What’s stopping 9 out of 10 from leaving?
SRE here, the warm and fuzzy is lets them dodge any accountability. Their teams push out bad code, blame it on Java Runtime, engage Oracle and in chaos of an outage, push out real fix and claim "Oracle fixed their mistakes". When I was Windows Ops type, I had a manager that wanted to call Microsoft for every outage just so management would think we are on it, even if the problem was not Microsoft at all.
Backslaps all around for management, bonuses intact and everyone happy.
"Wait, doesn't this impact revenue?" Most companies I know who use Java are type that get deeply embedded in their customers and it's not revenue impacting, just revenue delayed.
Exactly right.
But, you aren't wrong about management and licensing. I have been working to excise any Oracle software from use at work to eliminate the licensing cost. But, management wants to maintain some kind of external support for everything. They want somebody to call when internal staff can't handle it. Kind of an insurance policy for when shit hits the fan.
I once had to use a patch to be able to run an installer. That should have been the low point of my Oracle career but no! I've also had a patch fail after it had passed all prerequisite tests and after it had been installed on an identical machine: support told me the patch could have been modified. I can't even rely on installing something in a dev environment first, because they might change the patch! I hate Oracle with a passion.