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svrma | 5 years ago

How does Java pricing work these days (after being bought by Oracle)?

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pjmlp|5 years ago

After being rescued by Oracle, after all no one else wanted to buy Sun, not even Google (hoping it would just sink most likely).

Java is as open source and still has multiple implementations available, even Microsoft is now a Java vendor (after having bought jClarity).

Basically you want free beer like Linux? Get a distribution from OpenJDK.

You want support Red-Hat/SuSE style? There is Oracle, and a plenty of other vendors happy to sell JDKs with support.

macspoofing|5 years ago

>After being rescued by Oracle

Java was not rescued by Oracle. There was never any danger of Java going away or not having a proper sponsor. If anything was 'rescued', it was the SPARC/Solaris division of Sun.

pwdisswordfish5|5 years ago

> Basically you want free beer like Linux? Get a distribution from OpenJDK.

After the Oracle lawsuit, why should people feel safe believing that Oracle will respect the terms of the license instead of trying to extract more money and subject you to a costly lawsuit?

krisgenre|5 years ago

AFAIK IBM did want to buy Sun but backed out because of potential antitrust reviews.

skizm|5 years ago

Every seems to be being snarky, but on the off chance you care about the actual pricing, and assuming you're talking about Oracle's JDK and not OpenJDK: Oracle's JDK is free to use. You can pay for support if you want, which gives you the bleeding edge security patches immediately (without support you can upgrade every six months to get the all patches). The pricing for support is calculated by CPU core count I believe. So if you're using Java in production on 100 cores, that's going to be more expensive than 10. I don't have the specific numbers off the top of my head though.

andylynch|5 years ago

It's worth pointing out that with Oracle's new Java licensing model whether something is free on charge depends on a number of things including how Oracle thinks it's being deployed.

The Oracle JDK is indeed free of charge for developing aplications, but running that app using Oracle Java on a server as opposed to a desktop needs a paid license subscription & generates exposure to Oracle license audits.

Many, many firms are now using OpenJDK and the like, and have policies against even downloading Oracle's version.

svrma|5 years ago

I was not trying be to snarky. I was genuinely curious to know how it is priced after the oracle acquisition. As a language that I am most used to, I wanted to evaluate how much it'd cost (a rough estimate based on cores/users) if I were to launch a web service based on Java.

Tomte|5 years ago

You can use OpenJDK (via adoptopenjdk, Redhat or many others) and it's free.

Or you pay Oracle for support. Or some other company.

Oracle isn't special.

coldtea|5 years ago

Well, on the other hand OpenJDK is 99% Oracle's work repackaged.

If Oracle decided to stop putting out new FOSS-licenced versions, there would be no new OpenJDK releases (since all the core Java devs are Oracle employees).

So it's like a no-community project, where you get a dump of FOSS code every now and then from a vendor.

exabrial|5 years ago

Free forever. It's open source.