Hacker News Reader

Comment by isodev | Hacker News Reader

It’s always nice to see full-stack, batteries included frameworks. However, whenever I see Java, I can’t help but think about Oracle and it turns into a very unpleasant feeling.

View on HN

As a professional developer that only works on Java I hated the fact that Oracle bought Sun. I was rooting for IBM or Google. If you use the Oracle JDK; yes you MIGHT need to pay money depending on what you use of it. There are around 10 (?) different providers of Java Software Developer Kits available all the others are free. I know no Java developer that actually uses the one from Oracle; and since I am a consultant that works on contract bases at different companies I have spoken quite a few of them.

The issue with Oracle JDK is you _have_ to pay even if you don't use it. If there's just one person in the company using Oracle JDK they bill you for the entire company headcount.

Earlier licensing practices were not much better; my company did a 'hard purge' a few years ago and everything using Oracle JDK+RDBMS is now running on OpenJDK with a PostgreSQL backend.

Don't know what rooting for Google and/or IBM would help. All companies that size do have their shady side and will sometimes do questionable things. They didn't get to be so big just by being nice...

Why would you need Oracle JDK specifically? There are so many reliable JDK builds by other parties. https://sdkman.io/jdks

I'm personally using Amazon Corretto (is in the SKDMan link)

OpenJDK is still Oracle anyway.

Android Java proves how much Google cares about Java after screwing up Sun.

Given how much everyone around here likes to hate on IBM, while not even being aware of how OpenJ9 works, the alternative implementations for IBM mainframe and micro computers and so forth, it would hardly make a difference versus Oracle.

Sun, Oracle and IBM were the main triumvirate pushing Java into the market.

Every Java developer that uses OpenJDK or a distribution based on it, uses Oracle code.

It is about 80% of Oracle employes that put in the effort since Java 6 to bring the ecosystem forward.

This assumes things would have turned out better under a different company. Perhaps Google being Google would have cancelled the project altogether or made it Android only. IBM could have sold it off.

Whilst Oracle does have its issues what is it doing wrong here? As per other comments you don't have to use Oracle's JDK and if you do you're buying support.

> There are around 10 (?) different providers of Java Software Developer Kits available all the others are free. I know no Java developer that actually uses the one from Oracle

They're all from Oracle, even the ones you download from an Amazon website. Those providers merely build and package OpenJDK (which is the name of Oracle's implementation of Java). What you mean is that they're not using the distribution provided to Oracle support subscribers.

There are many other vendors who offer JDK. We have been using Amazon Corretto JDK in production pretty much since the launch. Didn't face any issues.

I don’t quite understand these comments.

Oracle seems to be this big, complicated enterprise oriented corporation. But they’re also stewards of Java and had kept the language evolving with impressive stability and compatibility guarantees.

There are definitely firms that I don’t want to rely on for ethical reasons. They accumulated long lists of malpractices and exploitation. One in particular is very popular around here.

What am I missing here?

Are you asking why Oracle is unethical?

Also, is the "One in particular" MS, Goog, or FB? All get as much skepticism/criticism as praise.

I don't necessarily want to bash on a specific company unrelated to the discussion I don't like right now. I just wanted to assert that I personally care when companies do shitty things. And whether people can provide substantiations for the negativity that is spread in some of the comments here.

Oracle saved Java. Sun was letting it rot. I don’t care what anyone else says about Oracle, but the OpenJdk team has done amazing work.

Sun did release their Java implementation under GPL in 2006. There are lots of OpenJDK builds from different companies so you don't have to touch anything 'Oracle' to use Java.

Except the tiny detail that OpenJDK code is mostly written by Oracle anyway.

So are you suggesting to be stuck using Java 6 version?

So a for loop written by those evil Oracle fingers is different than one written by some majestic employee of a virtuous company that saves the World on a weekly basis like a child’s cartoon?

Java is a tool that started long before Oracle acquired Sun, it’s open source and actually more open than most languages due to their governance and other powerful players involved.

The OpenJDK project releases all Java code under a GPL license. You can make use of Java 19 without having any kind of relation with Oracle.

Yeah I’d never touch anything Oracle. Don’t reward horrible behavior. Best thing the industry can do is ignore them as much as possible and let them fade away.

Just like there are different C compilers there are different JDK/JREs.

Do you use MySQL? It's hard to avoid Oracle at this point except by pretending to. They own so many different companies you're likely just not aware you're indirectly supporting them somewhere.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com