With Oracle essentially comiting suicide with the new Java licensing scheme this isn’t surprising.
It’s the best thing that happened to OpenJDK and the much cheaper commercial alternatives based on it.
I can only imagine the celebration at Azul when Oracle announced this nonsense they basically justified the business model of their competitors overnight.
You are very confused (I work at Oracle on OpenJDK):
- OpenJDK is the name of the JDK developed mostly by Oracle, with contributions from other companies and developers[1] (see the logo at the bottom of the OpenJDK website http://openjdk.java.net/)
- For many years, the JDK offered by Oracle (and Sun before it) was OpenJDK + commercial/free but proprietary features.
- Recently, Oracle has made a big move: they've completed open sourcing the JDK, and opened all of the commercial/proprietary features (those that have not been discontinued)[2]
- To fund Java's development (unlike in the case of .NET, iOS or Android, Sun/Oracle have not controlled their platform's billions-making ecosystem) there have been many monetization schemes over the years: licensing Java for mobile/embedded (the JDK used to have field-of-use restrictions), charging for the commercial features in the mixed free/commercial JDK, and even annoying browser toolbars. All of those are gone now that Oracle has open sourced the entire JDK.
- To keep Java competitive and attractive, and under encouragement from the community, Oracle has changed OpenJDK's release cycle to time-based releases, employing "Chrome versioning." There are no longer any major releases (every 3-5 years), and instead, more gradual, small "feature releases" every six months.
- The current monetization mechanism used to fund OpenJDK is a paid subscription model for what's known as Oracle JDK, which is essentially OpenJDK but offers customers the option to have even smaller updates than the new feature releases, that include just security patches and bug fixes, for companies that don't want new Java features. So Oracle offers the same software -- with no hidden commercial features -- under two different licenses.
You will pay as much as $2.50 per user for desktop installations and as much as $25 per core for server installations, the Advanced subscription which also provides you with security updates for older versions of Java is now nearly $7000 per server per year.
Nah, you won’t. For new deployments, you’ll use OpenJDK. For old deployments, you’ll either upgrade your codebase or use an alternative runtime (Amazon, IBM etc). Most of them will be free or cheaper than Oracle’s.
In the past companies had no clue how much of something was installed. These days with cyber security being such a concern any company with tight controls knows exactly what's on every machine. It's not hard to treat Oracle Java like a threat and red flag it during scanning. And if Oracle keeps up these shenanigans I can't help but feel like that's exactly what will happen.
Eh? The entire financial sector runs on Java, this isn’t about milking fees form some random companies because someone installed Java on their laptop this is milking fees form the actual key users of Java.
Microsoft has signed an agreement with Azul for Java on Azure and Amazon has released their own distribution of OpenJDK as a result.
The company I work for also switched to Azul since the projected cost of Oracle was in the 10s of millions due to their Advanced support costs per server.
Just to put things into perspective the projected yearly licensing cost for a single trading platform for us was 21 million dollars for the Oracle Advanced service agreement, I don’t know the exact final figure but apparently Azul was less than 200K for the entire company.
I simply don’t understand how Oracle thought they could get away with these fees.
No, it doesn't. Sure, you'll find a good amount of Java, but it will likely be C++ anywhere that's really latency sensitive. C# is also heavily used for front end GUIs now. F# is growing as well, and the quants (and others) love Python.
In my experience in finance, Java is now legacy. It was a fun experiment and had a good go, but it's now withering away.
Source: 15 years in financial development, mostly hedge funds, across 4 firms, and having interviewed with dozens of others.
Only place I've worked at doing active Java development was a startup CRM SaaS targeting the financial space. Coincidentally, the only Oracle shop ive worked at.
I think you are talking about a small sector of finance (trading, especially HFT?). The lion's share of software in finance is software used by large banks, insurance companies, etc. -- not hedge funds -- where Java is dominant (even in new projects).
I think any amount of fees would trigger movement away from Oracle, and suspect they calculated they were better off going all in to extract the maximum possible value before people switched away.
I don’t think Oracle minds, as long as you pick another JVM rather than moving to a different stack.
What they do mind is that Java stays relevant without costing them a lot of money. By basically offloading support of old versions to others (and/or by getting paid more for that support activity) while they accelerate development speed, they will likely achieve that result.
The alternative is to keep sinking a lot of money in development and marketing efforts, like Sun did; which, in the long term, resulted in slow release cycles and language stagnation, making other stacks more appealing.
This is the runtime binary. Android has always ran Dalvik, which is an alternative runtime implementation that uses some of the same class library interfaces.
It’s the best thing that happened to OpenJDK and the much cheaper commercial alternatives based on it.
I can only imagine the celebration at Azul when Oracle announced this nonsense they basically justified the business model of their competitors overnight.