Do I need to pay for Java now?

Unfortunately, the conclusions that the article draws in "What does the new release train mean to my company?" are wrong.

Starting with Java 11, Oracle JDK is no longer free for commercial use, not even for a single day. However, as long as people are OK with GPL v2 + Classpath Exception (which is more permissive than it sounds) and don't need support from Oracle, they can just move to OpenJDK, which is built from the exact same codebase.

Shoutout to https://adoptopenjdk.net, which plans to provide LTS releases of OpenJDK. I believe this will be crucial for a healthy Java ecosystem.

“You might ask why Oracle changes the releases of Java in such an big way.”

Nobody who had to deal with Oracle in the past will ask this.