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Comment by ivolimmen | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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.

> 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.

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 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.

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