We are kind of used to the fact that Java is „free“.
It has been free in the sense of „free beer“ pretty much forever.
And more recently also „free“ in the sense of „free speech“.
In spite of the fact that we read that „Oracle is going to monetize on Java“, as can be read in articles like this, it is remaining like that, at least for now. This is also written in the article.
But it seems that they are looking for loopholes. For example we download and install Java SE including X, Y and Z, because it comes like that. Agree to hundred pages of license text and confirm having read and understood everything, as always… Now we really need X, which is the JDK, which is actually free. But we just accidentally also install Y and Z, which we do not need, but which has a price tag on which they are trying to get us.
Even if nothing will really happen, issues like that help undermining the trust in the platform in general, not only for Java, but also for other JVM-languages. Eventually there could be forks like we have seen with LibreOffice vs. OpenOffice or with mariaDB vs. mySQL, which kind of took over by avoiding the ties to Oracle. Solaris seems to have a similar fork, but in this case people are just moving to Linux anyway, so the issue is less relevant.
These prospects are not desirable, but I think we do not have to panic, because there are ways to solve this that are going to be pursued if necessary. Maybe it is a good idea to be more careful when installing software. And to think twice when starting a new project if Oracle or PostgreSQL is the right DB product in the long term, taking into consideration Oracle’s attitude towards loyal long term customers.
It is regrettable. Oracle has great technology from their own history and from SUN in databases, Java including the surrounding universe, Solaris and hardware. Let us hope that they will stay reasonable at least with Java.
