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Comment by jsiepkes | Hacker News Reader

Who are these people who use the commercial Oracle Java version and why do they need it? When running on AWS you are probably better off running Amazon's Java, on Azure you are probably better off running Microsoft's Java, on RedHat you probably run Redhats Java, etc.

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I'm working for a european org that is close to government and has been granted immortality by law, so market forces only apply in a very dampened capacity. They pay a premium for Commercial Java to be able to ask for certain features or support. ...Oracle always declines them with a variety of excuses, so there's no upside. Their older developers say they use features specific to the Oracle version, but I've never seen that, it works fine with OpenJDK, Jetbrain's, Amazon's or Microsoft's JDK

Sounds like the older developers have some form of Stockholm Syndrome.

The older devs have zero upsides if they use a different JDK, but plenty of downsides if it introduces any issues. Is it really surprising then that they want to maintain the status quo?

Stockholm Syndrome is not a scientifically sound thing

While a fun fact, it's not referenced here as a scientific thing, just to point out that the engineers' attachment to Oracle Java is not rational.

I understand. I'm just saying that Stockholm Syndrome is very likely not a real thing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stockholm_syndrome

Nobody cares.

I used to work for such org, I'm 99.42% sure they don't use those features.

That situation arise when the person responsible for approving contracts doesn't understant jack and takes the most expensive one so that if any problem arise, it's not their fault.

The EU is where I found the strongest "Nobody Gets Fired For Buying IBM" mindset.

And Oracle, Microsoft, SAP and the others know it.

It should never matter, unless you have something specific you need from one of the various proprietary JVM's. The free JVM's are usually vanilla pre-compiled OpenJDK.

Frankly, imho, you should be deploying within a container even for simple/basic apps these days - so you bring your own JVM and environment rather than use something the platform provides.

The folks paying for Oracle JDK are likely big corps that want to pass the support-buck when it's 3am and something went down...

I used to work for Enterprise running Java 3rd party applications. Some of them had a requirement that we would only use Oracle Java if we wanted support.

Companies were starting to pick up on the fact that people were getting pretty angry with that arrangement and were offering to support OpenJDK or other Java, if we would upgrade to latest and greatest.

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