4 ms·

I've not written Java for a very long time, but why are people paying for Java when Azul and OpenJDK exist? I know there must be a reason for it - but I don't

by AJRF 4y ago

I've not written Java for a very long time, but why are people paying for Java when Azul and OpenJDK exist? I know there must be a reason for it - but I don't know what that is? Is it support? How is that useful for a programming language - do Oracle engineers come and tweak some Java code at your megacorp, or what is it? I don't understand the model

KingOfCoders 4y ago
Sometimes people pay because they have something from Oracle and the sales stuff throws Java etc. in/pushes hard. Those CIO/CEOs makeing the decision might not now that it's free. Or they are scared away by Oracle to use these. Or some external company does your IT project like EY. Or they got sold some Java extension by Oracle. And if you pay millions for the database, the Java costs might be trivial. (Haven't payed myself for Java as CTO so this is pure speculation).
- AJRF 4y ago
  > Those CIO/CEOs makeing the decision might not now that it's free I like to think if I ever ran a company i'd never hire someone to a position where they wouldn't know how to sniff this out, but I imagine I am being incredibly naive. It's mind boggling to me that some bill going from $30k -> $450k as mentioned earlier in the comments on this page would just be swallowed. Seems so wasteful.
  - KingOfCoders 4y ago
    I had to swallow once a bill that went up from $80k to >$500k YoY.
    - AJRF 4y ago
      I'd love to hear that story :D
      - KingOfCoders 4y ago
        Can't tell ;-)
fidgewidge 4y ago
A lot of it is Java 8 only. Companies (banks) that have codebases where they're in maintenance mode and they don't want to pay devs to upgrade to the latest Java due to all the backwards compatibility breaks that were in Java 9-11, so it's cheaper to just pay Oracle to continue maintaining Java 8. Otherwise it's the same as Red Hat. Why pay RH for RHEL when you could just install a free distro? Same considerations apply. If you've made it to Java 11 or 17 then yes there's no deep reason to pay Oracle unless you feel your business is sufficiently dependent on Java that you want the original developers to work on your specific bugs or problems, even long after that release is no longer supported by the upstream open source project. For example if you have a server that suddenly hits some weird performance bottleneck in Hotspot or the std libs then they will actually dig in and figure that out with you, and then spend time optimizing it to fix that. They've made reference to such efforts before. Obviously that is expensive, so they charge for it. Why this change - the focus in the article is price increase for a hypothetical example company but it doesn't take into account the cost of compliance under the old regime which is all about counting processors and/or end user machines. Basically trying to measure your usage. But that was super complex. Different types of processors counted differently, virtualized CPUs counted differently and so on. Audit and compliance was too hard. Number of employees is super easy to count and check so audit/compliance costs evaporate. That may on its own be enough to counterbalance the effect of increased prices in some cases.

by AJRF 4y ago

KingOfCoders 4y ago

Sometimes people pay because they have something from Oracle and the sales stuff throws Java etc. in/pushes hard. Those CIO/CEOs makeing the decision might not now that it's free. Or they are scared away by Oracle to use these. Or some external company does your IT project like EY. Or they got sold some Java extension by Oracle. And if you pay millions for the database, the Java costs might be trivial. (Haven't payed myself for Java as CTO so this is pure speculation).

AJRF 4y ago
> Those CIO/CEOs makeing the decision might not now that it's free I like to think if I ever ran a company i'd never hire someone to a position where they wouldn't know how to sniff this out, but I imagine I am being incredibly naive. It's mind boggling to me that some bill going from $30k -> $450k as mentioned earlier in the comments on this page would just be swallowed. Seems so wasteful.
- KingOfCoders 4y ago
  I had to swallow once a bill that went up from $80k to >$500k YoY.
  - AJRF 4y ago
    I'd love to hear that story :D
    - KingOfCoders 4y ago
      Can't tell ;-)

fidgewidge 4y ago

A lot of it is Java 8 only. Companies (banks) that have codebases where they're in maintenance mode and they don't want to pay devs to upgrade to the latest Java due to all the backwards compatibility breaks that were in Java 9-11, so it's cheaper to just pay Oracle to continue maintaining Java 8. Otherwise it's the same as Red Hat. Why pay RH for RHEL when you could just install a free distro? Same considerations apply. If you've made it to Java 11 or 17 then yes there's no deep reason to pay Oracle unless you feel your business is sufficiently dependent on Java that you want the original developers to work on your specific bugs or problems, even long after that release is no longer supported by the upstream open source project. For example if you have a server that suddenly hits some weird performance bottleneck in Hotspot or the std libs then they will actually dig in and figure that out with you, and then spend time optimizing it to fix that. They've made reference to such efforts before. Obviously that is expensive, so they charge for it. Why this change - the focus in the article is price increase for a hypothetical example company but it doesn't take into account the cost of compliance under the old regime which is all about counting processors and/or end user machines. Basically trying to measure your usage. But that was super complex. Different types of processors counted differently, virtualized CPUs counted differently and so on. Audit and compliance was too hard. Number of employees is super easy to count and check so audit/compliance costs evaporate. That may on its own be enough to counterbalance the effect of increased prices in some cases.