Oracle's Newest Audit Tactic: Focusing on Java

https://www.forbes.com/sites/danwoods/2019/01/31/oracles-newest-audit-tactic-focusing-on-java/#fc0556854960

by Garbage • 7 years ago

131 160 7 years ago

I don't know anyone who buys new softwares from Oracle. Only few large companies are going after Oracle new services and software, mostly because some selfish company executives.

pjmlp13• 7 years ago

I am on the other side, the large majority of our customers ride on SQL Server, Oracle, DB2, SAP and there is hardly any plan to move away from them.

tvbusy• 7 years ago

This is the problem with large company. They always "want" the applications to be "enterprise" level. Even if it's just a report generation tool to automate some simple task, use Oracle because they already have a large team that will take care of the database, why use mySQL and risk unforeseen issues down the road?

I have even seen a super super tool that simply allow user to go through a questionnaire, which a paper print out will more than likely enough and faster, to be implemented as an Oracle database, with the business logic embedded inside the database, and a super thin UI. User will need to know the correct schema name to use though, because they use schemas for versioning, and it's not like 1.0 and 1.1, it's latest_with_iso_compliace, test_only_production_for_customer_A and beta_for_production or similar.

arethuza2• 7 years ago

"I don't know anyone who buys new softwares from Oracle."

I do - I doubt that there are many organisations licensing just the Oracle database these days - I suspect most of their sales are in the ERP/finance areas where there are relatively few competitors.

How many competitors are there for Hyperion FM/Planning?

Edit: Note that I'm definitely not defending Oracle, but the market for their products is quite complex and much wider than a relational database engine.

toyg• 7 years ago

Do I know you? :)

As for competitors to hfm/epm: there are a few (onestream, tagetik, whatever sap is peddling...). But it doesn’t matter, all this thing about auditing will go away when every Oracle customer is forced at gunpoint to move to cloud versions - where they can be squeezed for more money at the touch of a button. Hfm licenses, for example, are basically not sold anymore unless you get special blessing from an Oracle VP; it’s FCCS or nothing.

mhd• 7 years ago

The enterprise sector is full of this. And why wouldn't it? It's basically never-ending circle of highly-paid consultants, in-house employees with very specific skillsets, never mind corporate kickbacks for devs and their managers. Opening this up would ruin your own revenue. No consultant ever got complaints from his successors for choosing IBM.

We look down on what's going on in the pharma industry, but the software world isn't all sunshine and lilies.

jarym• 7 years ago

Having worked there myself before and leaving in disgust this is definitely how it goes down.

Further, I always suspected some kind of dodgy dealing at some clients I’d visit since there’d be an army of their employees who’d be negative about Oracle but always a single big-wig that managed to be super passionate about Oracle.

Of course I never found evidence of anything dodgy - just a number of clients where this was a notable pattern.

raverbashing• 7 years ago

I'm sure some big companies like to make it easier on the higher-ups to accept their products (and the lower class be damned), because that would explain a lot of crap being sold by those "big companies"

It would be very interesting if some evidence came to light in an FCPA filing.

wil421• 7 years ago

I’ve worked at BigCorp(s) and seen similar things but from the other side. Most people absolutely hated oracle from the director who ran the teams to the admins and devs.

The only people who liked Oracle were VP and above. They were so short sighted they signed a deal with Oracle after they drastically cut support costs the first year. They were so shocked in year 2 when costs went north of 1 million. Making Oracle much much more expensive than the competitors who also bid. Everyone knew the competitors were less expensive in the long run and actually good products.

Not to mention the time they were audited and owed big time due to a webservice sending changes to our ERP system.

vb6lives• 7 years ago

I've seen the same.

We were close to finalizing a sale for a huge company before some non-technical exec insisted on using Oracle for the backend. Then it became a huge sticking point. Our cto joked that he must be getting a kickback.

raesene96• 7 years ago

When there are so many software options that don't involve buying from companies that use these kind of tactics, it's difficult to see how this will work out for Oracle in the long term.

Sure in the short-term they'll rinse companies for large amounts of money, but people tend to remember when that's been done to them, and aren't exactly keen to have it happen again.

Whilst I have no direct experience, a quick search indicates that IBM have similar practices. I wonder when/if that'll bleed across into Redhat.

pjmlp13• 7 years ago

Easy, Oracle bashers keep forgetting that Oracle and IBM pay the majority of salaries on OpenJDK developers.

Then again, there are plenty of other JVMs available since the 2000's, and many customers do pay for them.

raesene96• 7 years ago

That's an interesting characterization, that people who don't agree with Oracle's approach to licensing are "Oracle Bashers"?

Do you feel that the surprise audit approach to license compliance is a good one?

wolco2• 7 years ago

If Oracle wasn't involved you wouldn't need to pay as many to get involved

pron24• 7 years ago

Oracle contributes about 90% of development (80% of the issues, and almost all new JEPs). Red Hat contributes ~5%, and IBM only 1%. So the recent Red Hat acquisition improves their position a lot, but before that Oracle and IBM paid for the majority of OpenJDK salaries the same way Bill Gates and I combined have billions of dollars.

* https://blogs.oracle.com/java-platform-group/building-jdk-11...

* https://youtu.be/wHoRBvt3U6o?t=830

threeseed2• 7 years ago

This practice has been going on for decades. And Oracle isn't close to be the only company.

But don't worry you shouldn't feel sympathy for enterprise companies as they are often just as bad as the vendors.

raesene96• 7 years ago

Whilst I may or may not feel sympathy for the companies themselves (although not everyone who uses Oracle software is an "enterprise" by any means), I can feel sympathy for the poor IT teams who would have to deal with a surprise audit from a vendor.

chris_wot2• 7 years ago

Has deployments of Oracle software gone up over the long term, or are people beginning to migrate away from Oracle software?

setquk• 7 years ago

My first proper job involved oracle. This put me off ever using it again from a licensing, technology and ethical perspective. Just the army of clueless but certified vulture contractors explained the ecosystem. This is how you slowly burn a business but Larry’s going to be dead then so he doesn’t give a fuck.

pdimitar3• 7 years ago

Sure in the short-term they'll rinse companies for large amounts of money, but people tend to remember when that's been done to them, and aren't exactly keen to have it happen again.

The tech personnel, yes. The guys who accept corporate sales pitches, no. They only hear "Oracle" and are thinking "big name, nobody gets fired for buying that".

gaius• 7 years ago

but people tend to remember when that's been done to them, and aren't exactly keen to have it happen again.

Companies stick with Oracle and IBM for multi-decade stretches, maybe the move to cloud will be what it takes to dislodge them, but then again, in a world where Azure, AWS and GCP exist some people still choose Oracle and IBM, so there's no explaining it.

If I were a CIO I would announce that this year's bonuses will be funded from savings on Oracle licenses, then sit back and let nature take its course.

pjmlp13• 7 years ago

Intel's newest audit tactic, focusing on illegal installations from VTune, Intel C++, Intel Fortran, ....

Want to use commercial software? Pay accordingly.

Not wanting to pay for it? Plenty of options available.

https://adoptopenjdk.net/

https://aws.amazon.com/corretto/

https://www.azul.com/downloads/zulu/

https://www.eclipse.org/openj9/

https://developers.redhat.com/products/openjdk/download/

rickette• 7 years ago

These are great options. If you don't want to pay up to Oracle. Just use one of the OpenJDK distributions. Java is still free and the JVM is still an amazing piece of tech.

mort963• 7 years ago

Isn't it nicer to just... not use anything related to Oracle though? Oracle still holds a tremendous amount of power over OpenJDK, right?

Oracle has also demonstrated in court that the Java API is their intellectual property, and that they are willing to go after people for reimplementing them. OpenJDK might be blessed, but I'd still be afraid of having anything to do with their intellectual property. That's also one of the primary reasons I'm not very excited about ZFS.

DaiPlusPlus2• 7 years ago

JVM is still an amazing piece of tech

It’s hard to say that when we’re still clamouring for generics without type-erasure. It’s been over 14 years since the CLR had it and it’s definitely holding back the Java ecosystem in my opinion.

pron24• 7 years ago

You left out Oracle's free option:

http://jdk.java.net/

crankylinuxuser3• 7 years ago

I wouldn't trust that it doesn't have some onerous terms buried in the license.

Anything oracle is tainted. And that's putting it lightly.

tyingq5• 7 years ago

That's not exactly the same. Oracle is infamous for bait and switch, where it's free at first. With Java, they first snuck in some extra components that triggered license requirements, then later, just changed the whole jdk license.

They are very aware that big companies wouldn't be nimble enough to switch to openjdk in time to avoid the license fees.

Additionally, they know that companies have 3rd party software that bundles what was once "free" oracle jdk. The end user gets to foot the bill for that rather than the 3rd party.

pron24• 7 years ago

Old JDKs, bundled or not, require an explicit flag (`-XX:+UnlockCommercialFeatures`) to enable commercial features.

As to new JDKs, Oracle has open sourced (or discontinued) all previously commercial features so that now OpenJDK and Oracle JDK are the same software: https://blogs.oracle.com/java-platform-group/oracle-jdk-rele...

Infamous or not, the licensing situation is now clearer and better than ever before: Oracle offers the same software under a commercial license for those who wish to buy support, or under a free license to those who don't. The download pages for either option clearly identify the license, and point the user to the other option, if that's what they want:

* https://www.oracle.com/technetwork/java/javase/downloads/ind...

* https://www.oracle.com/technetwork/java/javase/downloads/jdk...

* https://openjdk.java.net/projects/jdk/11/

steve1977• 7 years ago

They didn't change the license of old JDKs AFAIK (correct me if I'm wrong).

So, those big companies would first have to switch to an affected version of the JDK anyway, so they could as well switch to OpenJDK.

filereaper• 7 years ago

Anyone know the details of Amazon Coretto in this regard?

theredbox• 7 years ago

Oracle wanted to be the apple of enterprise to offer an all in one oracle package that would be deeply integrated but they failed to assess the market.

It is not about Oracle not having competitive producta or services but about Oracle being stuck with their thinking in the 1991-2008 era.

dana3214• 7 years ago

Once Oracle bought Sun Microsystems, i became dis-interested in Java all round. I would rather use a programming language not licensed by a huge corporation.

The reason they are a huge company is the way they are predatory towards their customers. Probably why sun didn't survive as well, its kind of sad that this is the way of the world.

nicoburns3• 7 years ago

You should give C# a try. It's pretty open these days (bonus: it's a much nicer language than Java)

thefounder3• 7 years ago

Or better use Go! It's 100% open/BSD license.

elygre2• 7 years ago

Is C# more open than Java?

mustardo4• 7 years ago

Because who could possibly imagine a world where M$ would pull this same sort of stunt with the CLR...

severino2• 7 years ago

He said "no big corporations behind". Also, it's not fully open, as you said.

krn• 7 years ago

I don't care about Java, but I care about Clojure in which it is implemented. Should I be worried about Oracle?

mustardo4• 7 years ago

I doub't it, not unless Oracle wins the Google V Oracle case and somehow API's can become patented, in which case were all boned https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oracle_America,_Inc._v._Google....

Just make sure you don't use the Oracle JDK and use Open JDK or similar

pron24• 7 years ago

Oracle has now fully open sourced the JDK[1] (more than Sun ever did), not to mention all the resources invested into Java now.

[1] https://blogs.oracle.com/java-platform-group/oracle-jdk-rele...

j16sdiz4• 7 years ago

GPLv2 have no explicit patent granting. If you remember Sun, you should knew the TCK license controversy.

chris_wot2• 7 years ago

Thank goodness LibreOffice split from OpenOffice.org. A true blessing in disguise!

elygre2• 7 years ago

But then the four last sentences say that they don't actually audit so much -- but they will, in five years' time!

It’s too soon. Give it five years when you’re stuck in Oracle’s ecosystem and Oracle needs money. Then they’ll start auditing. Right now, there’s so much buzz going on around Java, they don’t have to audit.

brown9-22• 7 years ago

That’s the trap the author is trying to warn people about falling into.

thecleaner2• 7 years ago

Lets assume that as an individual I want to move away from Java for backend development and currently I use Spring. Is there another ecosystem with a great IDE, type safety (or just type annotations), limits that allow one to not shoot yourself in the foot, a good debugger, memory safety and lastly speed ? Python really shines in most of the above except for the speed part.

djhworld• 7 years ago

Why not just use openJDK? Seems a bit drastic to do a full rewrite.

thecleaner2• 7 years ago

I agree. I wouldn't consider a full re-write but for further development.

erpellan• 7 years ago

You could look into dart. Take a look at http://aqueduct.io/ for an example.

thosakwe• 7 years ago

I have to plug Angel, too: https://angel-dart.github.io/

patja• 7 years ago

Sounds like you might be looking for C#, but I'm sure you've considered it already.

zeckalpha• 7 years ago

Numba provides a Python decorator (like Java annotations) to opt in to native compilation: http://numba.pydata.org

jtdev4• 7 years ago

The Python speed issue in my experience is almost never a material concern. It’s fast enough using the CPython reference implementation, and there are numerous options (PyPy, Cython) to squeeze out better performance if you really need it.

justinclift2• 7 years ago

Go is pretty decent from a few releases back.

If you're using JetBrains IDEA Ultimate, the official JetBrains plugin for Go works really well. It's the same piece their GoLand IDE uses.

severino2• 7 years ago

But why would you want to move away from an ecosystem with a great IDE, type safety, speed and limits that prevent yourself from shooting yourself in your foot?

oceanstone• 7 years ago

Node.js, optionally with TypeScript, and VS Code as an IDE

nova22033• 7 years ago

Huh?

That’s why I think Oracle is sort of hedging its bets with Java audits and not going in there as strongly. It’s too soon. Give it five years when you’re stuck in Oracle’s ecosystem and Oracle needs money. Then they’ll start auditing.

This is burying the lede...

pron24• 7 years ago

As someone who works at Oracle on the JDK (i.e. OpenJDK), I’d like to point out a couple of things, as the interviewee was someone who directly benefits from any fear, uncertainty and doubt regarding Java (but this is not an official comment, and I speak only for myself):

* Under the old BCL license the Oracle JDK was a mix of free and commercial features. Using the commercial features required explicitly turning them on with the flag `-XX:+UnlockCommercialFeatures`. You could not use them accidentally. Current JDKs no longer contain any commercial features, as explained below.

* Starting with JDK 11, Oracle has completed open sourcing the JDK[1], which no longer contains any commercial features. Rather than a mixed free/commercial license, Oracle now offers the same software under two different licenses, the commercial OTN lincense, intended for those who wish to but a support subscription from Oracle, and a free and open-source license, for those who don't[2]. The commercial license download page[3] clearly states the different options:

Oracle Customers and ISVs targeting Oracle LTS releases: Oracle JDK is Oracle's supported Java SE version for customers and for developing, testing, prototyping or demonstrating your Java applications.

End users and developers looking for free JDK versions: Oracle OpenJDK offers the same features and performance as Oracle JDK under the GPL license (with the non-viral "Classpath Exception")

The page also links to the free option. The particular commercial JDK download page[4] also contains a big bright warning and links to the downlad page for the free license.

* That Oracle now only offers six months of free support (as oppsoed to before) is misleading. For at least the past seven years, Java had a major release every 3 or so years, and "update releases" (containing substantial new features, but no language or API changes) every six months, plus quarterly security and bug fixes[5]. The releases were also not supported for more than six months, and to be up to date on security, one was always required to upgrade to the semi-annual update releases. What changed recently, due to community demand, is how the features are distributed among the releases. There are no more major Java releases. The last one (ever) was JDK 9. Starting with JDK 10, the semi-annual releases are not major releases but "feature releases," that are allowed to contain API and language changes, but are small, so that instead of a major upgrade every three years, the upgrade process is more gradual (e.g. compare JDK 9, the last major release, with JDK 11, a feature release[6]). The feature releases are therefore somewhere between a major release and an update release but much closer to the latter. While major releases were supported for a number of years and the feature releases only for six months, the feature relases are by no stretch of the imagination major releases.

* Similarly sized runtimes/languages -- Apple's Swift/iOS, Google's Android and Microsoft's .NET -- are all part of ecosystems entirely or largely under the control of the companies owning the projects, and that generate billions of dollars annually, and so fund the development of the platform. Oracle has no control over the Java ecosystem, and so must fund the development of OpenJDK somehow. This is now done by offering long-term support for some of the feature releases, for companies that don't wish to upgrade to every feature release (in the past the funding came partly through the commercial features, which have now all been open sourced, and the annoying search toolbar that came with the JRE, which is gone now, too).

* Oracle employs hundreds of full-time developers who manage the OpenJDK project and contribute the lion's share of OpenJDK development[7]. While Oracle developers will continue to contribute most of the work, including security updates to current OpenJDK versions, they will not commit to backporting those contributions to old feature releases via OpenJDK's "JDK update" projects. Other companies have said they will do that work, so that there will likely be OpenJDK update releases for some feature releases, probably those that correspond to Oracle's LTS versions. Oracle encourages other members of the OpenJDK community to contribute even more.

[1] https://blogs.oracle.com/java-platform-group/oracle-jdk-rele...

[2] http://jdk.java.net/

[3] https://www.oracle.com/technetwork/java/javase/downloads/ind...

[4] https://www.oracle.com/technetwork/java/javase/downloads/jdk...

[5] https://java.com/en/download/faq/release_dates.xml

[6] https://openjdk.java.net/projects/jdk9/ vs. https://openjdk.java.net/projects/jdk/11/

[7] https://blogs.oracle.com/java-platform-group/building-jdk-11...

jmartrican2• 7 years ago

You should consider saving this comment so that it can be kept added to other similar article's that come out every few months.

jtdev4• 7 years ago

Wow, so with Java, rather than developing software... I can spend my time reading through piles of legalese, trying to figure out which incantation of vague licensing/use language I’m beholden to.

pron24• 7 years ago

The JDK is under the same license as Linux, so however closely you pay attention to the Linux legalese, that's as much attention you need to pay to Java's.

justinclift2• 7 years ago

As someone who works at Oracle ...

Ahhh. Your other responses were so positive and promoting of Oracle, I nearly accused you of working for them.

Turns out you really do.

jmartrican2• 7 years ago

I see articles like this and then see a bunch of comments about not wanting to use Java because of Oracle. But these articles are somewhat misleading in that there are free versions of Java out there. I think the authors of said articles just wants to stir the pot. This is old news and not really relevant with all the free alternatives. Even on our Ubuntu builds, when we install Java it's the open jdk variant that gets installed by default.

brown9-22• 7 years ago

There’s a response to this in the article - those free versions are only supported for 6 months.

IntelMiner• 7 years ago

I think what they mean is OpenJRE, versus Oracle JRE

p2detar• 7 years ago

OpenJDK builds from AdoptJDK [1] have LTS versions. The also state the following in their Roadmap [2]:

In addition, every three years one feature release will be designated as the Long Term Supported (LTS) release. We will produce LTS releases for at least four years. This assurance will allow you to stay on a well-defined code stream, and give you time to migrate to the next, new, stable, LTS release when it becomes available.

[1] https://adoptopenjdk.net

[2] https://adoptopenjdk.net/support.html#roadmap

pron24• 7 years ago

But they're not major versions. Java has switched to "Chrome versioning," and every new feature release gets a new number. Those versions are supported until the next one comes along.

suyash• 7 years ago

Another biased article by Java hater who has no clue what he is talking about. Make Java Great Again!

karianna• 7 years ago

Hi all - I help run https://adoptopenjdk.net - I genuinely think that the article is spreading some FUD, but I also understand if folks feel strongly about looking at alternatives then you can read the full background https://medium.com/@javachampions/java-is-still-free-c02aef8... and I'm happy to answer Q's here as well

gst3• 7 years ago

I actually think that is the best long-term approach for all of the parties involved:

In the past OpenJDK was missing critical features so that companies often used the commercial closed-source Oracle JDK. At the same time even then Oracle JDK was somewhat of a trap when it comes to licensing, as it included features not covered by the free licence that might be accidentally used by developers.

With Java 11 there is finally feature parity: Oracle contributed missing features to OpenJDK. Features that couldn't be contributed (due to licensing issues) were removed from the commercial Oracle JDK. So starting with Java 11 those two versions of the JDK are pretty much equal.

With Java 11 there's no reason to use the commercial Oracle JDK. Most of the companies that used the Oracle JDK before are better served by using one of the open-source OpenJDK builds: Either Oracle's OpenJDK build (which is only going to provide support for 6 months after each release), or one of the third-party builds that most likely are also going to track LTS releases such as Azul's Zulu or AdoptOpenJDK.

Oracle is very upfront about those changes: When you try to download Java 11+ from Oracle's website there's a huge yellow box with a warning about the license changes. In addition, that box also links to the GPL-licensed OpenJDK version.

As a Java developer I'm very happy about that new approach: With the feature parity between OpenJDK and the commercial release it's finally possible to develop and run Java applications on a 100% open-source stack, which is something that was much harder to do with earlier OpenJDK releases.

exabrial• 7 years ago

Or... Just run openjdk! Problem solved

thomasdullien• 7 years ago

Perhaps this is a stupid question, and someone please enlighten me - but would not the vast majority of JVM deployments be on either CentOS or Debian-derived base images with good support for an OpenJDK package?

I thought that the main differences between OpenJDK and Oracle java was the nicer font rendering and some Swing-ish stuff, is there a good comparison as to why people even use the Oracle Java?

Oracle's Newest Audit Tactic: Focusing on Java

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