Many people are very used to clicking through Oracle's tedious licensing maze to download previous JDKs.

It's just another license to ignore. I'll personally do whatever I want regardless of what is in the EULA.

Oracle is notorious for auditing compliance with their database licenses, and shaking down their users for extra money in the event the auditors find something even slightly questionable. There are external consultants that make a pretty good living just preparing companies to withstand those audits.

They haven't been doing that with JDK licenses, so far -- as long as Java had licenses which didn't allow for this kind of gamesmanship. But now that the license has changed, it's a completely legitimate thing to get worried about.

Not sure where you live or what sort of company you work for but in my country & our company we cannot just have a fuck all attitude towards software licenses.

The USA and I've been doing it for two decades, honestly copyrights and licenses are not important to me. I have taken a fuck all attitude without consequence and will continue to do so forever.

Haha the plethora of GPL violations that exist without consequence sort of illustrate your point quite well.

You think if Oracle's legal team is after your company you get a free get out of license violation card?

Haha, I’m not playing that game because I’m lawsuit averse but I’m not surprised people are successful at it. This JDK includes telemetry so it just got a lot more dangerous to play but otherwise I’d guess license violations are pervasive at small shops.

even at big ones.

Though it "sounds bad", this is a wonderfully practical approach. Why waste a lot of time with this BS?

Because it’s a good way to get yourself sued

Unless you're a very large firm, it's actually not. They'll negotiate with you long before lawyers are involved.

The moral argument that code should not be restrained by artificial license, like we treat ideas, is a strong one but not made clearly here.

If code was treated more like ideas or recipes we'd all still have jobs.

If you believe that strongly enough, civil disobedience through ignoring licenses is one approach. No one should risk more than they're willing to lose on the position because you will lose if it's costing someone else enough.

It's not an act of civil disobedience. I just flat out give a shit. Also apparently I don't need to.

That won't work if your company goes through due diligence or ends up getting a licenses review from Oracle. You'll have to settle up then and it won't be cheap.

The Oracle license police live for situations like this.

p.s., If it's just personal use you are within the terms of the license.

There's no "long legalese."

The new license (https://www.oracle.com/technetwork/java/javase/terms/license...) is very clear. It states in plain English: "Further, You may not: use the Programs for any data processing or any commercial, production, or internal business purposes other than developing, testing, prototyping, and demonstrating your Application;".

How is that not clear?

This entire article is just pure FUD. Oracle has stated over and over and over how the new licensing model works. It's clear to anybody who spends a couple of minutes reading the documentation.

If you want to claim that 2000+ word terms are not legalese then so be it. Suffice it to say, I disagree. What is needed here is a summary in the warning box on the main page. Something like "Do not download this unless you want to pay us".

> How is that not clear?

You'd think it's clear, and yet I've joined projects where software with such terms was included in production builds because "it was downloaded with npm so it's open source."

Huge difference legally between running:

    npm install package

And having a user certify that they read a license agreement. I'll leave it to lawyers to talk about whether a user actually agrees to a license when they run "npm install", but Oracle's site at least requires the user to accept the license agreement by physically clicking a button. And I've worked at a lot of companies that drill into you that you do not click that button without approval from legal.

But you've had approval from legal the last 27 times you downloaded the Oracle JDK.

I get your point, but npm has the same issue even if you didn't accept the license. I mean, if you didn't accept the license that it comes with, then what license gives you a right to use it at all?

IMO, there's an argument that you implicitly license others in making your code available in a package manager such as NPM which requires no authentication or license clickthrough to incorporate code in your project, unlike the .net or other PMs where license terms are presented and require click-through agreement.

Not saying anyone should stake any bets on that argument winning, just that it wouldn't likely be summarily dismissed in court and would at the very least factor into the damages calculation.

Will be interesting to see if any cases like this ever get adjudicated and precedent set.

What implicit license, though? GPL? BSD? Something else? I feel like developers have a tendency to gloss over these things as if all FOSS licenses are the same, but they really aren't.

What's unclear to me is how I would be running afoul of the licensing terms if I used the non-free version of the JDK to develop Java software. Because "developing, testing, prototyping, and demonstrating [my] Application" is exactly what I'd be using the JDK for.

Not a lawyer, but my assumption is that the clause state you can develop an application, but cannot run it in production/sell it.

Easy loophole, infinite open beta, continuous integration, rolling release. At which point, with which release would it turn from beta to commercial full gold master? Slippery Slope that. A better wording would be "if you make money, we want a cut, or you get a cut, got it?"

Not a lawyer either, but the license says that the "Programs" (meaning the JDK) may only be used for these purposes. Once I write my application, it will be running on the JRE, not the JDK.

Iirc there is no jre in 11, just jdk, also Oracle is not dumb they likely have a clause covering your "loophole". Finally why would you develop on Oracle jdk and run on open. Seems like an easy way to get bugs.

Ah. I wasn't aware there was no separate JRE.