
Oracle finally targets Java non-payers – six years after plucking Sun - lost_name
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/12/16/oracle_targets_java_users_non_compliance/
======
_Codemonkeyism
What a bad article, unclear contents and based on only one source - which by
the way wants to sell his services.

Going to the Oracle Java site the menu says:

    
    
      Java SE
      Java EE
      Java ME
      Java SE Support
      Java SE Advanced & Suite
      Java Embedded
      Java DB
      Web Tier
      Java Card
      Java TV
    

IANAL The article seems to be about "Java SE Advanced & Suite" including
JRockit VM and other advanced tools.

The license on the Java SE download page

[http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/java/javase/downloads/inde...](http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/java/javase/downloads/index-
jsp-138363.html)

here

[http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/java/javase/terms/license/...](http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/java/javase/terms/license/index.html)

does not include the words

    
    
      intelligent systems
      general purpose computing
    

so it's unclear of what download TheRegister is talking about.

[Edit] After downloading the Windows JDK the installer says "The Java Mission
Control ... is now available as a part of the JDK". There is an app "Java
Mission Control" after installation. There is no click through EULA during
installation. There is also no linked license in the app which I could find.

Is the term in the click-through EULA of the installer?

~~~
cpncrunch
No. Did you actually read the entire article?

"Java SE is free for what Oracle defines as “general purpose computing”...But
it is customers in these general-purpose settings getting hit by LMS. The
reason is there’s no way to separate the paid Java SE sub products from the
free Java SE umbrella at download as Oracle doesn’t offer separate
installation software"

~~~
_Codemonkeyism
From the article

"Java SE is free but Java SE Advanced Desktop, Advanced and Suite are not.
Java SE Suite, for example, costs $300 per named user with a support bill of
$66; there’s a per-processor option of $15,000 with a $3,300 support bill"

------
random3
Oracle will become the new SCO :)

That said, the article is a bit fuzzy.

For example, if you want to use Flight Recorder you have to explicitly enable
commercial features UnlockCommercialFeatures.

This is however free for non-production use. That is "designing, developing
and testing"

[http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/java/javase/terms/license/...](http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/java/javase/terms/license/index.html)

> A. COMMERCIAL FEATURES. You may not use the Commercial Features for running
> Programs, Java applets or applications in your internal business operations
> or for any commercial or production purpose, or for any purpose other than
> as set forth in Sections B, C, D and E of these Supplemental Terms. If You
> want to use the Commercial Features for any purpose other than as permitted
> in this Agreement, You must obtain a separate license from Oracle.

> B. SOFTWARE INTERNAL USE FOR DEVELOPMENT LICENSE GRANT. Subject to the terms
> and conditions of this Agreement and restrictions and exceptions set forth
> in the README File incorporated herein by reference, including, but not
> limited to the Java Technology Restrictions of these Supplemental Terms,
> Oracle grants you a non-exclusive, non-transferable, limited license without
> fees to reproduce internally and use internally the Software complete and
> unmodified for the purpose of designing, developing, and testing your
> Programs.

~~~
Bombthecat
Oracle won't die anytime soon.the database from oracle is just too good for
big data.

~~~
smoyer
I don't find it better than PostgreSQL for most applications but their sales
department is much stronger. In the enterprise, many applications are sold
specifically to run with the Oracle system. Oracle's other products can be a
mish-mash - Peoplesoft is a horrible mess (my favorite line during the sales
process was "PeopleCode is a Javascript like language that compiles into COBOL
- later we found that the COBOL compiler wasn't included in our quote).

I do need to say that there's a lot of humor available with Oracle - watching
Ellison's keynote at Oracle OpenWorld made me think I was hearing about AWS.
Every product he talked about was cloud-this and cloud-that. Who knew that
every product Oracle ever made was part of the cloud? He also trotted out the
idea that you could create applications without developers by demonstrating an
application he made himself - I guess he's representative of a typical
administrative assistant?

------
krylon
Bryan Cantrill has called Oracle the North Star of Rage - whenever you are
confused or lost, you can realign your coordinate system relative to Oracle.

I have never had to deal with Oracle, but every time I read something about
them in the news, I think of of that nice quote and tend to agree a little
more with Mr. Cantrill.

On the other hand, I wonder why they do this? This can only hurt Java. I would
imagine some companies will take this as a sign and go with .Net where they
presumably do not have deal with problems like this one.

~~~
xenadu02
Let me tell you... my company got acquired by Oracle. We thought things would
be OK. Nothing changed immediately. Slowly but surely they turned the screws.
5 year laptop replacement policy. You get the corporate standard laptop and
you'll like it. Sales? Oh those guys can buy new Macs every two years, they
get whatever they want. Then you understand where Software Engineers rank in
the company hierarchy. Oracle took the average price of our product from $100k
to $5 million for the same size deals. Our sales went from $5-7m to more than
$40m with no increasing in engineering headcount (team of 15). Didn't matter
when bonus time came, we all got stack-ranked and some people got nothing. As
a top performer I got a few options, worth maybe $5k.

Oracle exists to extract the maximum amount of money possible from the Fortune
1000. Everyone else can fuck off. Your impotent internet rage is meaningless.
If it doesn't piss off the CTO of $X then it doesn't matter. If it gets that
CTO to cut a bigger check then it will be embraced with extreme enthusiasm.

The culture wears down a lot (but not all) of the good people, who then leave.
What's left is a lot of mediocrity and architecture astronauts. The more
complex the product the better - it means extra consulting dollars!

My relative works at a business dependent on Micros. When Oracle announced the
acquisition I told them to start on the backup plan immediately because Oracle
was going to screw them sooner or later. A few years on and that is proving
true: Oracle is slowly excising the Micros dealers and ISVs out of the
picture, gobbling up all the revenue while hiking prices.

tl;dr: If your company is getting acquired by Oracle run away. I wish I had
followed my instincts and bailed out much sooner. The place is horrible as a
matter of policy to drive down the cost of software engineers so they don't
have to make as many layoffs from their constant stream of acquisitions.

~~~
paulstovell
> Oracle took the average price of our product from $100k to $5 million for
> the same size deals. Our sales went from $5-7m to more than $40m with no
> increasing in engineering headcount (team of 15)

Not that I like the Oracle sales model, but that is impressive. Playing devils
advocate, perhaps they are justified to treat sales so well.

~~~
zzalpha
Yeah, I was a bit baffled that was cited as a failure of some kind.

This just tells me pre-acquistion they weren't charging what the market would
bear for their product, by a factor of 50.

Which is probably one of the reasons Oracle bought the company in this first
place.

~~~
coleca
It also could be that Oracle realized the customers had some degree of
perceived lock-in, so they jacked the price up to milk the customers dry on
license renewal time. The customers paid once because they had little
alternative, but started their transition to something new as soon as they
could. The well will run dry quickly. They do the same thing with Oracle DB
license audits, and burned CIOs pay the penalty and instruct their teams to
start removing as much Oracle as they can as fast as they can so it doesn't
happen again.

------
tmd83
The article was very confusing to me. Does it really mean if I get the
standard download that might have some licensed components (Flight recorder
for example) I'm on the hook even if I don't enable/use those features? The VM
even has flag for unlocking commercial feature so that doesn't make sense.

Or is it the fact that people are using commercial features thinking that all
the free downloaded bits are free, that seems a bit naive for big companies.

Also not sure of the distribution angle, if I don't use the msi installer and
bundle it in a zip or something does it still require a commercial license?
From reading distribution FAQ it seems I can distribute it internally my
organization not sure if I can as part of commercial application sold to 3rd
party.

~~~
Sanddancer
Your best bet is probably to use the OpenJDK build for Windows. It's an MSI
file and it doesn't have any of the Oracle crap attached to it.

[https://developers.redhat.com/products/openjdk/overview/](https://developers.redhat.com/products/openjdk/overview/)

~~~
krylon
Thank you! I did not even know that existed!

~~~
smonff
Also, OpenJDKs packages exists for various GNU/Linux distributions.

~~~
krylon
_That_ I did know. ;-)

But I work as a sysadmin at a Windows shop, and deploying the JRE on ~80
machines has been a real pain so far. With an MSI package, I can just use a
GPO.

------
bitmapbrother
Incompetently written article. There are commercial applications you can
download for free, with the Oracle JDK, that you need to licence if you plan
on using them commercially such as Flight Recorder and Mission Control.

------
mikehc
I guess the best way to be absolutely sure you don't break the license is to
uninstall Java.

------
chris_wot
I guess I'd like to know what features are used that activate the licensing
conditions? i.e. the specific software or libraries that are part of Java SE
Advanced & Suite

I have to say that I'm entirely unsurprised though. Oracle has been doing this
across their database space for many years: they are kings of the dodgy
shakedown. Anyone who decides to go with Oracle on any new venture or as part
of any new development are absolutely insane to do so...

I'm genuinely waiting (or at least, I _was_ waiting before Trump was voted in
as President) for the U.S. Government to litigate against Oracle.

------
mbreese
Is there a word for being simultaneously shocked and not shocked at the same
time?

~~~
yegle
Mildly shocked?
[http://m.imgur.com/gallery/KR93TA2](http://m.imgur.com/gallery/KR93TA2)

------
_Codemonkeyism
Sadly the article is thin on facts and the article writer confused. Questions
coming to mind:

1\. Is this only Windows? OS X?

2\. Which download is this in particular?

3\. What if applications like IntelliJ Idea bring their own JDK?

------
itazula
Probably a naive question, but where does this put open source projects that
use Java? Tomcat springs to mind ...

~~~
loeg
OpenJDK is fine.

------
DoctorNick
Java cannot die soon enough.

~~~
bitmapbrother
Java isn't going anywhere. C#, though, does seem to be dying.

~~~
donatj
I have literally no idea what would lead you to that conclusion. C# has been
growing by leaps and bounds.

~~~
quantumhobbit
It depends where you are. My company switched to Java from C# because the
right executives heard about open source. If you ask most managers around here
C# might as well be COBOL and Java is a brand new language( certainly not
something from the 90's originally intended for cable box menus).

So there are certainly bubbles where C# is dying if only for stupid reasons.

~~~
BoorishBears
What a strange time to switch to java, with MS acquiring Xamarin and dotnet
core

~~~
satysin
AFAIK .NET Core offers nothing of any value for cross-platform GUI though.
There is Xamarin.Forms but last I looked at things it was pretty shit compared
to Java's offerings.

~~~
BoorishBears
Xamarin.Forms isn't really equivalent to any (commonly used) Java options.
Something like GTK# or WinForms+Monk would. There's also Eto and Avalon "in
the pipeline" so to speak.

To me neither Java nor C# does well at WORA UIs but they are at parity imo.
JavaFx isn't bad, but it doesn't do anything the C# offerings can't do fairly
easily.

I'm actually a fan of Qt for true cross-platform apps these days myself

~~~
satysin
Agreed on Qt.

------
oceante
This entire article is bullshit clickbait designed to appeal to select
baseless biases.

It offers no meaningful content except for this single sentence:

"The Register has learned of one customer in retail with 80,000 PCs which was
informed by Oracle it was in breach on Java."

There are no further details about why this customer was "targeted" or the
nature of their licensing deal with Oracle.

I would think after all these years people would know that (a) the Register is
a well-known source of fake news/clickbait/misleading headlines (b) Java is
open-source (full-stop) and wholly free software and (c) products like "Java
SE Advanced Suite" have nothing to do with the Java language or the JDK.
(Though I can see why (c) would be confusing, though Sun started this product
of calling everything Java XXX (tm).)

It's a shame that such an article gets written to feed advertisers useless
clicks but it's really disappointing to see it on the hacker news front page.

~~~
drvdevd
Yeah I'm not in love with Java, but let's also not forget that Google has
successfully extracted Java from Oracle's hands at this point, to a billion-
or-so installation extent.

~~~
owaislone
By essentially re-implementing Java. That doesn't apply to the rest of the
world.

~~~
VonGuard
And Oracle sued over that. Still is suing over that. The suit threatens all of
software by declaring APIs exempt from fair use.

~~~
BoorishBears
It's not like Google didn't do anything wrong, the fragmentation created by
dividing Java into Java, and "Android Java", is damaging

~~~
drvdevd
One could argue that the Java ecosystem was already pretty fragmented and
weird anyway: Java Card, Java in the browser, all the many versions of the JVM
on every platform, and open source JVM "forks"... right?

~~~
BoorishBears
Sure, but then Google went and added another billion plus installations of a
new fork that only shares very superficial ties with normal Java (in reference
to Dalvik, which has been replaced but still defines the _intentions_ Google
had as far as staying compatible).

And to add insult to injury, they've gone and fragmented Java on that platform
too.

Right now on Android you can have:

Java "6.5" hybrid, Java 6 with some Java 7 features

(Overwhelming majority of developers are stuck with this, and this is where an
Android project defaults to.)

Java 6 with some Java 7 and 8 features but no Java 8 APIs

(Retrolambda)

Java 8 without the proper Java 8 APIs, but breaking several popular tools for
Android development

(Jack + Devices not on Android N)

Java 8 with proper Java 8 APIs, but breaking several popular tools for Android
development

(Jack + Devices on Android N)

I've always felt that Oracle _should_ have some legal recourse for what Google
did. It honestly doesn't feel that different than what Microsoft did with
Visual J++ and we saw how that went down. It's a shame it's come down to the
case for copyrighting APIs instead of the case for punishing Google for subtly
breaking Java's maturity on their platform while benefiting from calling it
"Java".

