8 ms·

Oracle per-employee Java pricing causes concern

50 points by msolujic 4y ago

nivertech 4y ago
Questions: 1. What are the implications for the open source or cleanroom JVMs? 2. What are the implications for JVM-based languages like Kotlin, Scala, Clojure, Groovy, etc.? Speculation: Even though, it doesn't apply to the OpenJDK, it still sends a signal that the JVM licensing/pricing terms may change in the future. Unlike other corporations developing PLs/runtimes, Oracle does derive their income from this activity. It make sense to avoid potential licensing/prcing changes by migrating to the JVM to modern and/or less resource-hungry PLs. This process already started in the Big Data infra space with projects like ScyllaDB and RedPanda.
- eddsh1994 4y ago
  OpenJDKs are totally free still aren't they? This is only for the Oracle flavour.
  - kasperni 4y ago
    Actually, Oracle JDK are free for anyone. This only concerns people who have a Java SE Universal subscription.
  - rickette 4y ago
    Indeed, this doesn't affect most folks
- cnqso 4y ago
  At a certain point, Oracle can safely assume that everything that still hasn't migrated to a modern language will never migrate to a modern language
  - pjmlp 4y ago
    Which modern language, Go stuck in early 1990's language design, or Rust that still doesn't have a comparable Web story at enterprise level? Kotlin that leeches on Java infrastructure for its existence? And papa Google is yet to fully rewrite Android in Kotlin/Native? C# is an alternative, provided there is an implementation for the desired OS platform. Meadow is the only presence in Embedded without the capabilities from PTC, Aicas and microEJ. ...
    - chaostheory 4y ago
      Every language new or old will have cons. However, when the perceived con is financial (yes, I realize that OpenJDK isn’t affected, but as evident in the comments many people still don’t know that, and they will never know given all the choices); you’re going to lose a lot of future users. The part I find interesting is how Java is slowly becoming like COBOL all due to a combination of bad marketing and terrible messaging, and a flawed monetization scheme that was obviously rushed with little thought for the long term.
      - deleted 4y ago
        [deleted]
      - petre 4y ago
        > flawed monetization scheme At this point it rather looks more like a "protection tax" than a flawed monetization scheme.
    - habibur 4y ago
      c++ for high level and C for lower level and library building. bonus : you don't have to learn a new language every decade.
      - pjmlp 4y ago
        That ship has sailed in 2000… Plus the winds are changing in security liability.
      - deleted 4y ago
        [deleted]
  - realusername 4y ago
    I'd say that at this point the problem isn't the language anymore which became perfectly fine but the culture of the devs using it...
    - pjmlp 4y ago
      That culture is the same regardless of the language. The famous Design Patterns book is for enterprise projects based on Smalltalk and C++. CORBA and DCOM were a thing a few years before Java was invented. And so forth.
      - realusername 4y ago
        Not really no, you can't just ignore the culture context of languages. Ruby projects are going to have a better testing coverage and culture in average than Python projects whereas in reality both languages could do the same. Java overengineer culture is still present despite being non-existent in other languages like Go whereas in theory it could exist in both. Nowadays you can do anything with any language, in practice the culture often goes in the way
        pjmlp 4y ago
        Ruby is hardly a thing in enterprise computing, and until AI craziness, the only thing that Python mattered for enterprise shops was system administration instead of dealing with a mess of shell scripts and Perl. Go culture has brought us YAML spaghetting and kubernetes madness at enterprise level.
        realusername 4y ago
        There's a very large world outside the "entreprisy" companies you are used to let's say...
        pjmlp 4y ago
        There is, however the subject here is enterprise culture, so lets not move goalposts.
  - threeseed 4y ago
    Modern language like what exactly. Many of the features in modern Scala and Java don't exist in other languages.
    - nivertech 4y ago
      more features != better it just makes a language impossible to learn and use effectively need a reasonable amount of useful features
    - jimbob45 4y ago
      Many of the features in modern Scala and Java don't exist in other languages. I would appreciate if you could name them but I would understand if you didn’t have them handy to name. It’s unreasonable to expect you to know them off the top of your head.
      - deleted 4y ago
        [deleted]
  - anothernewdude 4y ago
    At a certain point what used to be customer turnover becomes business turnover as businesses fail and newer ones succeed.
- pritambarhate 4y ago
  This only for Oracle JDK. Oracle provides support for old versions of JDKs. So enterprises who have not updated their old software targeting old versions of JDK need to buy this support. Cost of that support contract is going up.
  - xbmcuser 4y ago
    Yeah Oracle has them in a bind as long as the cost to replace the java codebase is more expensive than what Oracle charges they will keep paying. Most of these are probably my guess old banking and accounting systems. I wonder if any US or other countries different departments pay for it as they could take years to move away from it. Oracle I feel is the company that behaves like a gangster as most of their tactics are similar.
    - threeseed 4y ago
      This is just for Oracle's implementation of the JVM which has features and enterprise support capabilities that other implementations don't. No company has or is ever forced to use it. And no one is going to replace their Java codebase because of this. They will simply swap for a different JVM like many of us did years ago.
- kaba0 4y ago
  > What are the implications for the open source or cleanroom JVMs? Nothing and nothing. Usual FUD posting about something that doesn’t matter to almost anyone.
pjmlp 4y ago
This is only for the commercial version, just like one has various paying models for the other Java vendors. Some companies like to have someone to refer to when their production server goes down instead of online forums. Business as usual for the open source version, which 80% of the paid development, top of the game GC and JIT compiler, language improvements are anyway done by Oracle, with IBM/Red-Hat, Azul, SAP, Microsoft, Alibaba as main contributors besides Oracle. > Users of OpenJDK builds from Oracle and users of free Oracle JDK builds are not impacted by the Java SE Universal Subscription
- happymellon 4y ago
  This is the second time in as many days that I've seen Microsoft listed as a contributor to Java, but my Google-fu doesn't turn up anything other than announcements that they are building a JVM, and a paper from 1999 about inefficiency in bytecode which led the to opposite of helping Java. A question in good faith, what has Microsoft done recently to contribute to Java?
  - threeseed 4y ago
    Microsoft is proud to have contributed the Windows on Arm port in 2020 as well as having made major contributions to the macOS M1 port. https://www.microsoft.com/openjdk https://www.microsoft.com/openjdk
    - happymellon 4y ago
      Adding a link with slightly more details than a marketing one-liner, but thats interesting. https://www.i-programmer.info/news/80-java/13854-microsoft-ports-openjdk-for-windows-10-on-arm.html https://www.i-programmer.info/news/80-java/13854-microsoft-p...
  - pjmlp 4y ago
    Besides sibling comment, they are now a OpenJDK vendor since they bought jClarity. https://devblogs.microsoft.com/java/ https://devblogs.microsoft.com/java/
runamok 4y ago
tl;dr: Oracle now is going to charge you *per employee*, NOT per employee actually using Oracle Java SE (employee = full-time and part-time employees and agents, consultants, and contractors). Frankly I don't even know how that's legal but based on how many lawyers Oracle has, assume it is.
- antonvs 4y ago
  I would imagine it’s legal because you can charge however you want for most products. No-one is forced to buy it though, and the best solution to predatory pricing is not to buy the product.
  - rwiggins 4y ago
    Yep. And which is better for the customer can vary on the circumstances. I worked for a company that licensed its software both ways (depending on the customer), although as a disclaimer I was a software eng, not in sales. One thing I'll caution: it's a mistake to think the per-user rate would necessarily be the same in both cases. The business tries to price its software based on value added. IIRC, in the rare cases that we offered customers the choice of pricing method, the final price was (estimated) to be roughly the same, with the per-user rate being the variable... Disclaimer: I haven't read the original article and I don't have any opinion on what Oracle's doing in this specific case as a result.
- anothernewdude 4y ago
  It'll take a small amount of HR wrangling for the bigger customers to restructure their businesses to place the Java Developers in their own company that pays this license.
  - phpisthebest 4y ago
    This is not about development unless 100% of that development is server side only with zero Java clients of any type Even then I would not put it past oracle to make the claim all users of the company that accesses the server app needs a license
threeseed 4y ago
Other JVMs available: * AWS Corretto: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/corretto/latest https://docs.aws.amazon.com/corretto/latest * Azul Zulu: https://www.azul.com/downloads/?package=jdk#download-openjdk https://www.azul.com/downloads/?package=jdk#download-openjdk * Eclipse Temurin: https://adoptium.net/temurin/releases https://adoptium.net/temurin/releases * IBM Semeru: https://developer.ibm.com/languages/java/semeru-runtimes https://developer.ibm.com/languages/java/semeru-runtimes
- rickette 4y ago
  Full list: https://sdkman.io/jdks https://sdkman.io/jdks By the way, highly recommend SDKman as a handy tool to install and manage different Java installs on your machine.
  - KronisLV 4y ago
    I wonder what happened with the Eclipse OpenJ9 project: https://www.eclipse.org/openj9/ https://www.eclipse.org/openj9/ It has build instructions on the site, but not pre-built binaries for download. In the site that you linked, however, it says that Semeru does use it under the hood. I actually recall it being one of the options from AdoptOpenJDK instead of HotSpot: https://adoptopenjdk.net/releases.html?variant=openjdk8&jvmVariant=openj9 https://adoptopenjdk.net/releases.html?variant=openjdk8&jvmV... But the Temurin releases from Adoptium no longer have that option, which is curious: https://adoptium.net/temurin/archive/ https://adoptium.net/temurin/archive/ Oh well, it seemed like a cool project, like an attempt at adapting JDK for cloud workloads and smaller services, without going as far as GraalVM.
    - pjmlp 4y ago
      OpenJ9 already did PGO, JIT cache and AOT compilation years before GraalVM, as it is based on IBM's commercial JVM implementations for their platforms and used to be the JVM for WebSphere (before Liberty rewrite). I guess it is a pity if they decide to no longer invest on it.
    - rickette 4y ago
i386 4y ago
Always review Oracle license changes closely. At Atlassian in 2008, I noticed that they had acquired a company called Coherence which made a distributed cache for the JVM. Confluence used it heavily for its clustered edition, but the original license allowed us to distribute (in inactive form) for free but pay the license fee only when we sold clustered. Hidden in the license agreement, it said we’d have to pay for every copy _downloaded_ - the implication was this would include 100% of trials downloaded AND any customer who built confluence from source (all paying customers had source code access). Fast forward - a mad month where we ripped that shit out for about 6 to 8 supported back versions.
- Shorn 4y ago
  What did you replace Coherence with? Did you feel the loss of it much, or did it turn out you could/should have gotten rid of it earlier?
  - i386 4y ago
    I think our caching needs were abstracted out, most confluences servers used escache and confluence clusters used coherence.
- miohtama 4y ago
  Oracle is a lawyer company not a software company. This is the peril of purchasing your software from lawyers.
anothernewdude 4y ago
I worked for one business that had structured their company structure to reduce the costs of some revenue and employee count licenses. I doubt any one would bother for Java, but still if you need to lower costs, then just put your java division in a separate company.
daverol 4y ago
Oracle being Oracle - nothing to see here.
code_sloth 4y ago
This seems a slow death in the long term to me. 1. Customers that balk at this cost will switch to other cheaper/free vendors. 2. Oracle imposes even more onerous costs to maintain revenue. and repeat. At some point either Oracle gives up, or they attempt to extract revenue from vendors as well. The latter will probably result in a some kind of fork.
- JonChesterfield 4y ago
  The customer base is very large companies who find having someone to sue reassuring and are likely to be institutionally incapable of running their own fork of java. Seems fine to me.
  - xmcqdpt2 4y ago
    Well there is also the fact that the openjdk codebase is huge and so even though it is quite well written and documented fixing a bug in the jdk (and especially a bug in hotspot) isn't easy. Although tbh i have no idea how the quality of support is with Oracle.
kasperni 4y ago
JDK 19 and JDK 17 binaries are free to use in production and free to redistribute, at no cost, under the Oracle No-Fee Terms and Conditions [1]. This license change concerns people who have a subscription service with Oracle. [1] https://www.oracle.com/uk/java/technologies/downloads/#java19 https://www.oracle.com/uk/java/technologies/downloads/#java1...
villgax 4y ago
Pure trash

50 points by msolujic 4y ago

Questions: 1. What are the implications for the open source or cleanroom JVMs? 2. What are the implications for JVM-based languages like Kotlin, Scala, Clojure, Groovy, etc.? Speculation: Even though, it doesn't apply to the OpenJDK, it still sends a signal that the JVM licensing/pricing terms may change in the future. Unlike other corporations developing PLs/runtimes, Oracle does derive their income from this activity. It make sense to avoid potential licensing/prcing changes by migrating to the JVM to modern and/or less resource-hungry PLs. This process already started in the Big Data infra space with projects like ScyllaDB and RedPanda.

eddsh1994 4y ago
OpenJDKs are totally free still aren't they? This is only for the Oracle flavour.
- kasperni 4y ago
  Actually, Oracle JDK are free for anyone. This only concerns people who have a Java SE Universal subscription.
- rickette 4y ago
  Indeed, this doesn't affect most folks
cnqso 4y ago
At a certain point, Oracle can safely assume that everything that still hasn't migrated to a modern language will never migrate to a modern language
- pjmlp 4y ago
  Which modern language, Go stuck in early 1990's language design, or Rust that still doesn't have a comparable Web story at enterprise level? Kotlin that leeches on Java infrastructure for its existence? And papa Google is yet to fully rewrite Android in Kotlin/Native? C# is an alternative, provided there is an implementation for the desired OS platform. Meadow is the only presence in Embedded without the capabilities from PTC, Aicas and microEJ. ...
  - chaostheory 4y ago
    Every language new or old will have cons. However, when the perceived con is financial (yes, I realize that OpenJDK isn’t affected, but as evident in the comments many people still don’t know that, and they will never know given all the choices); you’re going to lose a lot of future users. The part I find interesting is how Java is slowly becoming like COBOL all due to a combination of bad marketing and terrible messaging, and a flawed monetization scheme that was obviously rushed with little thought for the long term.
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
    - petre 4y ago
      > flawed monetization scheme At this point it rather looks more like a "protection tax" than a flawed monetization scheme.
  - habibur 4y ago
    c++ for high level and C for lower level and library building. bonus : you don't have to learn a new language every decade.
    - pjmlp 4y ago
      That ship has sailed in 2000… Plus the winds are changing in security liability.
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
- realusername 4y ago
  I'd say that at this point the problem isn't the language anymore which became perfectly fine but the culture of the devs using it...
  - pjmlp 4y ago
    That culture is the same regardless of the language. The famous Design Patterns book is for enterprise projects based on Smalltalk and C++. CORBA and DCOM were a thing a few years before Java was invented. And so forth.
    - realusername 4y ago
      Not really no, you can't just ignore the culture context of languages. Ruby projects are going to have a better testing coverage and culture in average than Python projects whereas in reality both languages could do the same. Java overengineer culture is still present despite being non-existent in other languages like Go whereas in theory it could exist in both. Nowadays you can do anything with any language, in practice the culture often goes in the way
      - pjmlp 4y ago
        Ruby is hardly a thing in enterprise computing, and until AI craziness, the only thing that Python mattered for enterprise shops was system administration instead of dealing with a mess of shell scripts and Perl. Go culture has brought us YAML spaghetting and kubernetes madness at enterprise level.
        realusername 4y ago
        There's a very large world outside the "entreprisy" companies you are used to let's say...
        pjmlp 4y ago
        There is, however the subject here is enterprise culture, so lets not move goalposts.
- threeseed 4y ago
  Modern language like what exactly. Many of the features in modern Scala and Java don't exist in other languages.
  - nivertech 4y ago
    more features != better it just makes a language impossible to learn and use effectively need a reasonable amount of useful features
  - jimbob45 4y ago
    Many of the features in modern Scala and Java don't exist in other languages. I would appreciate if you could name them but I would understand if you didn’t have them handy to name. It’s unreasonable to expect you to know them off the top of your head.
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
- anothernewdude 4y ago
  At a certain point what used to be customer turnover becomes business turnover as businesses fail and newer ones succeed.
pritambarhate 4y ago
This only for Oracle JDK. Oracle provides support for old versions of JDKs. So enterprises who have not updated their old software targeting old versions of JDK need to buy this support. Cost of that support contract is going up.
- xbmcuser 4y ago
  Yeah Oracle has them in a bind as long as the cost to replace the java codebase is more expensive than what Oracle charges they will keep paying. Most of these are probably my guess old banking and accounting systems. I wonder if any US or other countries different departments pay for it as they could take years to move away from it. Oracle I feel is the company that behaves like a gangster as most of their tactics are similar.
  - threeseed 4y ago
    This is just for Oracle's implementation of the JVM which has features and enterprise support capabilities that other implementations don't. No company has or is ever forced to use it. And no one is going to replace their Java codebase because of this. They will simply swap for a different JVM like many of us did years ago.
kaba0 4y ago
> What are the implications for the open source or cleanroom JVMs? Nothing and nothing. Usual FUD posting about something that doesn’t matter to almost anyone.

pjmlp 4y ago

This is only for the commercial version, just like one has various paying models for the other Java vendors. Some companies like to have someone to refer to when their production server goes down instead of online forums. Business as usual for the open source version, which 80% of the paid development, top of the game GC and JIT compiler, language improvements are anyway done by Oracle, with IBM/Red-Hat, Azul, SAP, Microsoft, Alibaba as main contributors besides Oracle. > Users of OpenJDK builds from Oracle and users of free Oracle JDK builds are not impacted by the Java SE Universal Subscription

happymellon 4y ago
This is the second time in as many days that I've seen Microsoft listed as a contributor to Java, but my Google-fu doesn't turn up anything other than announcements that they are building a JVM, and a paper from 1999 about inefficiency in bytecode which led the to opposite of helping Java. A question in good faith, what has Microsoft done recently to contribute to Java?
- threeseed 4y ago
  Microsoft is proud to have contributed the Windows on Arm port in 2020 as well as having made major contributions to the macOS M1 port. https://www.microsoft.com/openjdk https://www.microsoft.com/openjdk
  - happymellon 4y ago
    Adding a link with slightly more details than a marketing one-liner, but thats interesting. https://www.i-programmer.info/news/80-java/13854-microsoft-ports-openjdk-for-windows-10-on-arm.html https://www.i-programmer.info/news/80-java/13854-microsoft-p...
- pjmlp 4y ago
  Besides sibling comment, they are now a OpenJDK vendor since they bought jClarity. https://devblogs.microsoft.com/java/ https://devblogs.microsoft.com/java/

runamok 4y ago

tl;dr: Oracle now is going to charge you *per employee*, NOT per employee actually using Oracle Java SE (employee = full-time and part-time employees and agents, consultants, and contractors). Frankly I don't even know how that's legal but based on how many lawyers Oracle has, assume it is.

antonvs 4y ago
I would imagine it’s legal because you can charge however you want for most products. No-one is forced to buy it though, and the best solution to predatory pricing is not to buy the product.
- rwiggins 4y ago
  Yep. And which is better for the customer can vary on the circumstances. I worked for a company that licensed its software both ways (depending on the customer), although as a disclaimer I was a software eng, not in sales. One thing I'll caution: it's a mistake to think the per-user rate would necessarily be the same in both cases. The business tries to price its software based on value added. IIRC, in the rare cases that we offered customers the choice of pricing method, the final price was (estimated) to be roughly the same, with the per-user rate being the variable... Disclaimer: I haven't read the original article and I don't have any opinion on what Oracle's doing in this specific case as a result.
anothernewdude 4y ago
It'll take a small amount of HR wrangling for the bigger customers to restructure their businesses to place the Java Developers in their own company that pays this license.
- phpisthebest 4y ago
  This is not about development unless 100% of that development is server side only with zero Java clients of any type Even then I would not put it past oracle to make the claim all users of the company that accesses the server app needs a license

threeseed 4y ago

Other JVMs available: * AWS Corretto: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/corretto/latest https://docs.aws.amazon.com/corretto/latest * Azul Zulu: https://www.azul.com/downloads/?package=jdk#download-openjdk https://www.azul.com/downloads/?package=jdk#download-openjdk * Eclipse Temurin: https://adoptium.net/temurin/releases https://adoptium.net/temurin/releases * IBM Semeru: https://developer.ibm.com/languages/java/semeru-runtimes https://developer.ibm.com/languages/java/semeru-runtimes

rickette 4y ago
Full list: https://sdkman.io/jdks https://sdkman.io/jdks By the way, highly recommend SDKman as a handy tool to install and manage different Java installs on your machine.
- KronisLV 4y ago
  I wonder what happened with the Eclipse OpenJ9 project: https://www.eclipse.org/openj9/ https://www.eclipse.org/openj9/ It has build instructions on the site, but not pre-built binaries for download. In the site that you linked, however, it says that Semeru does use it under the hood. I actually recall it being one of the options from AdoptOpenJDK instead of HotSpot: https://adoptopenjdk.net/releases.html?variant=openjdk8&jvmVariant=openj9 https://adoptopenjdk.net/releases.html?variant=openjdk8&jvmV... But the Temurin releases from Adoptium no longer have that option, which is curious: https://adoptium.net/temurin/archive/ https://adoptium.net/temurin/archive/ Oh well, it seemed like a cool project, like an attempt at adapting JDK for cloud workloads and smaller services, without going as far as GraalVM.
  - pjmlp 4y ago
    OpenJ9 already did PGO, JIT cache and AOT compilation years before GraalVM, as it is based on IBM's commercial JVM implementations for their platforms and used to be the JVM for WebSphere (before Liberty rewrite). I guess it is a pity if they decide to no longer invest on it.
  - rickette 4y ago

i386 4y ago

Always review Oracle license changes closely. At Atlassian in 2008, I noticed that they had acquired a company called Coherence which made a distributed cache for the JVM. Confluence used it heavily for its clustered edition, but the original license allowed us to distribute (in inactive form) for free but pay the license fee only when we sold clustered. Hidden in the license agreement, it said we’d have to pay for every copy _downloaded_ - the implication was this would include 100% of trials downloaded AND any customer who built confluence from source (all paying customers had source code access). Fast forward - a mad month where we ripped that shit out for about 6 to 8 supported back versions.

Shorn 4y ago
What did you replace Coherence with? Did you feel the loss of it much, or did it turn out you could/should have gotten rid of it earlier?
- i386 4y ago
  I think our caching needs were abstracted out, most confluences servers used escache and confluence clusters used coherence.
miohtama 4y ago
Oracle is a lawyer company not a software company. This is the peril of purchasing your software from lawyers.

anothernewdude 4y ago

I worked for one business that had structured their company structure to reduce the costs of some revenue and employee count licenses. I doubt any one would bother for Java, but still if you need to lower costs, then just put your java division in a separate company.

daverol 4y ago

Oracle being Oracle - nothing to see here.

code_sloth 4y ago

This seems a slow death in the long term to me. 1. Customers that balk at this cost will switch to other cheaper/free vendors. 2. Oracle imposes even more onerous costs to maintain revenue. and repeat. At some point either Oracle gives up, or they attempt to extract revenue from vendors as well. The latter will probably result in a some kind of fork.

JonChesterfield 4y ago
The customer base is very large companies who find having someone to sue reassuring and are likely to be institutionally incapable of running their own fork of java. Seems fine to me.
- xmcqdpt2 4y ago
  Well there is also the fact that the openjdk codebase is huge and so even though it is quite well written and documented fixing a bug in the jdk (and especially a bug in hotspot) isn't easy. Although tbh i have no idea how the quality of support is with Oracle.

kasperni 4y ago

JDK 19 and JDK 17 binaries are free to use in production and free to redistribute, at no cost, under the Oracle No-Fee Terms and Conditions [1]. This license change concerns people who have a subscription service with Oracle. [1] https://www.oracle.com/uk/java/technologies/downloads/#java19 https://www.oracle.com/uk/java/technologies/downloads/#java1...

villgax 4y ago

Pure trash