3 ms·
I don't think it's Oracle's coders that people worry about so much as its sales model and lawyers. Particularly, that it makes it too easy for end-users to stu
by wbillingsley 5y ago
I don't think it's Oracle's coders that people worry about so much as its sales model and lawyers.
Particularly, that it makes it too easy for end-users to stumble into using components that do not come under its open source licence. This makes it a headache for organisations and users, because it is very difficult for an organisation to police "you can use X, but you musn't pass Y command-line flag that could invoke a non-free part" and other actions that could create a liability for the organisation (and a disciplinary row for the employee)
It's a little like deciding you're going to set up a sweet shop, give out free samples, and lay landmines one foot either side of the entrance.
If they historically used a model more similar to JetBrains or other companies that have a commercial open source product (where the program looks for a licence key in order to activate the non-free features, or where there is a completely separate install process for free and non-free versions) I expect they wouldn't face the same regular criticism. It's the 'Surprise! Lawyers!" aspect that people find stressful and unattractive.
With JDK builds, this separation of free and non-free product is what the community has essentially provided: if you install something like Adoptium Eclipse Temurin, you can be a bit more confident it hasn't bundled non-free programs that could create a financial liability alongside it. You could try to track which Oracle downloads are what, but they've changed their licence from time to time, so some people find it easier simply to differentiate by what organisation provided the packaged JDK.
- pjmlp 5y agoThat is no different with OpenJDK, whose 90% is still mostly provided by Oracle. This is like going for CentOS to work around Red-Hat doing most of the work.