7 ms·

Oracle Discontinues Free Java Time Zone Updates

163 points by sharms 13y ago

nijk 13y ago
Anything that makes Java harder to use is good for the industry.
wavefunction 13y ago
Go on Larry, run it into the ground! You may not care about this, owning your own personal Hawaiian island, but there's a reason people give a shit about Bill Gates and even that notorious asshole Steve Jobs, but you, you're just an object of derision!
- michaelwww 13y ago
  > Steve Jobs De mortuis nil nisi bonum dicendum est (“Of the dead nothing but good is to be said”)
  - thaumasiotes 13y ago
    This is not a correction, as the provided translation is fine. But because I have a personal interest in the subject, here's one that tracks the Latin a little more closely: De mortuis [On the dead, ] nil [nothing] nisi bonum [unless it is good] dicendum est [should be said].
    - michaelwww 13y ago
      I've heard this phrase floating around my whole life, so I was prompted to look it up on Wikipedia. I used the freer translation. According to Wikipedia, it's a Greek aphorism τὸν τεθνηκóτα μὴ κακολογεῖν (“Don’t badmouth a dead man”) attributed to Chilon of Sparta (ca. 600 BC), one of the Seven Sages of Greece. As for Ellison, I think the Christian warning about mammon applies: "Lay not up for yourselves treasures upon earth, where moth and rust doth corrupt, and where thieves break through and steal: But lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust doth corrupt, and where thieves do not break through nor steal: For where your treasure is, there will your heart be also. No man can serve two masters: for either he will hate the one, and love the other; or else he will hold to the one, and despise the other. Ye cannot serve God and mammon." - Matthew 6:19-21,24 (KJV)
    - asveikau 13y ago
      Been a while, but I was taught that the gerund in Latin implied worthiness. So "dicendum" could be "worth saying".
      - thaumasiotes 13y ago
        I find it unlikely (though I have no Latin training beyond high school). That "dicendum" isn't appearing by itself; it's part of a syntactic construction, the horribly named 'passive periphrastic' with "est". http://ancienthistory.about.com/od/latinlearning/qt/passiveperiphra.htm http://ancienthistory.about.com/od/latinlearning/qt/passivep... As that page notes, it's the same construction as in "Carthago delenda est [Carthage must be destroyed]".
        asveikau 13y ago
        It would seem that Wikipedia agrees with my interpretation: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gerundive http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gerundive > It is used to indicate that someone or something (the referent of the noun it modifies) needs or deserves to be the object of an action. Also some of this spills into common names of people today: > The name Amanda is the feminine gerundive of amare ("to love"), and thus means roughly ... "worthy of being loved", ... Similarly with the name Miranda; ... "worthy of admiration" ...
  - PakG1 13y ago
    So Steve Jobs' reality distortion field should be able to have everlasting effect then? He was an asshole by all accounts in the workplace (I won't extend this comment to his personal life because on accounts, he seemed nice in his personal life). He was demanding, hard-driving, effective, and generally right. But he was an asshole. I don't think he gave a damn what people thought about his personality, because he could often say he was right. That doesn't change the fact that he was an asshole by all accounts in the workplace.
    - michaelwww 13y ago
      Don't shoot the messenger. I'm just stating the wisdom of the ages (Western Civ.) I would say it means the dead can't defend themselves. The dead are retired from the game and resting in peace. I would also guess that it means you should take your fight to the living acolytes where your words might have more effect. Also, I don't see Jobs' reality distortion field having much influence anymore: Apple seems adrift.
      - PakG1 13y ago
        To be clear, I wasn't shooting the messenger, only the messenger's message. You'll note I didn't do any shooting at you directly. :) And I think there is a lot to be gained from learning from dead people, both their positives and negatives. Whether or not they can defend themselves is of little consequence to me, as I think they can contribute many lessons to society from beyond the grave if society is allowed to examine their past lives.
        michaelwww 13y ago
        I didn't feel shot at, and I agree with you that we can learn from the dead. Calling Steve an asshole at this point doesn't seem right to me. Another phrase comes to mind is "Let us now praise famous men," which Wikipedia tells me is from a passage in the Wisdom of Sirach (2nd century B.C.) that begins, "Let us now praise famous men, and our fathers that begat us." I better get off this kick because I have work to do! The wisdom of the ages is a fascinating subject though.
  - meatsock 13y ago
    To the living we owe respect, but to the dead we owe only the truth. -voltaire
    - wavefunction 13y ago
      Cheers, that's a wonderful quote.
    - rbanffy 13y ago
      And the truth is usually much more complex than a quick message like that allows. It's easy to forget, but even very powerful people are just people and are prone to each and every failing less powerful humans, such as you and I, are.
- melling 13y ago
  Maybe next time you should wait before shooting from the hip with some pointless rant. Other people have already provided some real insight into the issue. It doesn't sound like it's a major issue. Larry just wants people to pay or do the work themselves, if they're going to lag behind on older versions. It costs him extra money and development wasted time. He should make it even more painful so companies must upgrade. When I hear people tell me they're still using Java 1.4, I find it very hard to think they're not being extremely lazy.
  - chii 13y ago
    > they're still using Java 1.4, I find it very hard to think they're not being extremely lazy. or they are running an app that they either don't have the source, or don't have the budget to update.
    - lttlrck 13y ago
      Or don't need to. A decade is not so long.
  - wavefunction 13y ago
    If you knew me IRL, you'd know that's not my MO (not shooting from the hip with a rant, though there was a point to it, sir) Besides, like you said, there were other people to provide real insight into the issue. My post was just what it was, and you can downvote it accordingly...
  - eli 13y ago
    Old runtime == "extremely lazy"? Who's shooting from the hip now?
    - arkitaip 13y ago
      1.4 was released in 2002. If you haven't updated your code in over a DECADE, you are being incredibly lazy or incompetent.
      - 13y ago
astangl 13y ago
Big deal. So we'll start getting the updates from IBM instead. http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/java/jdk/dst/jtzu.html http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/java/jdk/dst/jtzu.html
nettdata 13y ago
It's based on freely available data in the first place, and I'm sure an Open Source option will pop up to replace it. If it's truly "mission critical", then I don't see what's wrong with paying for the service. Call me crazy, but I don't see this as being a big deal. $0.02 (CDN)
thwarted 13y ago
I never understood why the system-wide timezone database, at least on UNIX-like systems, wasn't used by Java. Why does Java need its own timezone database/database format? Why do I need to install new timezone databases on my Linux system that runs Java? Why can't the Olsen tzinfo files be installed on systems where the OS provider doesn't provide them?
- bonzoesc 13y ago
  Lawyer-resistance; remember the situation a year or so ago when the tzinfo files were the subject of a patent claim? Oracle's weren't at risk because they have lawyers on retainer.
  - bbanyc 13y ago
    Oracle's files are based on the tzinfo files, and are just as vulnerable. If anything, more so because Oracle has a lot more money than the tzinfo maintainers. No, this is about write-once-run-anywhere compatibility as the other responses say. (Incidentally, it was a copyright claim, not a patent claim, but in this regard they work the same way.)
    - bonzoesc 13y ago
      > Oracle's files are based on the tzinfo files, and are just as vulnerable. If anything, more so because Oracle has a lot more money than the tzinfo maintainers. Oracle's got enough cheddar to take it to court or settle out-of-court like their business depends on it.
- lobster_johnson 13y ago
  Indeed. The time zone database is managed by IANA [1] and is the de facto standard of time-zone management, and used by almost every platform (including GNU, iOS/OS X, Android and *BSD) [2] except Windows. The database itself is in the public domain. For Java, it looks like Joda Time implements tz compatibility. [1] http://www.iana.org/time-zones http://www.iana.org/time-zones [2] http://www.iana.org/time-zones/repository/tz-link.html http://www.iana.org/time-zones/repository/tz-link.html
hga 13y ago
Not to take away from the greater import of this, or the issues of legacy code, but as noted in the Slashdot discussion, Joda Time (http://joda-time.sourceforge.net/ http://joda-time.sourceforge.net/) is a good replacement for the official time stuff.
- quarterto 13y ago
  And effectively becomes official in Java 8 (or rather, JSR-310 from the same creator does).
zorlem 13y ago
Oracle changed the distribution terms of TZUpdater from free (as in beer) to available only to paying customers at least half a year ago. It should be noted, though, that this largely affects only users that for some reason can't update their JRE and are lagging behind the latest version. Oracle still provides up-to-date versions of the TZ data with the latest JRE. It's not a big issue since one could use IBM's TZ updater tool or compile the TZ data from the raw Olson TZ database using javazic.jar available from OpenJDK.
- overgard 13y ago
  It strikes me that the organizations that can't update to the latest JRE are the really large enterprises still running IE6 and so on. I think one client we worked with was still stuck on Java 1.4. I imagine that's the target of this latest change.
  - zorlem 13y ago
    >It strikes me that the organizations that can't update to the latest JRE are the really large enterprises still running IE6 and so on. Not necessarily. I know quite a few companies that have stabilized their code against a particular version and lack the manpower and/or the money to constantly upgrade and deal with the newly introduced bugs in newer versions. They usually do the upgrades on a schedule (eg. once a year or every 18 months). For most major deployments changing to a new version of the JVM is a non-trivial task. edit: added a life-cycle
  - yuhong 13y ago
    In fact, you can pay Oracle to support old versions of JRE, and 1.4 was updated under paid support until Feb of this year.
btown 13y ago
How difficult would it be for someone to create an open-source version of this tool? From the readme for the now-paywalled utility, it seems that the utility only modifies a single directory in a predictable way... http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/java/javase/tzupdater-readme-136440.html#remove http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/java/javase/tzupdater-read...
- Maxious 13y ago
  Or just use the implementation in OpenJDK https://blogs.oracle.com/coffeys/entry/want_the_latest_tzdata_support https://blogs.oracle.com/coffeys/entry/want_the_latest_tzdat...
sgt 13y ago
Not a big deal - blown out of proportion. As one slashdotter put it: "IBM provides free access to the Olson database updates: http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/java/jdk/dst/jtzu.html http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/java/jdk/dst/jtzu.html Was this post even necessary?"
joelthelion 13y ago
We should get rid of time zones entirely. They cause problems to no end while providing no real benefit. People would get used to the fact that the sun usually rises at 11PM in New Delhi, for example.
- cnu 13y ago
  And if I am travelling from New Delhi to London, how would I know/sync what time the sun rises/sets?
  - arjie 13y ago
    Oh, that's easy: the sun never sets on the British empire. Seriously, though, time zones do not help with that. The sun sets at nine in the evening in Leicester in July. Can't be helped, the length of the day is different.
  - jlgreco 13y ago
    Trying to use timezones to figure out what the sun is doing is already an exercise in futility: http://www.daylightmap.com/index.php http://www.daylightmap.com/index.php The earth's axis is tilted so in addition to needing to know the timezone and the date in a solar sense, you also need to know the latitude and need to be able to combine those three things in your head... in practice you just look it up instead.
  - mikeash 13y ago
    How do you know now? Time zone info doesn't just pop into your head. You have to look that up too, or at least receive it somehow. Sunrise data could be obtained the same way. The difference being, of course, that you wouldn't need to look up anything that didn't care about the sun, while time zone info needs to be known to make sense of any time.
- weinzierl 13y ago
  Getting rid of leap seconds and summer time, that would do it for me. BTW China has only one time zone, so they are kind of practicing what you suggest.
- 13y ago
yekko 13y ago
You get what you paid for.
skottk 13y ago
They really want you to stay current on the JRE. They really really want you to get off the dangerous, broken JRE 6 version. They're maintaining the most dangerous client software in the world, and they can't break the language with quarterly releases of exciting new features. They have to love people forward into new releases, or maintain the old releases forever. TZUPDATER is maybe the only thing they can kill to incent people to upgrade. And they're not killing it, they're letting you pay to keep running old, vulnerable versions of software. Slashdot OP misses the point. You're supposed to upgrade your runtime periodically. They're years behind.
- josephkern 13y ago
  "Slashdot OP misses the point. You're supposed to upgrade your runtime periodically. They're years behind." Never supported mission/life critical apps in an enterprise that require an older runtime? It's not the users fault that a dev built an application that's only compatible with a specific runtime version.

163 points by sharms 13y ago

nijk 13y ago

Anything that makes Java harder to use is good for the industry.

Go on Larry, run it into the ground! You may not care about this, owning your own personal Hawaiian island, but there's a reason people give a shit about Bill Gates and even that notorious asshole Steve Jobs, but you, you're just an object of derision!

michaelwww 13y ago
> Steve Jobs De mortuis nil nisi bonum dicendum est (“Of the dead nothing but good is to be said”)
- thaumasiotes 13y ago
  This is not a correction, as the provided translation is fine. But because I have a personal interest in the subject, here's one that tracks the Latin a little more closely: De mortuis [On the dead, ] nil [nothing] nisi bonum [unless it is good] dicendum est [should be said].
  - michaelwww 13y ago
    I've heard this phrase floating around my whole life, so I was prompted to look it up on Wikipedia. I used the freer translation. According to Wikipedia, it's a Greek aphorism τὸν τεθνηκóτα μὴ κακολογεῖν (“Don’t badmouth a dead man”) attributed to Chilon of Sparta (ca. 600 BC), one of the Seven Sages of Greece. As for Ellison, I think the Christian warning about mammon applies: "Lay not up for yourselves treasures upon earth, where moth and rust doth corrupt, and where thieves break through and steal: But lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust doth corrupt, and where thieves do not break through nor steal: For where your treasure is, there will your heart be also. No man can serve two masters: for either he will hate the one, and love the other; or else he will hold to the one, and despise the other. Ye cannot serve God and mammon." - Matthew 6:19-21,24 (KJV)
  - asveikau 13y ago
    Been a while, but I was taught that the gerund in Latin implied worthiness. So "dicendum" could be "worth saying".
    - thaumasiotes 13y ago
      I find it unlikely (though I have no Latin training beyond high school). That "dicendum" isn't appearing by itself; it's part of a syntactic construction, the horribly named 'passive periphrastic' with "est". http://ancienthistory.about.com/od/latinlearning/qt/passiveperiphra.htm http://ancienthistory.about.com/od/latinlearning/qt/passivep... As that page notes, it's the same construction as in "Carthago delenda est [Carthage must be destroyed]".
      - asveikau 13y ago
        It would seem that Wikipedia agrees with my interpretation: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gerundive http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gerundive > It is used to indicate that someone or something (the referent of the noun it modifies) needs or deserves to be the object of an action. Also some of this spills into common names of people today: > The name Amanda is the feminine gerundive of amare ("to love"), and thus means roughly ... "worthy of being loved", ... Similarly with the name Miranda; ... "worthy of admiration" ...
- PakG1 13y ago
  So Steve Jobs' reality distortion field should be able to have everlasting effect then? He was an asshole by all accounts in the workplace (I won't extend this comment to his personal life because on accounts, he seemed nice in his personal life). He was demanding, hard-driving, effective, and generally right. But he was an asshole. I don't think he gave a damn what people thought about his personality, because he could often say he was right. That doesn't change the fact that he was an asshole by all accounts in the workplace.
  - michaelwww 13y ago
    Don't shoot the messenger. I'm just stating the wisdom of the ages (Western Civ.) I would say it means the dead can't defend themselves. The dead are retired from the game and resting in peace. I would also guess that it means you should take your fight to the living acolytes where your words might have more effect. Also, I don't see Jobs' reality distortion field having much influence anymore: Apple seems adrift.
    - PakG1 13y ago
      To be clear, I wasn't shooting the messenger, only the messenger's message. You'll note I didn't do any shooting at you directly. :) And I think there is a lot to be gained from learning from dead people, both their positives and negatives. Whether or not they can defend themselves is of little consequence to me, as I think they can contribute many lessons to society from beyond the grave if society is allowed to examine their past lives.
      - michaelwww 13y ago
        I didn't feel shot at, and I agree with you that we can learn from the dead. Calling Steve an asshole at this point doesn't seem right to me. Another phrase comes to mind is "Let us now praise famous men," which Wikipedia tells me is from a passage in the Wisdom of Sirach (2nd century B.C.) that begins, "Let us now praise famous men, and our fathers that begat us." I better get off this kick because I have work to do! The wisdom of the ages is a fascinating subject though.
- meatsock 13y ago
  To the living we owe respect, but to the dead we owe only the truth. -voltaire
  - wavefunction 13y ago
    Cheers, that's a wonderful quote.
  - rbanffy 13y ago
    And the truth is usually much more complex than a quick message like that allows. It's easy to forget, but even very powerful people are just people and are prone to each and every failing less powerful humans, such as you and I, are.
melling 13y ago
Maybe next time you should wait before shooting from the hip with some pointless rant. Other people have already provided some real insight into the issue. It doesn't sound like it's a major issue. Larry just wants people to pay or do the work themselves, if they're going to lag behind on older versions. It costs him extra money and development wasted time. He should make it even more painful so companies must upgrade. When I hear people tell me they're still using Java 1.4, I find it very hard to think they're not being extremely lazy.
- chii 13y ago
  > they're still using Java 1.4, I find it very hard to think they're not being extremely lazy. or they are running an app that they either don't have the source, or don't have the budget to update.
  - lttlrck 13y ago
    Or don't need to. A decade is not so long.
- wavefunction 13y ago
  If you knew me IRL, you'd know that's not my MO (not shooting from the hip with a rant, though there was a point to it, sir) Besides, like you said, there were other people to provide real insight into the issue. My post was just what it was, and you can downvote it accordingly...
- eli 13y ago
  Old runtime == "extremely lazy"? Who's shooting from the hip now?
  - arkitaip 13y ago
    1.4 was released in 2002. If you haven't updated your code in over a DECADE, you are being incredibly lazy or incompetent.
    - 13y ago

astangl 13y ago

Big deal. So we'll start getting the updates from IBM instead. http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/java/jdk/dst/jtzu.html http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/java/jdk/dst/jtzu.html

nettdata 13y ago

It's based on freely available data in the first place, and I'm sure an Open Source option will pop up to replace it. If it's truly "mission critical", then I don't see what's wrong with paying for the service. Call me crazy, but I don't see this as being a big deal. $0.02 (CDN)

thwarted 13y ago

I never understood why the system-wide timezone database, at least on UNIX-like systems, wasn't used by Java. Why does Java need its own timezone database/database format? Why do I need to install new timezone databases on my Linux system that runs Java? Why can't the Olsen tzinfo files be installed on systems where the OS provider doesn't provide them?

bonzoesc 13y ago
Lawyer-resistance; remember the situation a year or so ago when the tzinfo files were the subject of a patent claim? Oracle's weren't at risk because they have lawyers on retainer.
- bbanyc 13y ago
  Oracle's files are based on the tzinfo files, and are just as vulnerable. If anything, more so because Oracle has a lot more money than the tzinfo maintainers. No, this is about write-once-run-anywhere compatibility as the other responses say. (Incidentally, it was a copyright claim, not a patent claim, but in this regard they work the same way.)
  - bonzoesc 13y ago
    > Oracle's files are based on the tzinfo files, and are just as vulnerable. If anything, more so because Oracle has a lot more money than the tzinfo maintainers. Oracle's got enough cheddar to take it to court or settle out-of-court like their business depends on it.
lobster_johnson 13y ago
Indeed. The time zone database is managed by IANA [1] and is the de facto standard of time-zone management, and used by almost every platform (including GNU, iOS/OS X, Android and *BSD) [2] except Windows. The database itself is in the public domain. For Java, it looks like Joda Time implements tz compatibility. [1] http://www.iana.org/time-zones http://www.iana.org/time-zones [2] http://www.iana.org/time-zones/repository/tz-link.html http://www.iana.org/time-zones/repository/tz-link.html

hga 13y ago

Not to take away from the greater import of this, or the issues of legacy code, but as noted in the Slashdot discussion, Joda Time (http://joda-time.sourceforge.net/ http://joda-time.sourceforge.net/) is a good replacement for the official time stuff.

quarterto 13y ago
And effectively becomes official in Java 8 (or rather, JSR-310 from the same creator does).

zorlem 13y ago

Oracle changed the distribution terms of TZUpdater from free (as in beer) to available only to paying customers at least half a year ago. It should be noted, though, that this largely affects only users that for some reason can't update their JRE and are lagging behind the latest version. Oracle still provides up-to-date versions of the TZ data with the latest JRE. It's not a big issue since one could use IBM's TZ updater tool or compile the TZ data from the raw Olson TZ database using javazic.jar available from OpenJDK.

overgard 13y ago
It strikes me that the organizations that can't update to the latest JRE are the really large enterprises still running IE6 and so on. I think one client we worked with was still stuck on Java 1.4. I imagine that's the target of this latest change.
- zorlem 13y ago
  >It strikes me that the organizations that can't update to the latest JRE are the really large enterprises still running IE6 and so on. Not necessarily. I know quite a few companies that have stabilized their code against a particular version and lack the manpower and/or the money to constantly upgrade and deal with the newly introduced bugs in newer versions. They usually do the upgrades on a schedule (eg. once a year or every 18 months). For most major deployments changing to a new version of the JVM is a non-trivial task. edit: added a life-cycle
- yuhong 13y ago
  In fact, you can pay Oracle to support old versions of JRE, and 1.4 was updated under paid support until Feb of this year.

btown 13y ago

How difficult would it be for someone to create an open-source version of this tool? From the readme for the now-paywalled utility, it seems that the utility only modifies a single directory in a predictable way... http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/java/javase/tzupdater-readme-136440.html#remove http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/java/javase/tzupdater-read...

Maxious 13y ago
Or just use the implementation in OpenJDK https://blogs.oracle.com/coffeys/entry/want_the_latest_tzdata_support https://blogs.oracle.com/coffeys/entry/want_the_latest_tzdat...

sgt 13y ago

Not a big deal - blown out of proportion. As one slashdotter put it: "IBM provides free access to the Olson database updates: http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/java/jdk/dst/jtzu.html http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/java/jdk/dst/jtzu.html Was this post even necessary?"

joelthelion 13y ago

We should get rid of time zones entirely. They cause problems to no end while providing no real benefit. People would get used to the fact that the sun usually rises at 11PM in New Delhi, for example.

cnu 13y ago
And if I am travelling from New Delhi to London, how would I know/sync what time the sun rises/sets?
- arjie 13y ago
  Oh, that's easy: the sun never sets on the British empire. Seriously, though, time zones do not help with that. The sun sets at nine in the evening in Leicester in July. Can't be helped, the length of the day is different.
- jlgreco 13y ago
  Trying to use timezones to figure out what the sun is doing is already an exercise in futility: http://www.daylightmap.com/index.php http://www.daylightmap.com/index.php The earth's axis is tilted so in addition to needing to know the timezone and the date in a solar sense, you also need to know the latitude and need to be able to combine those three things in your head... in practice you just look it up instead.
- mikeash 13y ago
  How do you know now? Time zone info doesn't just pop into your head. You have to look that up too, or at least receive it somehow. Sunrise data could be obtained the same way. The difference being, of course, that you wouldn't need to look up anything that didn't care about the sun, while time zone info needs to be known to make sense of any time.
weinzierl 13y ago
Getting rid of leap seconds and summer time, that would do it for me. BTW China has only one time zone, so they are kind of practicing what you suggest.
13y ago

yekko 13y ago

You get what you paid for.

skottk 13y ago

They really want you to stay current on the JRE. They really really want you to get off the dangerous, broken JRE 6 version. They're maintaining the most dangerous client software in the world, and they can't break the language with quarterly releases of exciting new features. They have to love people forward into new releases, or maintain the old releases forever. TZUPDATER is maybe the only thing they can kill to incent people to upgrade. And they're not killing it, they're letting you pay to keep running old, vulnerable versions of software. Slashdot OP misses the point. You're supposed to upgrade your runtime periodically. They're years behind.

josephkern 13y ago
"Slashdot OP misses the point. You're supposed to upgrade your runtime periodically. They're years behind." Never supported mission/life critical apps in an enterprise that require an older runtime? It's not the users fault that a dev built an application that's only compatible with a specific runtime version.