Commentary on Oracle’s license: An offer you can’t refuse

It is certainly nothing new to many that Oracle’s licensing policy is not exactly user-oriented. House of Brick is an international service provider that advises companies on various Oracle licensing models. The fact that there is a business model for this says a lot about it. This same company has now published information that an increasing number of customers are seeking advice in the area of ​​Java licensing. These companies have apparently been contacted by Oracle because they do not use Java SE in compliance and are required to enter into a license agreement with Oracle.

Advertisement

Three questions and answers: Are coding assistants now replacing programmers?

Hendrik Ebers is a Java Champion, member of the JCP Expert Group and has been recognized several times as a rockstar speaker at JavaOne. With his own company Open Elements, Hendrik is currently helping to design the Hedera Hashgraph and make its services available to the public. As a software architect, consultant and trainer at Embark Software Consulting GmbH, Falk Sippach is always looking for that spark of passion that he can ignite in his participants, clients and colleagues. He has been supporting mostly agile software development projects in the Java environment for over 15 years.

But first things first: why is such a contract needed and how did Oracle get information about these companies?

Screw on the license model

In April 2019, Oracle introduced two new licensing models for the use of Oracle JDK (their commercial Java distribution). Thus the previously free distribution became subject to a fee. With the release of Java 20, the license model was adjusted again. Oracle said it is introducing a “simple, affordable, monthly” Java SE Universal subscription. In this new model, users of Oracle’s Java distribution must pay a license fee per company employee. Management consulting Gartner Estimates Last year, the new licensing model would be two to five times more expensive per employee than the previous one.

Based on this new licensing model, Oracle is now “shocking” companies into concluding as many license agreements as possible. According to House of Brick, Oracle has deployed an entire team of employees in India who contact organizations around the world. They have collected company information over the past few months by tracking downloads of their own Java distributions. Companies that have never worked with Oracle are often overwhelmed by this sudden contact and turn to House of Brick for help. According to its CEO, Oracle is making these “new customers” an offer they can’t refuse: if these companies take out a straight subscription model, there will be no consequences for past use of unlicensed software. This basically means that a company has to make a decision: enter into a contract with Oracle or accept the risk that a court will force them to pay additional fees for such a subscription.

So much for the facts, which also include register or in House of Bricks Blog You can read more about this. But does this mean that the use of Java will be tied to Oracle’s subscription model in the future? Not at all and below we would like to offer our personal view of things. We are very concerned about recent developments regarding licensing practices for Oracle’s commercial Java distribution. This approach could shed a lasting negative light on the Java programming language and its runtime environment. Although most developers understand that this is simply a distribution of Java provided by Oracle, managers and decision makers often do not have this deeper insight. Instead of making money with Java, Oracle’s strategy could, in the worst case, lead companies to abandon Java altogether in the future.

Insist on naming rights

This story also shows how desperate Oracle is to make money from Java. With the acquisition of Sun Microsystems in 2009, they acquired Java and now they are the largest contributor to OpenJDK. Oracle also owns the naming rights to OpenJDK and Java. Based on current events, we now wonder what Oracle will try next if current attempts fail to achieve enough success. We strongly believe that this approach will prevent them from concluding a perpetual license agreement for Java that makes sense from a customer perspective. And maybe some manager at Oracle will decide to cut funding for OpenJDK. This will be something that will affect the entire Java community. The example of JavaScript shows how Oracle, as the owner of the trademark, insists on their trademark rights even though they do not perform any development activities in this language.

And no, we have no problem with Oracle making money from OpenJDK, Java, or commercial Java distributions. But we question whether this approach is truly healthy and sustainable for the product and the community. That’s why we want Oracle to ensure transparency and fairness in its licensing processes. Companies that use Oracle’s Java distribution should be clearly informed about the licensing requirements before switching to a paid model.

Lots of good options

For all decision makers: There are many high-quality and free open source alternatives to Oracle’s commercial Java distribution, such as Temurin from Eclipse Adoptium, Corretto from Amazon and others. These alternatives offer the same features and long-term support without commercial license fees. Responsible people can use the support and resources of the Java community and access to experts in this field (for example) Open Element) Try again.

For example, Adoptium aims to develop and distribute certified Java builds suitable for all types of applications without additional license fees. Since all of Adoptium’s work is done at the Eclipse Foundation, Temurin is not only vendor independent, but also significantly more transparent in development and deployment than most other distributions. Companies should therefore consider migrating to Temurin. This not only leads to huge cost savings. In the field of security, transparent processes and audits provide a clear picture of the runtime environment used. Temurin recently underwent a security audit and results made public,

(RME)