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Comment by jostmey | Hacker News Reader

Let me get this straight: 1) Oracle allowed anyone to download Java, seemingly for free 2) Somewhere in the fine print it said you might have to pay Oracle for using Java, but this was not transparent when you visit the download page. 3) Oracle is hunting down everyone who downloaded Oracle. Is this right?

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Yes, this is exactly correct. I was very surprised when I learned that this was possible and legal. It happened to a company I worked for, and cost the company quite a bit of money. Since then I have learned much about how unintuitive and convoluted software licensing can be.

Licensing BS is why Open Source really became a thing, starting back in the bad old 90's when Steve Ballmer could kill with a stare. "Surprise! We're going to start billing you based on how many keyboard keys your business uses." The mortal terror that someone upstream of your business might Alter The Deal (Pray We Don't Alter It Further) is why a lot of people are totally uninterested in any software that isn't MIT/BSD/Apache.

And that's also why if something that was MIT/BSD/Apache changes licenses, some developers will start gnawing off their leg before the trap even springs shut.

I wonder if this is enough to make the larger dev community to finally realize that .NET is more open-source than Java ecosystem?

(Disclaimer: I work for Microsoft, though not on .NET)

In defense of Java, the canonical JRE/JDK implementation has been OpenJDK for quite some time now, and there are many non-Oracle spins of it.

As for .NET, while it is currently good and I personally enjoy it, I'm a little wary on it too. Unlike with Java, where decision making is distributed in some fashion (as far as I can tell), Microsoft has retained nearly total control of .NET, and key parts of the ecosystem like the debugger are still under non-OSS licensing terms.

This is unfortunate, but I hope more interactions with teams that work on JIT and Roslyn would help to change this opinion.

Since when? OpenJDK is 100% open-source, with the same license as the Linux kernel. Besides, the standard itself is also open-source and it has multiple, independent implementations.

It is correct and I used to work for a company where we moved everything to OpenJDK because of this. Legal was involved.

This is free except those times it is not. Download now!

I think this is the fundamental problem people have with ubiquitous and long license agreements:

Users are in the habit, perhaps pressured, to accept the terms with without due consideration by a qualified lawyer. C.f. the South Park "human centipede" episode.

I suspect that the best solution, society-wise, is to enact stronger consumer protection laws that override these EULAs.

It's been a tongue-in-cheek thing in Java circles for a while. Oracle says "Java runs on billions of devices". Oracle explicitly leaves silent "...and we'll sue/bill them all for it."

Behold, the lawn mower cometh... I believe is the reality.

This is also how VirtualBox works (another Oracle product).

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