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> things like the recent change to count all employees (even the ones who do not use Java) when calculating the price for an Oracle JDK license AFAIK, the chan

by pron 4y ago

> things like the recent change to count all employees (even the ones who do not use Java) when calculating the price for an Oracle JDK license AFAIK, the change to the pricing model for support was done at the request of Oracle's support customers, as it's easier for them to track. I don't know why non support customers would care one way or another. > but then you find out that you have to download from AdoptOpenJDK instead of downloading directly from OpenJDK The OpenJDK website's downloads link links here: https://jdk.java.net https://jdk.java.net Of course, you can download any of the other builds if you prefer. > which could expose the company to huge licensing costs That's incorrect. The Oracle JDK is free to use. > all the users see is a pointless namespace change That's perfectly understandable, and users who are bothered by this are welcome to stop trusting the libraries that have chosen to do that to them. But the Java ecosystem is decentralised and Oracle has no control over third-party libraries. Allowing a library that chooses not to be an official Java standard to pretend that it is is also unfair. The maintainers of that library have decided that it would be better to inflict that change on their users rather than remain a Java standard, and maybe they know what's best for their users.

cesarb 4y ago
> That's perfectly understandable, and users who are bothered by this are welcome to stop trusting the libraries that have chosen to do that to them. But the Java ecosystem is decentralised and Oracle has no control over third-party libraries. The libraries which did the namespace change are things like JAXB and JAX-RS and JAX-WS, which have been part of Java since Java 6. It's not some random third-party library, and Oracle did have control over them, until one day they decided they didn't want them anymore. As a part of Java, users did expect them to keep working (other than small changes like adding or removing a couple of methods, which became even less of a risk of breakage once Java 8 introduced default methods). The use of these libraries is pervasive all over the Java ecosystem, which leads to the complaint mentioned in the comment above: by first removing them on Java 11, and then forcing their new maintainer to rename the packages (instead of grandfathering them as an exception, or even better, providing an aliasing mechanism so that the renaming wouldn't break binary compatibility), Oracle broke some of the faith people had on Java's stability and backwards compatibility.
- pron 4y ago
  > and then forcing their new maintainer to rename the packages Their new maintainers were not forced to rename the package; they chose to do it. That the java/javax namespaces are governed by the JCP (which will turn 25 years old this year), is well-known to anyone familiar with Java's governance, and I can't see a reason why an exception would be warranted if the maintainers had the choice of staying in the JCP; they weren't compelled to leave -- they wanted to leave. Why would a standards body lend its seal of approval to someone who no longer wishes to work in that standards body? "I don't want to follow the rule" is not a good reason to grant an exception from a rule.
  - redeeman 4y ago
    we should probably also not blow this "problem" out of proportion. If you actively maintain your things, you can probably handle swapping a few strings out that are garantueed to give buildtime errors. If you dont maintain your application and run on antiquated runtimes? well good news, it keeps totally unchanged... edit: okay, i guess if you do some funky stuff like reflection or having stuff in various config files, it might not give compiletime errors.. still though, recursive search and you'll find the spots in practically all cases
    - cesarb 4y ago
      It's more involved than just "swapping a few strings". You also need to make sure that all the libraries you depend on are on the same side of the divide, that is, you have to "swap a few strings" and update all your dependencies at the same time (and these updates could bring unrelated breaking changes with them). And some of these dependency changes might be unexpected; you might not expect a general-purpose logging library to depend on that, yet one popular logging library has to be upgraded from 1.3.x to 1.4.x when changing the namespace from javax to jakarta. It's even worse when your software can load plugins written by third parties, and your API allows these plugins to expose servlets or similar. You'd have to not only "swap a few strings" and update the dependencies in your software, but also make all these third parties update all plugins at the same time, with no chance of a gradual transition. It's a large amount of pain, for a completely unnecessary naming change.

by pron 4y ago

cesarb 4y ago

> That's perfectly understandable, and users who are bothered by this are welcome to stop trusting the libraries that have chosen to do that to them. But the Java ecosystem is decentralised and Oracle has no control over third-party libraries. The libraries which did the namespace change are things like JAXB and JAX-RS and JAX-WS, which have been part of Java since Java 6. It's not some random third-party library, and Oracle did have control over them, until one day they decided they didn't want them anymore. As a part of Java, users did expect them to keep working (other than small changes like adding or removing a couple of methods, which became even less of a risk of breakage once Java 8 introduced default methods). The use of these libraries is pervasive all over the Java ecosystem, which leads to the complaint mentioned in the comment above: by first removing them on Java 11, and then forcing their new maintainer to rename the packages (instead of grandfathering them as an exception, or even better, providing an aliasing mechanism so that the renaming wouldn't break binary compatibility), Oracle broke some of the faith people had on Java's stability and backwards compatibility.

pron 4y ago
> and then forcing their new maintainer to rename the packages Their new maintainers were not forced to rename the package; they chose to do it. That the java/javax namespaces are governed by the JCP (which will turn 25 years old this year), is well-known to anyone familiar with Java's governance, and I can't see a reason why an exception would be warranted if the maintainers had the choice of staying in the JCP; they weren't compelled to leave -- they wanted to leave. Why would a standards body lend its seal of approval to someone who no longer wishes to work in that standards body? "I don't want to follow the rule" is not a good reason to grant an exception from a rule.
- redeeman 4y ago
  we should probably also not blow this "problem" out of proportion. If you actively maintain your things, you can probably handle swapping a few strings out that are garantueed to give buildtime errors. If you dont maintain your application and run on antiquated runtimes? well good news, it keeps totally unchanged... edit: okay, i guess if you do some funky stuff like reflection or having stuff in various config files, it might not give compiletime errors.. still though, recursive search and you'll find the spots in practically all cases
  - cesarb 4y ago
    It's more involved than just "swapping a few strings". You also need to make sure that all the libraries you depend on are on the same side of the divide, that is, you have to "swap a few strings" and update all your dependencies at the same time (and these updates could bring unrelated breaking changes with them). And some of these dependency changes might be unexpected; you might not expect a general-purpose logging library to depend on that, yet one popular logging library has to be upgraded from 1.3.x to 1.4.x when changing the namespace from javax to jakarta. It's even worse when your software can load plugins written by third parties, and your API allows these plugins to expose servlets or similar. You'd have to not only "swap a few strings" and update the dependencies in your software, but also make all these third parties update all plugins at the same time, with no chance of a gradual transition. It's a large amount of pain, for a completely unnecessary naming change.