Oracle cooks up free and premium JDKs Oracle will deliver two Java Development Kit (JDK) based on the OpenJDK project - one free and the other paid. That's according to Tweets pouring thick and fast from an Oracle session at QCon San Francisco, where the database giant mostly repeated its earlier plans for Java. Adam Messinger, Oracle vice president of …
From the title: ".Managing Automation recognizes two Oracle customers— Hologic and Batesville Casket—that are reaching new business heights.."
Sounds like the discarded tag-line of a Terminator movie.
I thought El Reg had the license on tasteless headlines, but I see that oRACLe can play word-games too. Unless they were just trying to be funny, I mean, what's not to laugh about flying imaginary caskets.
Besides, oRACLe isn't the only scum out there, I don't know of any SAP implementation that occurred on-time and on-budget...On-time, yes, because when that kind of money is involved, it't easier to work 20hrs/day than to work 8 and get reamed by middle-management.
But these are jus t my opinions.
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If you expect to get something for free, you should not look at corporations who have to pay the wages of their employees.
Take GNU Ada, Python, FreePascal or GNU Smalltalk.
The whole freetard approach of the Java people is simply broken. SUN nearly went bankrupt because they fell for the freetard siren songs.
While there might be value in an premium, paid-for VM (Zend's PHP runtime might be an example for this) I don't this necessarily applies to the underlying programming language. Languages have to be taught, and as part of good CS culture, this kind of supports the peer-review culture that is integral to open source. Enterprise customers are most likely already paying heaps to run Java application servers with Oracle or DB2. They are happy to pay for good stuff but there are limits.
Will the runtime be so much more cost-effective than more iron? What will IBM offer them? You do have to wonder that if Oracle squeeze its customers too hard they might look elsewhere for something that they bought because it was supposed to be industry standard.
I've used JRockit in the past, good VM, first with compressed pointers for 64 bit use, great heap management, good for app servers. It used to be free for development, but that went away 2+ years ago. Which means that not only did I stop using it @works, the OSS projects I work on don't get tested on it by myself or anyone else. Go look at all the Hadoop bugs related to JRockit -I was the only person filing them, and when JRockit stopped being free, I stopped doing that.
So: if Oracle do want a premium JVM, they need to recognise that most of the open source and mass apps won't be built and tested on it, may not work, unless they somehow retest every single app, field all bug reports related to their JVMs, and try and get patches back into the main trunk projects. That may happen - in Ant the Eclipse and Netbeans teams helped a lot, but in Hadoop, Oracle are going to have to bring up a 500 node cluster of their own and stress it out, or recommend that everyone use the same JVMs that Yahoo! and Facebook use -which is currently the classic JVM.
One other issue here is support contracts: you can currently get support contracts for the Sun JVM from oracle. Will this go away and you only get support on the premium JVM? I hope not. But looking at the mysql changes, it may happen.
We sell a j2ee solution and do not support JRockit for exactly that reason ... there are a lot of free JVM's out there and most customers used the platform vendor's JVM (HP, IBM, Sun), and Sun JVM on Windows and GNU/Linux ... I guess we will have to support OpenJDK sooner than later, unless Oracle play it like they do with Oracle database ... a decent db without enterprise features for free ...
Our business (financials) has recently begun an internal review of all systems with a specific requirement to migrate from Oracle within 12 months. This has recently been extended beyond the DB to cover any Oracle-related (i.e. SUN) equipment or software also.
Not sure what Oracle Sales been up to at a C-level but it's going to cost them in the long run.
This could easily end up damaging the reputation of Java because there are bound to be incompatibilities and bugs caused by the lack or precence of premium features. This will inevitably increase testing costs and ironically make Java less popular with business!
Oracle need to stop digging, their hole is already disturbingly deep; it could easily sabotage future business!
e.g. The main Postgre-SQL backer is already recruiting ex MySQL staff, to sell Postgre-SQL's Oracle compatibility and MySQL porting capability!
..does not hurt. SUN was in altruist mode and effectively on the path of self-destruction. Mr Larry's greedy company is doing very well, meanwhile.
So what's your point ???
(I do think he is doing lots of damage by sueing google (all those dodgy patents), but the SUN JVM clearly belongs to Oracle and its costs lots of money each year just to fix bugs, test and maintain compatibility with new OS releases. Larry is right to charge for that work and the freetards simply don't have a clue. Have a look at the Delphi pricelist - that's a commercial product not subsidized...)
The only tweet I can find is http://twitter.com/mtnygard/status/665968355319808
"It's our intent to have a premium version of the JDK." Said in addition to the open source JDK. #qconsf
The official story on "premium" are not "premium JVMs" but rather "premium programs" mentioned in http://www.oracle.com/us/corporate/press/173782
It's hard to make money from a language. If you charge people a lot of money to use it, then it has to be really good otherwise people will walk away. If you want to sell training, support and developer stuff then you need to give the language away and hope you can get your money other ways.
Sun tried to give the language away in an almost open-source way in the hope that lots of people would use Java then buy stuff from them. It wasn't working well enough for Wall Street.
Oracle are trying the more direct approach, only time will tell if they can make money from it.
Personally I don't think things look good for Java, and Oracle, but people who use Java and add value may make tonnes of money - assuming Oracle doesn't kill everything in the short term...
The official Press Release from Oracle in this topic came during JavaOne. Quoting from http://www.oracle.com/us/corporate/press/173782
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* The Oracle JDK and Java Runtime Environment (JRE) will continue to be available as free downloads, with no changes to the existing licensing models.
* Premium offerings such as JRockit Mission Control, JRockit Real Time, Java for Business and Enterprise Support will continue to be made available for an additional charge.
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