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The complaints have nothing to do with staying up to date or support. OracleJDK is no longer free for commercial use. OpenJDK has always been been free for wh

The complaints have nothing to do with staying up to date or support. OracleJDK is no longer free for commercial use. OpenJDK has always been been free for whatever use (it's GPL, with exceptions). The danger is that a developer is already using OracleJDK, and upgrades or inadvertently uses OracleJDK (because it was installed by their package manager perhaps), and then Oracle shows up and claims they owe a bunch of money.

pjmlp 8y ago
Anyone with professional experience knows that licenses aren't set in stone, which is why any sane legal department does routine control of existing software deployments.
repolfx 8y ago
Oracle JDK has never been "packagable" in that way. Some people did it anyway or they hard-coded cookies into scripts and things, but those scripts and packages are all for fixed versions anyway. Linux distros do it right and ship OpenJDK. They'll upgrade to OpenJDK 11 without issue. As far as I can tell Hacker News and reddit are overrun with hysterical developers who are desperate to believe Oracle is evil, but whose entire rationale boils down to "but I don't want to read I just want to download whatever I randomly find on the internet", a rationale that is oddly not sympathised with when open source license violations occur. Oracle JDK doesn't even have any DRM or other controls to ensure license compliance, it's all trust based. And the download page even tells you to go download OpenJDK if you want the GPLd non-commercially-supported version. I'm starting to understand now why companies have to audit their customers. Apparently the world is full of employees who feel it's perfectly legitimate to ignore straightforward, trust based license agreements out of some odd sense of entitlement?
filomeno 8y ago
Lol, I wish I could keep getting my _Oracle_ JDK updated from the package manager. Unfortunately that stopped being a thing after Java6 with some licensing changes that made it impossible for distributions to package Java (if I recall correctly).

pjmlp 8y ago

Anyone with professional experience knows that licenses aren't set in stone, which is why any sane legal department does routine control of existing software deployments.

repolfx 8y ago

Oracle JDK has never been "packagable" in that way. Some people did it anyway or they hard-coded cookies into scripts and things, but those scripts and packages are all for fixed versions anyway. Linux distros do it right and ship OpenJDK. They'll upgrade to OpenJDK 11 without issue. As far as I can tell Hacker News and reddit are overrun with hysterical developers who are desperate to believe Oracle is evil, but whose entire rationale boils down to "but I don't want to read I just want to download whatever I randomly find on the internet", a rationale that is oddly not sympathised with when open source license violations occur. Oracle JDK doesn't even have any DRM or other controls to ensure license compliance, it's all trust based. And the download page even tells you to go download OpenJDK if you want the GPLd non-commercially-supported version. I'm starting to understand now why companies have to audit their customers. Apparently the world is full of employees who feel it's perfectly legitimate to ignore straightforward, trust based license agreements out of some odd sense of entitlement?

filomeno 8y ago

Lol, I wish I could keep getting my _Oracle_ JDK updated from the package manager. Unfortunately that stopped being a thing after Java6 with some licensing changes that made it impossible for distributions to package Java (if I recall correctly).