• AutoTL;DRB
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    610 months ago

    This is the best summary I could come up with:


    Oracle has started to dispatch Java audit letters to Fortune 200 companies for the first time, according to one licensing expert.

    But industry experts have pointed out that businesses with limited Java use would have to license the software per employee under the latest model, a dramatic shift from the one previously offered by Oracle.

    But that has changed in recent months, according to Craig Guarente, founder and CEO of Palisade Compliance, an independent Oracle licensing advisory company.

    Guarente was speaking on a webinar hosted by Azul, which helps organizations move away from Oracle Java to open source alternatives.

    In February 2023, Gartner warned that Oracle “actively targets organizations” on Java compliance following the introduction of new contractual terms for the code.

    In July last year, The Register revealed Oracle was sending unsolicited emails to businesses offering to discuss Java subscription deals, seemingly in an effort to extract information that could be to its benefit in future license negotiations.


    The original article contains 555 words, the summary contains 159 words. Saved 71%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!

  • @[email protected]
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    10 months ago

    Lol brb gonna share this with the CFO and watch them go into a panic. Going to bet they’ll freak out and by the end of 2024, no more Java for us.

    This is the golden ticket I’ve been waiting for.

      • Ethan
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        4610 months ago

        Obviously OpenJDK is superior to dealing with Oracle’s bull. But even more superior (IMO) is simply not using Java. My life has been noticeably more pleasant since I started refusing to touch Java.

          • @[email protected]
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            3310 months ago

            Java has a lot of advantages, but that’s a crazy statement. I feel like literally everyone complains about basic stuff like public static void main, over reliance on factories and OOP, and just how much code you need to generate for some basic stuff. I’m not a Java hater, but I am glad I don’t have to use it anymore.

            • @[email protected]
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              710 months ago

              What’s the issue with public static main?

              And whats the issue with factories? Factories are a design pattern thats not specific to Java, I’d recommend you read the design patterns book and understand why they exist. I also have 0 factory useage stuck in my mind and I have been developing with java since 2016.

              OOP? It’s an OO language ffs, that’s like complaining that C isn’t OO. If you don’t want to use an OO language don’t use one.

              how much code you need to generate for some basic stuff

              Do you mean verbosity because thats only a complaint for people who dont need to maintain stuff long term. Or maybe you misused java for doing something simple where python would have sufficed.

              And then there is the springboot framework that makes shit trivial

              • @[email protected]
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                110 months ago

                So a lot of Java hate I think is mostly in jest.

                Personally, Java was the programming language that I had to use for my first two years of college. It’s how I learned OOP, data structures, and algorithms. I had to use Eclipse, which at the time was AWFUL (and maybe still is, no idea). I remember it being semi-normal for it to take over a minute to launch on my (gaming) PC.

                Later on, as I learned other languages and got a job, I just haven’t really had a reason to go back to Java, and most of my memories of it are from being annoyed at Eclipse and needing to implement Quicksort in it. I’m sure it’s a great language and I bet it’s a lot better and more convenient now. It’s just kinda trendy and weirdly nostalgic to hate on it in a half-serious way :) .

          • Echo Dot
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            10 months ago

            People complain about Java being weird all the time. The reason people complain about it is because they use it all the time and things about it annoy them.

            Pretty much everyone who uses any programming language has stuff they don’t like about it and we’ll complain about it from time to time. A lot of this stuff never really gets fixed, because updating languages is problematic, see mysqli_real_escape_string.

            • Phoenixz
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              110 months ago

              I don’t want to be that guy, but that PHP function call at the end that you said never really gets fixed… I haven’t used that in 20 years of PHP, and I’m pretty sure that hasn’t existed since like 10-15 years ago. People seem to love to hate php because 20 years ago it did something not quite right.

          • @[email protected]
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            510 months ago

            Being good has nothing to do with having to maintain your company’s code base that’s in Oracle’s Java SE 1.6.

            You can’t just design your way out of a conflict whose solution is to change either the existing system architecture or change Java versions,

            both suggestions will get you laughed out of the room.

        • @[email protected]
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          10 months ago

          Did you stop programming altogether? /s

          I think you can potentially get stuck with worse when you stop Java.

          • Ethan
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            210 months ago

            Sure, there are worse languages and environments to get stuck with. But I can avoid those jobs. And if I get hired as a SomeLang developer and they force me to work in Java or whatever, it’s time to dust off the resume.

          • Ethan
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            710 months ago

            I am aware of that, but Java is the most popular language that runs on the JVM. I don’t specifically dislike other JVM languages, though one of my issues is type erasure and that’s partially a limitation of the JVM.

            • @[email protected]
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              210 months ago

              Kotlin is becoming very popular.In like 10 years of Java development I ran into type erasure like once…

              Project Valhalla should help with it though (when it finally lands). And kotlin/other jvm languages will benefit as well.

            • @[email protected]
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              110 months ago

              There are solutions to it. For example in Scala I’ve had to use Class tags a couple of times before and they were ergonomic and functioned well

  • @[email protected]
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    12610 months ago

    It feels like actual innovation in all sectors has slowed to a crawl, and corporations – especially the ones run by MBA parasites – are concentrating more and more on just squeezing money out of people with various bullshit tactics, while at the same time thinning their workforce (naturally the MBAs are never under threat, though)

    • @[email protected]
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      6610 months ago

      Oracle was never really innovative on a technical level , it’s first and foremost a company focused on selling licenses, and they’re really innovative in that regard but if you fall for that as a company, I have no pity, this is their whole schtick.

      Big companies in general are often rather conservative in nature while innovation happens on smaller scale and later expands.

      The big problem is rather that a lot of innovation has been absorbed by the big companies via buyouts, especially when money was cheap to borrow. Innovation bears risk, buying an established solution and milking existing users much less so.

      I don’t think the users are without blame. A lot of people ignore the red flags when a solution is just convenient enough (we need the commercial support / this exactly covers our use case so we don’t have to hire someone to adapt it / …) and the vendor then cashes out when moving away from his solution would be really expensive.

      I think there’s still a lot of innovation lately, but a lot people are just looking for the next big thing that does everything it feels like.

        • @[email protected]
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          510 months ago

          Alright, not that I wrote or implied that anywhere… In fact Java was probably the whole reason Oracle bought Sun to gain leverage over Android. Which fits very much into what I wrote - one company innovates, another one buys them to squeeze users (Google wasn’t a customer of Sun, they used their own implementation which wasn’t exactly Java but also not exactly anything else). Just that Sun by all means wasn’t a small company, I mean they controlled almost a full stack with their own processors (SPARC), workstations and servers (Blade was somewhat famous), an operating system with Solaris (and if you want to count it even JavaOS) and Java on top of those, and they contributed a lot of technology like NFS, ZFS (license discussions aside). On the other hand, when they bought someone, the product wasn’t just milked to death, but actually integrated into their stack and continued to be developed in the open.

          Shame it turned out that way, I guess Sun was a bit overleveraged with how much they did vs. how much they made from it. And to think that Oracle paid less than a fifth than what Twitter sold for later for all of that technology to go to waste, just for a chance to sue Google… But we long as suits continue to license their stuff because they have cool advertisements at airports, this will keep going.

      • NostraDavid
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        210 months ago

        Oracle was never really innovative on a technical level

        Even their RDBMS and SQL was copied from ideas that came from IBM. And I recall either E. F. Codd or one of the SQL guys making a remark about Oracle’s less-than-saviour sales tactics, even back in the 90s.

      • @[email protected]
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        1010 months ago

        The big problem is rather that a lot of innovation has been absorbed by the big companies via buyouts

        Which ultimately does seem to lead to innovation slowing down. The big players buy out any potential smaller competitors, and very often just outright kill the products / services they inherited in the acquisition.

      • @[email protected]
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        10 months ago

        I was a developer at Oracle. We got handed down sales goals. ??? It was a running joke in our org that oracle is a sales company and we just scramble to make what they’re selling. When I left half our org had been laid off or left. Only got two raises in the 5 years I was there. Not worth.

    • circuitfarmer
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      410 months ago

      corporations – especially the ones run by MBA parasites

      Is that not all of them right now?

    • @[email protected]
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      1710 months ago

      We’re at the end-times for western capitalism, where rent-seeking has become the primary driver of markets. It’s happening all around us.

      • @[email protected]
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        1210 months ago

        My employer has a pretty large presence in AWS. We finished migrating to Amazon’s Corretto (based on openjdk) months ago. It was pretty painless given we already use Amazon’s Linux distros.

        • @[email protected]
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          710 months ago

          What could possibly go wrong with locking yourself into an environment owned by Amazon, or Google or Microsoft?

          • Kogasa
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            10 months ago

            What’s the lockin? Is it really harder than just swapping the jdk path to switch between Coretto and OpenJDK? I understand Coretto being preferable for performance and security patches but I don’t imagine it’s that big of a deal if one eventually had to switch

      • @[email protected]
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        10 months ago

        Ever since I looked up “java download” and had to go through the horrible process on the Oracle site, I decided that they didn’t want me to download Java so I should avoid it, and that has always proved to be a good decision

        • Baldur Nil
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          210 months ago

          As much as I do like programming in Java, you have a good point.

    • @[email protected]
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      1410 months ago

      So here’s the thing. This year I fell in love wih clojure, it’s an absolute pleasure to program in. It’s also a hosted language that runs on java (primarily) or javascript (or a bunch of marginalized things). And honestly, I feel like I can make the java backend run more resource-effecient than the JS one.

      • Arghblarg
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        1510 months ago

        No, I know that – I honestly want them both to die :p

        Both have been a blight on software development for decades.

        • @[email protected]
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          1410 months ago

          I don’t have a problem with Java, and you can get Oracle free versions of Java.

          JavaScript on the other hand is a blight as you say.

          • Kogasa
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            210 months ago

            You can get blight free versions of JavaScript too, if you use TypeScript.

      • @[email protected]
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        10 months ago

        Yeah, for a short time there the word ‘java’ was very ‘in’. Marketing hipsters at the time wanted to use it in everything, just like the word ‘AI’ now.

      • @[email protected]
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        310 months ago

        ECMA by Ecma?

        Ahh, needed Wiki:

        It acquired its current name in 1994, when the European Computer Manufacturers Association (ECMA) changed its name to reflect the organization’s global reach and activities. As a consequence, the name is no longer considered an acronym and no longer uses full capitalization.

    • qaz
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      110 months ago

      OpenJDK misses some parts that are in the Oracle JVM

      • @[email protected]
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        410 months ago

        OpenJDK is the reference implementation now. Biggest differences I’ve seen are in the default list of trusted CAs.

        • qaz
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          110 months ago

          What about JavaFX? It’s included in the Oracle JVM but not in the others afaik.

          • @[email protected]
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            310 months ago

            JavaFX was removed from the main Java spec in Java 11. Even the Oracle Java distribution. It’s a separate project now and is pretty easy to include as as jar if needed. In fact there are non-Oracle builds of the JVM that do add it (there are Zulu builds that put it back in). Because Java is now GPL. Anyone can create a build and include what they want.

    • Echo Dot
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      2010 months ago

      I’m actually not that shocked. Corporations make weird corporate decisions all the time because they feel as if they’re getting the more professional version or something. They tend to view open source projects as either unprofessional or in some complicated way, actually illegal. Like it’ll turn out that open source isn’t allowed after all.

      This is what happens when lawyers who don’t actually know what they’re talking about make recommendations. They don’t know, so they always advise caution. Also they genuinely don’t seem to know the difference between pirated software and open source.

      • @[email protected]
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        1010 months ago

        I’m currently involved in a legal case in which I produced audio recordings. I was questioned intensely by the other sides lawyer about the modified date on windows.

        I kept asking him to clarify what he meant by modified until he said “I don’t know”.

        Like. Ffs.

      • @[email protected]
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        1310 months ago

        The reason corporation are like that is because the responsibility is with the employee the decided to use the open source tool, when there is another company backing a product, there is someone to hold accountable. Also, there is a support number if shit hits the fan, and guarantee of support long term if the supplier is financial healthy.

  • @[email protected]
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    10 months ago

    Oracle quoted us 30K because a small handful of our users needed to use a .jnlp application a couple times per year. It took me a couple of days but I got it working with Corretto and a program called OpenWebStart.

  • @[email protected]
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    12710 months ago

    Oracle is a law firm with a large IT department.

    They’ve been giving us shit because they “see downloads from our IP addresses”. It’s an absolute shake-down operation. They let anybody download their poisoned jvm for free and then tell your company that they now owe them a fortune.

      • @[email protected]
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        1910 months ago

        We’d love to but we do have some legitimate needs for it since Oracle software requires their jvm. It’s a massive pain in the ass.

          • @[email protected]
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            1410 months ago

            You didn’t seem to understand. Oracle only supports their own jvm when running their software that uses Java (e.g. weblogic).

            • @[email protected]
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              210 months ago

              I know it may not be an easy question to answer, but does your company really owe them money? I’m guessing that their other software that uses their JVM also has a license, so they should be more clear about the company having to license out the JVM in order to use it. This sounds like a scam that comes packaged along with some other software.

              • @[email protected]
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                610 months ago

                Oh - sorry, Oracle offers a free “entitlement” to use the JVM when used with their software if it’s required. We don’t pay extra for the Oracle JVM.

            • 0^2
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              10 months ago

              Sorry forgot about support.

              • @[email protected]
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                310 months ago

                It’s not about functionality. When you’re paying for licensing and support you need to use supported versions of things. If you call up about an issue with the database and you’re running an unsupported os or Java version they hang up on you.

                • 0^2
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                  110 months ago

                  Sorry forgot about support. You are right.

    • JackbyDev
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      110 months ago

      What’s hilarious is that the AdoptOpenJDK project (now called Adoptium) managed to create a better UI than Oracle ever had for downloads.

    • Rose
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      410 months ago

      As it says on AdoptOpenJDK page, the project has rebranded to Adoptium.

      I use Adoptium on Windows (dunno, seems to run Minecraft, OK, that’s good enough for me). On Linux I just use whatever OpenJDK is packaged in distro.

    • Echo Dot
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      610 months ago

      Fairly sure that in that case it would actually be more cost effective to just rewrite the application.