It's mostly under open source licenses, and such licenses tend to discuss patents don't they.

The Google lawsuit was partly because they didn't use the actual Java source code so they didn't benefit from those open source licenses. But bear in mind:

• Google won, Oracle lost, multiple times. I'm guessing they won't try that again.

• Google has since switched to the OpenJDK source code, not away from it. They are now actually working more closely with Oracle, not less.

Weird I know, but that's how it's played out.

Actually no, most open source licenses have no mention of patents.

If you're smaller than Google, dealing with Oracle might be outside your budget. Safer not to.

If its patents you are worried about, not dealing with someone won't protect you from their lawyers.

It's Oracle's general attitude. While not going anywhere near their products won't protect you from a patent lawsuit, it is some protection. They can't sneak in some commercial components and bill you later, for example.

It would be really nice to sort that out. This looks like a really useful tool.

That's never going to be sorted out because Oracle intended it that way. Like in 2011, just after they bought Sun, they started bundling payment-required components (e.g. JavaSE Advanced) in their supposedly "free" (as in beer) JavaSE download. Only this year did they start hunting down people who have been using those extra components, with some businesses owing back-charges of $1 million or more to Oracle. See http://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/12/16/oracle_targets_java_...

Based on past behavior, Oracle intends Graal and Truffle to do the same.

Edit: Actually, I suspect the name Graal is a play on JVM-based Grails, which, along with Apache Groovy, has the same culture of drawing users in with false promises then charging them for OCI consulting and G2One conferences to manage the resulting technical debt. Perhaps Graal means Oracle ain't buying theirs, they're building their own.

No, Java SE had commercial features forever and you can't use them accidentally. You have to pass a command line switch called -XX:+UnlockCommercialFeatures. They are free for development use and as such there's no DRM, it works on the honour system. Oracle have simply started stepping up their efforts against people who were, shall we say, not able to handle the honour system.

The commercial features aren't relevant to most developers, so it's all a bit of a storm in a teacup. There's certainly no bait and switch.

For this reason alone, I have refused to use Truffle. Consider the RPython toolchain, from the makers of PyPy; it does a similar thing (turn an interpreter with light annotations into a JIT compiler) but you are in no legal danger.

From what I understand, the JIT compilation RPython does isn't anywhere as sophisticated as Graal, and I can say from personal experience that the toolchain is pretty painful to work with.