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I just don't buy this at all. Unless you're talking about a seed-round startup, where the C-levels are all 20-something year old frat bros straight out of coll

I just don't buy this at all. Unless you're talking about a seed-round startup, where the C-levels are all 20-something year old frat bros straight out of college. No remotely competent CTO or CIO in any halfway respectable enterprise is still going to be confused about Java licensing in 2021. The only people I EVER encounter with any confusion around Java licensing are students, entry-level devs, and people from other ecosystems who parrot things they hear on Internet forums. OpenJDK is free and open source. It imposes no license restrictions on your server-side applications, and these days imposes virtually no limitations on retribution of the JDK itself with traditionally-shipped applications. Oracle's own binary build of the OpenJDK source code is a commercially licensed thing, because it comes with some extra proprietary tools that people might care about when profiling applications in a large enterprise. But there are other OpenJDK builds with no cost or licensing restrictions whatsoever, from Azul, IBM, Amazon, and others. Outside of the largest and most conservative Oracle shops, virtually everyone uses one of these free JDK builds. So much nonsense FUD is made from "lack of commercial support" for the non-Oracle JDK builds. Not "having someone to sue" if something goes wrong, etc. For one thing, who are you supposed to sue when you have a problem with Python or Node? If you want someone to be financially liable to you, then you have to financially pay someone to take on that liability. In practice though, have you ever even heard of a lawsuit over a JDK bug? This is nonsense.

javajosh 5y ago
Ignoring the ad hominem attacks, I appreciate your attempt to clarify the situation. However, you are factually wrong about Oracle's position, because they actually offer two different builds of Java - one that is GPL'd (with classpath exception) and one that is commercial[1]. I take the first claim seriously because it's downloadable as a tar.gz file without any license acceptance. However "GPL" is another thing that causes worry among the C-levels (and myself). A superficial reading might be that Oracle's JDK does not come with the GPL encumbrance. But this also raises the question: what differs between the various JDK builds? And again, what is the legal status of "OpenJDK" particularly WRT Oracle? I personally don't think these are stupid or trivial questions. Nor do I think the answers are obvious. Nor are they nonsense FUD. I am certainly NOT an Oracle partisan - I saw first hand what they did with Sun. 1 - https://jdk.java.net/17/ https://jdk.java.net/17/
- papercrane 5y ago
  > A superficial reading might be that Oracle's JDK does not come with the GPL encumbrance. This is the whole point of the "classpath exception". You can run, build and distribute Java programs under any license you choose. > But this also raises the question: what differs between the various JDK builds? Very little typically. Some like RedHat or Amazon enable extra options, like the Shenandoah GC. The big difference is who you contact for support. > what is the legal status of "OpenJDK" particularly WRT Oracle? I'm not sure what this question even means, but frankly given Microsoft, IBM and Amazon are all building and distributing their own builds of OpenJDK I don't think there are any significant legal issues, these are all companies with teams of lawyers on retainer.
  - javajosh 5y ago
    How about this: what is "OpenJDK"? It used to be an independent open-source clone of the Sun-then-Oracle implementation of the JVM/JLS/JSR specs under a liberal license. Now it seems to mean something different - like a working group that manages the specs, but no longer has a build of it's own. By convention, it seems that Oracle's "OpenJDK build" is the "default" OpenJDK build, but Oracle also provides a "commercial build", which is also, confusingly, an implementation of "OpenJDK". Meanwhile other vendors have "OpenJDK" builds: Amazon (corretto), Red Hat, etc. This means that they offer binaries that implement the OpenJDK specs. My mental model is currecntly: So there's a spec and an implementation, OpenJDK can refer to both, and a vendor can have multiple implementations of OpenJDK (spec), and some of impls can be closed/commercial, as in the case of Oracle (and maybe Red Hat?).
    - papercrane 5y ago
      OpenJDK was never an independent clone. OpenJDK was started by Sun and was all of the JVM code they could relicense. Contributions to it were done either by Sun themselves, or by companies and individuals that signed a contributor agreement. This has continued under Oracle. Notably this includes Redhat, IBM, Microsoft, Azul, Apple and SAP. Originally the code didn't have enough components to produce a useful JVM, and Redhat put a lot of effort into producing builds that integrated with IcedTea to produce a fully Free Software JVM. Now though the OpenJDK has all of the components needed to produce a JVM. OpenJDK is Oracle's reference implementation of Java, and provides a GPL+Classpath exception licensed build on their website. Additionally, Oracle provides a build a commercially supported build from their website. The commercial builds from Oracle have included other additions, but over the years the amount of closed sourced add-ons has decreased. Other vendors provide builds of the OpenJDK, most include additional code, although for the most part the changes are minimal. All of these builds are based on the OpenJDK, and adhere to the GPL+Classpath exception. There is also Azul Platform Prime/Zing. Which is there own JVM with an LLVM-based JIT, I'm not sure if they're using any OpenJDK code, but if so I assume they have a commercial agreement with Oracle.
boulos 5y ago
Hmm. Without Corretto, which is "recent", I don't see how your argument holds. "No" seed stage company is going to use something from Azul, and probably not from "regular" IBM either (that is, exempting RedHat). Without Corretto, I think Oracle really has poisoned the well. [1] https://aws.amazon.com/corretto/ https://aws.amazon.com/corretto/
- javajosh 5y ago
  It's particularly confusing because "OpenJDK" used to be an independent group who's purpose was to build a fully open-source Java - and it was Apache licensed. Now, it seems that "OpenJDK" refers to a specification and/or working group which NO LONGER provides a build, instead relying on vendors to do so, and indeed the vendors have wide latitude about how they license it. This is genuinely complicated, I'm not a lawyer or a software license expert, and I don't understand it. And honestly, based on some of the haughty and arrogant, but factually wrong, comments I've been seeing, I suspect that a lot of people think they understand it, but don't.
  - boulos 5y ago
    Which is exactly your point! The uncertainty/confusion is now super high due to Oracle's actions. It's literally fear, uncertainty, and doubt. It's a bit like GPL and other open source licensing in the early days ("better not touch GPL code at all") rather than the now commonplace "Ahh, yes. No to AGPL, but GPL is fine since we won't distribute it. We'd prefer APL" practices. I absolutely believe that experts in licensing understand the OpenJDK / Corretto / Microsoft's OpenJDK distro and so on. But it really did go from "yeah, openjdk is no problem" to "hmm, do we understand this?".
  - papercrane 5y ago
    > "OpenJDK" used to be an independent group who's purpose was to build a fully open-source Java - and it was Apache licensed. You've confused OpenJDK with Apache Harmony. The Harmony project dissolved in 2011, essentially being killed by IBM's decision to join the OpenJDK project instead.

javajosh 5y ago

Ignoring the ad hominem attacks, I appreciate your attempt to clarify the situation. However, you are factually wrong about Oracle's position, because they actually offer two different builds of Java - one that is GPL'd (with classpath exception) and one that is commercial[1]. I take the first claim seriously because it's downloadable as a tar.gz file without any license acceptance. However "GPL" is another thing that causes worry among the C-levels (and myself). A superficial reading might be that Oracle's JDK does not come with the GPL encumbrance. But this also raises the question: what differs between the various JDK builds? And again, what is the legal status of "OpenJDK" particularly WRT Oracle? I personally don't think these are stupid or trivial questions. Nor do I think the answers are obvious. Nor are they nonsense FUD. I am certainly NOT an Oracle partisan - I saw first hand what they did with Sun. 1 - https://jdk.java.net/17/ https://jdk.java.net/17/

papercrane 5y ago
> A superficial reading might be that Oracle's JDK does not come with the GPL encumbrance. This is the whole point of the "classpath exception". You can run, build and distribute Java programs under any license you choose. > But this also raises the question: what differs between the various JDK builds? Very little typically. Some like RedHat or Amazon enable extra options, like the Shenandoah GC. The big difference is who you contact for support. > what is the legal status of "OpenJDK" particularly WRT Oracle? I'm not sure what this question even means, but frankly given Microsoft, IBM and Amazon are all building and distributing their own builds of OpenJDK I don't think there are any significant legal issues, these are all companies with teams of lawyers on retainer.
- javajosh 5y ago
  How about this: what is "OpenJDK"? It used to be an independent open-source clone of the Sun-then-Oracle implementation of the JVM/JLS/JSR specs under a liberal license. Now it seems to mean something different - like a working group that manages the specs, but no longer has a build of it's own. By convention, it seems that Oracle's "OpenJDK build" is the "default" OpenJDK build, but Oracle also provides a "commercial build", which is also, confusingly, an implementation of "OpenJDK". Meanwhile other vendors have "OpenJDK" builds: Amazon (corretto), Red Hat, etc. This means that they offer binaries that implement the OpenJDK specs. My mental model is currecntly: So there's a spec and an implementation, OpenJDK can refer to both, and a vendor can have multiple implementations of OpenJDK (spec), and some of impls can be closed/commercial, as in the case of Oracle (and maybe Red Hat?).
  - papercrane 5y ago
    OpenJDK was never an independent clone. OpenJDK was started by Sun and was all of the JVM code they could relicense. Contributions to it were done either by Sun themselves, or by companies and individuals that signed a contributor agreement. This has continued under Oracle. Notably this includes Redhat, IBM, Microsoft, Azul, Apple and SAP. Originally the code didn't have enough components to produce a useful JVM, and Redhat put a lot of effort into producing builds that integrated with IcedTea to produce a fully Free Software JVM. Now though the OpenJDK has all of the components needed to produce a JVM. OpenJDK is Oracle's reference implementation of Java, and provides a GPL+Classpath exception licensed build on their website. Additionally, Oracle provides a build a commercially supported build from their website. The commercial builds from Oracle have included other additions, but over the years the amount of closed sourced add-ons has decreased. Other vendors provide builds of the OpenJDK, most include additional code, although for the most part the changes are minimal. All of these builds are based on the OpenJDK, and adhere to the GPL+Classpath exception. There is also Azul Platform Prime/Zing. Which is there own JVM with an LLVM-based JIT, I'm not sure if they're using any OpenJDK code, but if so I assume they have a commercial agreement with Oracle.

boulos 5y ago

Hmm. Without Corretto, which is "recent", I don't see how your argument holds. "No" seed stage company is going to use something from Azul, and probably not from "regular" IBM either (that is, exempting RedHat). Without Corretto, I think Oracle really has poisoned the well. [1] https://aws.amazon.com/corretto/ https://aws.amazon.com/corretto/

javajosh 5y ago
It's particularly confusing because "OpenJDK" used to be an independent group who's purpose was to build a fully open-source Java - and it was Apache licensed. Now, it seems that "OpenJDK" refers to a specification and/or working group which NO LONGER provides a build, instead relying on vendors to do so, and indeed the vendors have wide latitude about how they license it. This is genuinely complicated, I'm not a lawyer or a software license expert, and I don't understand it. And honestly, based on some of the haughty and arrogant, but factually wrong, comments I've been seeing, I suspect that a lot of people think they understand it, but don't.
- boulos 5y ago
  Which is exactly your point! The uncertainty/confusion is now super high due to Oracle's actions. It's literally fear, uncertainty, and doubt. It's a bit like GPL and other open source licensing in the early days ("better not touch GPL code at all") rather than the now commonplace "Ahh, yes. No to AGPL, but GPL is fine since we won't distribute it. We'd prefer APL" practices. I absolutely believe that experts in licensing understand the OpenJDK / Corretto / Microsoft's OpenJDK distro and so on. But it really did go from "yeah, openjdk is no problem" to "hmm, do we understand this?".
- papercrane 5y ago
  > "OpenJDK" used to be an independent group who's purpose was to build a fully open-source Java - and it was Apache licensed. You've confused OpenJDK with Apache Harmony. The Harmony project dissolved in 2011, essentially being killed by IBM's decision to join the OpenJDK project instead.