Users advised to review Oracle Java use as Big Red's year end approaches | Hacker News Reader

Users advised to review Oracle Java use as Big Red's year end approaches

theregister.com

8 pointsrntn7 comments

> Oracle introduced a paid subscription for Java in September 2018, and in January 2023 decided to switch its pricing model to per employee rather than per user, creating a steep price hike for customers

So...if you have 1000 employees and 100 developers using Oracle Java you need to spin off those 100 developers into a new company and then hire that company to do your Java development?

Is there a good reason to use Oracle Java other than support or as part of some bigger licensing deal that includes other Oracle products that you are using? My understanding is that there are several other OpenJDK builds that are available as near drop in replacements.

I have no idea. Support is probably important to a lot of companies, but IBM sells support for OpenJDK. A quick search says that IBM's support can be bought per virtual core or per user so unless the per user or per core price is completely ridiculous should have a lot of money for big companies over Oracle's new per employee model.

My guess is we'll find out if there is really a good reason to stick with Java, because surely there were be a few big customers who will try to switch to someone else for support like IBM or will try to switch to some community supported OpenJDK based Java.

Why is literally anyone using Oracle’s paid version of OpenJDK? Like why?

I could understand the paid version of Graal, given it’s paid features are pretty sick.

Praise there are a million free versions of openjdk.

What’s the leading OpenJDK build these days other than Oracle?

I'm not sure about a single leading OpenJDk build. It may depend on your use case, and even then, I suspect that they're all pretty interchangeable unless you have some very niche need.

If you're doing anything on AWS, Amazon's Corretto is a good choice. Probably similar for Azure and Microsoft's offering.

If you're using JetBrains IDEs and don't mind waiting for the major release (11, 17, 21, etc.), then those aren't a bad choice either.

I've used Azul's Zulu plenty for my own projects. One thing they do different is to provide alternate builds for every JDK version with JavaFX packaged directly into the JVM.

It's pretty easy to pick and choose between them and manage multiple versions from multiple vendors simultaneously using SDKMAN.

Having good results w/Azul so far

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