Oracle is targeting users on Java compliance | Hacker News Reader

Oracle is targeting users on Java compliance

theregister.com

21 pointslaktak13 comments

Bryan Cantrill's immortal advice about dealing with Oracle:

"Do not fall into the trap of anthropomorphising Larry Ellison. You need to think of Larry Ellison the way you think of a lawnmower. You don't anthropomorphize your lawnmower, the lawnmower just mows the lawn, you stick your hand in there and it'll chop it off, the end. You don't think 'oh, the lawnmower hates me' -- lawnmower doesn't give a shit about you, lawnmower can't hate you. Don't anthropomorphize the lawnmower. Don't fall into that trap about Oracle."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-zRN7XLCRhc&t=33m

This is the second or third article in El Reg on this topic that appears to be a vehicle for Palisade Compliance. Every one has extensive quotes from the CEO of that company, so I wonder to what extent these stories are organic vs placed PR. They're heavy on quotes from compliance consulting and lacking any input from users. Instead we get stuff like this:

> In Gartner's calculations of the cost of the Java licensing changes, the worst-case scenarios see costs more than double, while the best case might see costs fall by 94 percent.

Which is the same thing as the previous Reg story said. Seems like there's no real new information here to justify a second or third pop at the same topic.

Can someone ELI5 why people have to pay for Java licences if it's a free software product.

Is this only for Oracle's distribution of Java and would not apply if people are using OpenJDK?

This doesn't apply on OpenJDK, Eclipse Adoptium, and many other free distributions.

A detailed comparison between various distributions here: https://whichjdk.com

Oracle mainly targets larger organisations that cannot switch quickly to OpenJDK, either because of compliance reasons or organisational inertness. These organisations have no choice but to pay.

That's still a choice aka paying is the "easier" choice.

A choice requires an active decision. Some companies prefer to use the "proper" version of Java, and have allocated a budget to pay Oracle. In other companies, no choice may have been made until the Oracle auditors knock at the door.

OpenJDK and Oracle JDK are both the "proper" version of Java, developed by the same company.

Only one of them has support, and support isn't free beer.

Beyond support, Oracle JDK provides much better performance than OpenJDK in responsiveness and JVM performance. That is why I referred to it as Java's "proper" version (in quotes). However, in reality, it hardly makes a difference.

I thought that gap was closed and was really just relevant to non-x86 architectures... I'm not betting any money on it :) but if you did happen to have a link I'd appreciate it

The difference is mostly on the tooling and support.

https://www.baeldung.com/oracle-jdk-vs-openjdk

Interesting, this is the first time I've heard compliance as a reason -- can you elaborate? Is Oracle Java somehow FIPS or ISO certified but not OpenJDK? Thx.

When I worked in finance, compliance (the team, not the concept) strongly preferred us to use vendor-supported tech. The understanding I got was that using vendor-supported software would indemnify us if a bug in that software caused us to violate some regulation.

Basically, violations caused by software could be passed off to the maintainer of that software, but for open source stuff we were considered the maintainer.

It was generally worth it to them to pay for stuff to avoid the tail risk of upsetting the SEC.

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