UK Universities Sign $13.3 Million Deal To Avoid Oracle Java Back Fees (theregister.com)
- Reference: 0178041859
- News link: https://developers.slashdot.org/story/25/06/13/2034219/uk-universities-sign-133-million-deal-to-avoid-oracle-java-back-fees
- Source link: https://www.theregister.com/2025/06/13/jisc_java_oracle/
> UK universities and colleges have signed a framework worth up to 9.86 million pounds ($13.33 million) with Oracle to use its controversial Java SE Universal Subscription model, in [1]exchange for a "waiver of historic fees due for any institutions who have used Oracle Java since 2023 ." Jisc, a membership organization that runs procurement for higher and further education establishments in the UK, said it had signed an agreement to purchase the new subscription licenses after consultation with members. In a procurement notice, it said institutions that use Oracle Java SE are required to purchase subscriptions. "The agreement includes the waiver of historic fees due for any institutions who have used Oracle Java since 2023," the [2]notice said .
>
> The Java SE Universal Subscription was introduced in January 2023 to an outcry from licensing experts and analysts. It moved licensing of Java from a per-user basis to a per-employee basis. At the time, Oracle said it was "a simple, low-cost monthly subscription that includes Java SE Licensing and Support for use on Desktops, Servers or Cloud deployments." However, licensing advisors said early calculations to help some clients showed that the revamp might increase costs by up to ten times. Later, analysis from Gartner found the per-employee subscription model to be two to five times more expensive than the legacy model.
>
> "For large organizations, we expect the increase to be two to five times, depending on the number of employees an organization has," Nitish Tyagi, principal Gartner analyst, said in July 2024. "Please remember, Oracle defines employees as part-time, full-time, temporary, agents, contractors, as in whosoever supports internal business operations has to be licensed as per the new Java Universal SE Subscription model." Since the introduction of the new Oracle Java licensing model, user organizations have been strongly advised to move off Oracle Java and find open source alternatives for their software development and runtime environments. A survey of Oracle users found that [3]only one in ten was likely to continue to stay with Oracle Java, in part as a result of the licensing changes.
[1] https://www.theregister.com/2025/06/13/jisc_java_oracle/
[2] https://www.find-tender.service.gov.uk/Notice/030963-2025
[3] https://developers.slashdot.org/story/25/01/30/1617210/oracle-faces-java-customer-revolt-after-predatory-pricing-changes
Nice college you have there... (Score:1)
be a shame if something were to happen to it.
O ne
R ich
A sshole
C alled
L arry
E llison
Oracle defines employees as temporary, agents, con (Score:3)
Oracle defines employees as temporary, agents, contractors???? So any working for oracle in any way should sue for full rights as an employee?
Re: (Score:2)
Its this thing that I assume is screwing up the universities. Universities usually have giant pools of people working in various capacities, from admin full timers, to academics, t ground staff, professors, and more often then not a huge number of postgrads not exactly on the payroll but still working on research projects whilst living off scholarships and grants. Even a small university could have upwards of 5000 employees, contractors and postgrads.
I *dont* understand why universities would tolerate this
Re: (Score:2)
I *dont* understand why universities would tolerate this sort of corporate bullying from Oracle, when alternative JVMs and DBMS are *right there*.
I can take a stab at this.
First, it is surprisingly difficult to verifiably eliminate a piece of software from a large environment. We went through this exact exercise a couple years back because we didn't want to pay Oraclegeld. The first 90% is easy. But then you're dealing with Java running on weird devices that are difficult, expensive, or both to replace
PSA: Use OpenJDK...everyone does! (Score:2)
Java is great. Oracle's licensing fiasco is the greatest blunder in the history of computing. Java should be the undisputed king of business computing, but Oracle and Sun's licensing fuck-uppery strongly hindered what is the industry's superior runtime platform.
Use OpenJDK. It's fully compatible and great and will outperform anything you do in Go, Python, C#, or JavaScript. It sucks that Oracle is engaging in this stupidity...but...eh, the world sucks. Your life doesn't have to...use OpenJDK.
This should be a lesson. (Score:5, Insightful)
This should really be a lesson to all the universities to stop using Oracle's products.