3 ms·

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

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
  - anothernewdude 4y ago
    Serious question - do people still use Java to build client side anything?

3 ms·

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

by runamok 4y ago

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
  - anothernewdude 4y ago
    Serious question - do people still use Java to build client side anything?