(director approaches an employee who is staring at Eclipse and looking tired)

(director angrily waves a bill from Oracle) Do you see how much it costs me to have you here? You could at least type faster! Show me your spreadsheet with the coffee you drank this week!

(employee opens up a spreadsheet)

(director) oh gawd dammit that like £20 worth of coffee!!!

(employee) sir, with all respect, if you filter the spreadsheet by owner you'll see that I bought this coffee myself!

(director) and who pays you so you have all that money, huh?

(employee) well...

(director) what? do you have a side hustle?

(employee) about that...

(director) oh lord, I am losing money by even talking to you!

(employee) just... that umm...

(director) YOU ARE FIRED STEVE!

(employee) my name is Derek

(director) DEREK YOU ARE FIRED TOO!

(director makes a mark on the Oracle invoice and mumbles two more losers to go mhmhmhmhmhmhm)

(director) oh gawd dammit that like £20 worth of coffee!!!

Don't forget the tea lady needs a Java licence too. Got to keep Ellison in yachts, they don't pay for themselves.

... not know that they can select from a dozen compatible OpenJDK variants which they can use for free, including continuous updates? And, for some of them, purchase commercial support separately if needed?

"We can't use OpenJDK, because it will make the investors shake and if something unpleasant hits the fan who are we going to blame?"

Yes. That. That's why companies buy windows, or am enterprise Linux. Yes, costs money, but at least you can point fingers.

OpenJDK has enterprise support from IBM

Didn't they support the Nazis during the WWII?

They support yo' mamma.

[1]IBM and World War II

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_and_World_War_II

I recall hearing recently something along the lines of- assuming you'd made the mistake of having signed up with Oracle in the first place- the contract you agreed to states that in the event of switching to another compatible variant, you're still required to pay Oracle their fees regardless.

I also vaguely recall that this clause was indefinite(?)

(Perhaps someone else can clarify and/or correct this if it's wrong).

Sounds similar to a contract where you sign off your soul to Satan...

There is a difference?

At least with Satan, you get what you pay for.

you're still required to pay Oracle their fees regardless

I *very* much doubt whether (if it exists) it would pass any competent legal challenge..

I had my suspicions on that count too, but let's bear in mind that you'd likely have to put the effort (and quite possibly a lot of money) even taking it to court to get them to agree with that, if they did.

Something I suspect Oracle (and countless other manufacturers' unenforceable contracts) rely upon.

Then there's also Oracle's modus operandi of having licensing that's opaque and convoluted enough that there's always some other missed infringement they can catch you out with if you piss them off and they decide (coincidentally, cough) that they fancy auditing you. (Whether that's actually the case or not doesn't really matter so long as the customer isn't clear, and I get the impression their sales people use that as a barely-veiled threat often enough).

insert shocked.gif meme here

"even predatory for Oracle"

Harsh. (not saying it's far off the mark)

Agreed. This IS NOT NEW(S)...

I'm just surprised that it has taken them so long to get around to doing this to Java.

For whom the bell tolls, Java, your grave awaits thee.

The death knell for Java in the enterprise even if you don't use an Oracle version.

If the likes of IBM were smart, they'd advertise the hell out of the fact that they have their own version of Java but they won't.

Those companies should use Java from a different vendor than Oracle. Problem solved.

This is the same Oracle as the one that “just put ZFS into the Linux Kernel” people think would not mind...

Just pointing that out.

It's the same sort of scam where Oracle demands you license the Oracle DB across *all* cores of a VCenter deployment, even if it will only run on a single set of 4 cores no matter what. Oh, you have another VCenter also running v7.0, so you can move VMs between VCenter instances using VMotion? I think you'll need to license that cluster as well. Oh wait, you don't have that setup, doesn't matter, you *might* have it setup and we can't have that.

And this is for a piece of software which is developed on Postgresql and is a supported DB by the vendor. But since our DBAs only know Oracle... we go through this shit all the time.

This is why Oracle is going the way of the mainframe and min-computer vendors, they're going to get eaten alive from the bottom end.

You mean this, right ? https://jhdba.wordpress.com/2019/06/17/oracle-car-parking/

Of course, this is the same happening again. Following this, some time ago, I have yet to meet any company that will view Oracle DB as anything but expensive legacy we do everything to get rid of.

The AS400 of the DB. And no, I really don't think having Oracle DBAs is any excuse to even favour Oracle DB anymore.

Right now, people should really f***k off Java right away !

I hope this will start a stampede towards .NET and C#. Oracle's predatory practices have been well documented for decades. Oracle's mantra is: "We make a boatload of money from it or we kill it!"

I suppose they've come to the conclusion they can empty their customers' pockets and they'll accept it, albeit with grinding teeth.

Well, you've convinced me (walks to edge of frying pan, holds breath, closes eyes and jumps). This is going to be great! What can possibly go wrong?

Well, they'll change its name every 5 minutes for a start. :-) Then there's the bits that don't work yet.. VS2022 SSIS for example. And then there was that bug in. NET 4.5 that nearly royally shafted me and they still haven't fixed it. Who knew if you used a system font on IIS and sent stuff to a print server, it would render (just) the numbers in some weird shit typeface? E. G. Times New Roman words then 20 in weird sans serif bold crap then back to Times New Roman.

That'll be trading a devil for an imp, not much of an improvement and the imp has dreams of being a devil herself one day.

On a more serious note, .Net isn't as flexible as Java (though it does need a lot less boilerplate). In fact there's no official desktop GUI toolkit for Linux. They will try to force you into using their other properties, esp. if you are on a platform that they believe has the potential to compete with them. Windows is the primary OS, Microsoft SQL is the primary database, Azure is the primary cloud, anything else you'll have to do it yourself. Oh, as demonstrated with their attempt to pull features from the 'open source' version, reserving it for Visual Studio, they are not above sabotaging .Net if they think it might give them a commercial advantage.

Java, ever since Oracle took ownership, has been a disaster in waiting, if not in practice.

.Net isn't your savior, it's just another commercial enterprise trying to bait the trap with open source goodies.

If you are deep into Java, then switch to a true open source version, as others have mentioned, there are commercial entities that will provide support, for a price if you are nervous.

If you want to truly be free, take this opportunity to switch to a truly open language. There are plenty to choose from and more cropping up every day; JavaScript, Python, PHP, C, C++, FORTRAN, Rust, etc. etc.

Figures. Just as we are finally getting Haitian Bleu here again, the price is going up! Oh, wait. You mean the programming language. Whew! That's a relief. For a minute I thought it was something important.