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Comment by cookiengineer | Hacker News Reader

[flagged]

There are legitimate use cases where you would want first-party support from Oracle and would be willing to pay for it. I know we clown on those who didn’t just start with OpenJDK but let’s not forget that Oracle actually sells a top-tier product for those who need it.

A top tier product isn't one that changes its licensing terms this way.

Tell that to every bank.

This is so backwards, it's hard not to take it as a troll.

There is zero risk to using Java. People standardly use OpenJDK builds, which are freely and widely available under open source licensing (GLPv2 + classpath exception). In regards to maintenance, Java continues to be one of the most highly invested languages in existence.

The question to you in response is:

Are you talking about Java(tm) or Java, the language? Because that is a big operational risk difference.

Edited my original comment.

In addition to the licensing risks there's significant technical risk, IME. Chief among them is making sure your colleagues are sufficiently literate to have read Bloch's and Goetz's (et al.) books, and sufficiently tasteful to synthesize those lessons into code which isn't horrible. This is exceedingly rare in practice. So there's the same risk, approximately, as with every other programming language and that's reckless Dunning-Kruger ass programmers.

It's not about Java but Oracle and their shady licencing practice.

Java (and it's derivatives) is an amazing language and JVM is nothing short of an engineering miracle. It's highly useful in building reliable enterprise services.

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