Oh my god. The amount of FUD concerning the JDK licensing for JDK 11 is just amazing.
So, unless I’ve missed something, Oracle does the following:
- Contributes pretty much all of the closed source technologies (or what was originally to become closed source) of the Oracle JDK to OpenJDK, for example giving the community:
- JDK Flight Recorder
- JDK Mission Control
- ZGC
- …and probably more stuff I can’t think of right now
- Ensures the Oracle JDK and the OpenJDK builds are virtually indistinguishable, except for licensing
- Moves to, from what I’ve been told, a very competitively priced subscription model (as opposed to the rather, IMHO, highly priced Java SE Advanced licenses)
- Starts providing a free OpenJDK build (which includes all these donated technologies)
- Provides uncountable man hours of maintaining and innovating the Java platform
- Ensures that the community knows where to find the free bits by linking to them, and slaps on a bright yellow warning sign, so that everyone can see that the licensing has changed:
And how does the community react, you wonder? Yep, that’s right. “Oracle is the Devil”, “This is a bait and switch operation” etc. Ad nauseum.
So, this is my personal take on open source: if I like a certain open source technology, and it helps me in my work, I support it. Either by contributing, or by paying (gasp) money for it. Especially if I would like the technology to thrive in the future. Technologies that are not supported, tend to die and be forgotten. I have personally, for a very long time, paid a yearly contribution of 35$ to Eclipse. And that is even though my team, and countless of other teams at Oracle, have contributed to various Eclipse projects over the years. And, no, Eclipse does not provide me support for it.
Summary
Oracle gives away countless of highly regarded technologies and starts releasing free OpenJDK builds. Parts of the Java community throws a fit.