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Comment by nivertech | Hacker News Reader

Questions:

1. What are the implications for the open source or cleanroom JVMs?

2. What are the implications for JVM-based languages like Kotlin, Scala, Clojure, Groovy, etc.?

Speculation:

Even though, it doesn't apply to the OpenJDK, it still sends a signal that the JVM licensing/pricing terms may change in the future. Unlike other corporations developing PLs/runtimes, Oracle does derive their income from this activity.

It make sense to avoid potential licensing/prcing changes by migrating to the JVM to modern and/or less resource-hungry PLs.

This process already started in the Big Data infra space with projects like ScyllaDB and RedPanda.

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OpenJDKs are totally free still aren't they? This is only for the Oracle flavour.

Indeed, this doesn't affect most folks

Actually, Oracle JDK are free for anyone. This only concerns people who have a Java SE Universal subscription.

This only for Oracle JDK. Oracle provides support for old versions of JDKs. So enterprises who have not updated their old software targeting old versions of JDK need to buy this support.

Cost of that support contract is going up.

Yeah Oracle has them in a bind as long as the cost to replace the java codebase is more expensive than what Oracle charges they will keep paying. Most of these are probably my guess old banking and accounting systems. I wonder if any US or other countries different departments pay for it as they could take years to move away from it. Oracle I feel is the company that behaves like a gangster as most of their tactics are similar.

This is just for Oracle's implementation of the JVM which has features and enterprise support capabilities that other implementations don't.

No company has or is ever forced to use it. And no one is going to replace their Java codebase because of this. They will simply swap for a different JVM like many of us did years ago.

At a certain point, Oracle can safely assume that everything that still hasn't migrated to a modern language will never migrate to a modern language

Which modern language, Go stuck in early 1990's language design, or Rust that still doesn't have a comparable Web story at enterprise level?

Kotlin that leeches on Java infrastructure for its existence? And papa Google is yet to fully rewrite Android in Kotlin/Native?

C# is an alternative, provided there is an implementation for the desired OS platform. Meadow is the only presence in Embedded without the capabilities from PTC, Aicas and microEJ.

...

Every language new or old will have cons. However, when the perceived con is financial (yes, I realize that OpenJDK isn’t affected, but as evident in the comments many people still don’t know that, and they will never know given all the choices); you’re going to lose a lot of future users.

The part I find interesting is how Java is slowly becoming like COBOL all due to a combination of bad marketing and terrible messaging, and a flawed monetization scheme that was obviously rushed with little thought for the long term.

> flawed monetization scheme

At this point it rather looks more like a "protection tax" than a flawed monetization scheme.

c++ for high level and C for lower level and library building.

bonus : you don't have to learn a new language every decade.

That ship has sailed in 2000…

Plus the winds are changing in security liability.

C++? You have to learn a new language every three years, with an argument for continually as the compilers update out of sync with each other

C# seems the obvious choice to me. One can probably compile Java to C# - it might be in the category of regex then fix compiler errors, so economically reasonable to do. Probably similar library coverage for the two ecosystems by now.

That lets one replace the dependency on Oracle, whose reputation is invariant, with Microsoft, who are known to be nice people who won't blow up your world to increase their profits.

Plus the legal team who liked contracts with Oracle can replace them with contracts with Microsoft. The developers who like Java are fairly likely to like C#, what with it being very nearly the same language.

[in case the subtext is somehow missed, I believe this will punt the problem down the road until Microsoft do something similarly expensive to you]

Microsoft is hardly much different, and contrary to Sun/Oracle once upon a time the gatekeeped .NET features behind different support levels on Visual Studio, like contracts, nowadays gone because obviously the adoption wasn't that great.

There are also some tooling features like code coverage, live testing or byte code rewriting tooling that require Visual Studio Enterprise licenses.

IKVM and J# were two ways of running Java code on .NET.

I'd say that at this point the problem isn't the language anymore which became perfectly fine but the culture of the devs using it...

That culture is the same regardless of the language.

The famous Design Patterns book is for enterprise projects based on Smalltalk and C++.

CORBA and DCOM were a thing a few years before Java was invented.

And so forth.

Not really no, you can't just ignore the culture context of languages.

Ruby projects are going to have a better testing coverage and culture in average than Python projects whereas in reality both languages could do the same.

Java overengineer culture is still present despite being non-existent in other languages like Go whereas in theory it could exist in both.

Nowadays you can do anything with any language, in practice the culture often goes in the way

Ruby is hardly a thing in enterprise computing, and until AI craziness, the only thing that Python mattered for enterprise shops was system administration instead of dealing with a mess of shell scripts and Perl.

Go culture has brought us YAML spaghetting and kubernetes madness at enterprise level.

There's a very large world outside the "entreprisy" companies you are used to let's say...

There is, however the subject here is enterprise culture, so lets not move goalposts.

I don't, I see the java type enterprise culture itself as a downside.

Modern language like what exactly.

Many of the features in modern Scala and Java don't exist in other languages.

more features != better

it just makes a language impossible to learn and use effectively

need a reasonable amount of useful features

Many of the features in modern Scala and Java don't exist in other languages.

I would appreciate if you could name them but I would understand if you didn’t have them handy to name. It’s unreasonable to expect you to know them off the top of your head.

At a certain point what used to be customer turnover becomes business turnover as businesses fail and newer ones succeed.

> What are the implications for the open source or cleanroom JVMs?

Nothing and nothing. Usual FUD posting about something that doesn’t matter to almost anyone.

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