Java’s New Pricing

I recently attended a talk by Georges Saab, Java head honcho at Oracle. The following is an executive summary, simply explained so you can understand the changes and plan accordingly. If you use Java commercially, the odds of you reading this and saying, “We’re fine, don’t need to change anything,” without doing any checking, is very low.

I’ll add the same “safe harbor” statement Georges added: any planning/spending you do should not rely solely on this article – things can change, I might have misheard something, etc. Do your own research.

Background

• The JDK, or Java Development Kit, is a versioned specification. JDK 5, 6, … 11. There are also editions, such as Java SE, Java EE, etc.
• For 5 through 9, major versions were released every 2-5 years. Updates (e.g. 8u20) came out about every 6 months. “Updating” means back-porting security, bug fixes, and possibly other improvements that are guaranteed to have no breaking changes.
• The JDK specification has implementations, which are downloadable binaries. They come from various providers (companies, organizations, or individuals) and may be
  • under various open source or commercial licenses
  • free or paid
• The most common one is Oracle JDK.
• OpenJDK is a community project which provides the reference implementation of the JDK. 
• It is a collaboration between several companies, but >90% of the contributions come from Oracle. 
• Anyone can create their own build/distribution of OpenJDK and many do – including Oracle.
• These builds can have code changes. For a while, Linux vendors replaced code that wasn’t GNU-compatible so it could legally be distributed with Linux, but is/was still called “OpenJDK.”

Today and the Future

• Starting with JDK 10, a major version of Java will be released every 6 months. Far fewer changes, but still major versions, so not guaranteed to be backward-compatible. 
• JDK 11 introduces the concept of long-term support (LTS) versions. These are the ones that are going to get updates after the next version is released. Example:
  • JDK 12 is released and bug security fixes are back-ported to 11.
  • JDK 13 is released and bug security fixes are back-ported to 11, but not 12.
• The big news is that Oracle is going to stop updating Oracle JDK 8 for commercial use in January 2019 and personal (desktop) use in December 2020 unless you pay for support.
• Oracle will only provide updates to the free version of Oracle JDK, and OpenJDK, while it is current (versions released in the last 6 months). Meaning as soon as JDK 12 is released – 6 months later – they will stop providing updates to Oracle JDK 11 unless you pay.

Let me clarify that with an example that shows you your options:

• JDK (Java) 11 is released and you adopt the Oracle JDK in a commercial setting. You’re paying nothing as usual.
• Six months later, JDK 12 is released, with fixes and new features.
• Your options:
  1. Do nothing. Continue to use Oracle JDK 11 for free forever, legally. The license does not expire, it will just never be updated by Oracle.
     • Maybe you’re running on a closed/air-gapped system and there is nothing else you need.
  2. Upgrade to Oracle JDK 12. Still free and likely can run everything you built under 11 without issues.
  3. Switch to OpenJDK 11 from a provider other than Oracle, who is updating it.
  4. Switch to another commercial JDK.
  5. Pay Oracle for updates of 11. I was told the current price for this is $25/processor/month, with volume discounts, run on the honor system. I understand this is a significant discount from earlier pricing models.

It will be interesting to see how this plays out. I totally get that Oracle has a big staff of developers making Java better and they need to pay them. Giving the product away for free makes that more difficult.

On the other hand, many people have gotten used to paying nothing. A number of companies are already planning to provide updates for older versions, but we’ll see what kind of toll this puts on other contributors and who does what for free. Some have extensive Java experience and their own (often commercial) distributions: Red Hat, Azul Systems, IBM, etc. Those may be more cost effective for you. Maybe you’re already using one.

For the record, I have no problem with companies charging money for software development. Mine does and I’m very fond of the rent and coffee it pays for.

CIO/CTO Action Items

1. Identify every system that is running Java in a commercial environment. This includes desktops.
   • Remove Java from systems that don’t need it.
2. Identify where those distributions came from: Oracle, Red Hat, GNU, etc.
3. Determine their update schedule. Be aware of when your Java versions will be out of date. Put it on your maintenance schedule or potentially get pwned. 
4. Switch to JDKs that will be updated or plan for regular upgrades.
5. Budget accordingly.

For further reading, Java Champions have created a document summarizing the changes in a bit more depth.

Hope you found that useful! Please comment with any corrections. 

Thanks to Marco Villalobos for pointing out some issues in the first version.