
Ask HN: Anyone rewriting Java code due to new license costs? - brij0102
With Oracle’s new terms for commercial Java license, are commercial software being rewritten to another language? Time to bring back C :-)
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kevinherron
Just use OpenJDK, Azul, Corretto, etc...

There's absolutely no reason to pay for Oracle's JDK unless you want Oracle's
support.

It was probably intentional, but Oracle really fucked up the marketing on this
change and as a result a bunch of FUD has been spread throughout the Java
ecosystem.

~~~
nullwasamistake
Oracle really screwed themselves here. Everyone is jumping ship to other JDK
vendors, making them even less likely to pay for Oracle support

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lastofus
Even if there were no free alternatives to Oracle's JDK (there are plenty),
who looks at the cost of engineering time, opportunity costs, and thinks
"yeah, this is way cheaper than paying Oracle"?

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icedchai
It's probably cheaper to just use OpenJDK.

~~~
mywittyname
The past two companies I've worked for are forcing teams to move to OpenJDK
and one was far more diligent about conducting audits for this than they were
for GDPR.

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icedchai
I'm mostly ignoring it, myself. If it becomes a problem I'll switch.

~~~
nullwasamistake
If it becomes a problem it will be too late to not pay Oracle huge fees/fines
for using it against the license. Oracle is known for their license
enforcement, it might even bankrupt your company.

~~~
icedchai
We hardly have any servers and are using an old version of JDK 8 under the old
license. It does not keep me up at night.

~~~
nullwasamistake
In that case you're fine. I would still be wary of people accidentally
updating. We IP blocked Oracle download servers from corporate network lol

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nullwasamistake
Not here, we've migrated to OpenJDK binaries maintained by Red Hat and Azul
(depending on OS). They're still FOSS so it hasn't affected us, yet at least.

I have never seen an issue from switching Java SE->OpenJDK. We did the whole
company in one day without outages. I'm convinced that incompatiblies don't
exist in practice.

~~~
kwhat4
There are some incompatibilities. The com.sun.net packages come to mind.

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astaunton
No need to change to another language, as has been pretty much outlined by
previous posts Java is driven by the changes added to OpenJDK. Even Oracles
commercial binaries use the OpenJDK code repository, compile it and add some
support. Use one of the other vendors (Corretto by Amazon is freely available)

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thedevindevops
I don't actually write in Java but I keep hearing about:
[https://openjdk.java.net/](https://openjdk.java.net/)

~~~
umen
no good at all .. its Red Hat product now , which they can decide to not
support it any more when it not going to meet their business model

~~~
jetti
It's open source, so if Red Hat stops supporting it then others can pick it
up. On top of that, there are 8 other groups that are offering builds which
means you can just switch.

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theandrewbailey
I hardly ever write Java for work anymore, but the situation has inspired me
to start looking into .net for the first time since college. Unfortunately,
the ASP.net ecosystem on Linux is still a bit lacking compared to JavaEE (or
is it JakartaEE yet?).

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muzani
I'm surprised nobody mentioned Kotlin. It's similar but better, simple enough
that reading/writing code is close to pseudocode. Google has moved towards
officially supporting Kotlin instead of Java for Android development.

~~~
mpetkevicius
What do you mean by "instead"? It seems to me they support both languages as
equals (the Android documentation contains examples in both languages) and
have no plans of ditching Java.

~~~
Someone
A month ago ([https://android-developers.googleblog.com/2019/05/google-
io-...](https://android-developers.googleblog.com/2019/05/google-
io-2019-empowering-developers-to-build-experiences-on-Android-Play.html)):

 _”Today we’re announcing another big step: Android development will become
increasingly Kotlin-first. Many new Jetpack APIs and features will be offered
first in Kotlin. If you’re starting a new project, you should write it in
Kotlin”_

“Just use Kotlin” doesn’t help for the licensing issue, though, if you keep
using Oracle’s JVM.

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tmaly
I know of companies that are paying because too much money is on the line.

My good friend is a senior Oracle sales person and he felt like they stabbed
him in the back when they did it. He spent years developing good relationships
and now this.

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sanjamia
Yes. Goodbye, Java. It was a fun ride. Given dead end for iOS and Oracle’s
licensing strategy, I will use compile-to-native languages for all new
projects.

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adl
No need to rewrite anything. There is an excellent summary here:
[https://medium.com/@javachampions/java-is-still-
free-2-0-0-6...](https://medium.com/@javachampions/java-is-still-
free-2-0-0-6b9aa8d6d244)

the tl;dr is that there are multiple OpenJDK vendors now, Oracle just happens
to charge for their JDK distribution, but you can choose from several vendors
(Azul, Red Hat, IBM, AdoptOpenJDK, Amazon Correto, etc)

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umen
Im interested very much in this subject also , what is the future of java . as
java dev for 15 years i don't know what will be with java in about 10 years .

