New JRE/JDK gets released -> somebody from our company goes and downloads the RPM after accepting the license -> she uploads the RPM into our internal repository -> somebody from another department changes the build scripts to use the new JRE/JDK -> few minutes later we are running the dev clusters with the new JRE/JDK.

In this process the person who downloads the new RPM (aka me) has to be 100% sure that the new JDK is ok to be used. Which I completely missed (my bad) I was wondering about the GPL stuff a bit but I was thinking that Oracle came to their senses and started to distribute the JRE/JDK under a license that is better than the previous one. Again, my bad that I paid attention more to the performance improvements, modules, ZGC etc. than to the license changes. This is why I was surprised when I saw the article from Joda (his real name is Stephen?) and also upvoted, sent around to all my Java peers to be aware that this is absolutely, 100%, pure fuckery that Orcle just dumped on us.

Sounds like your company needs a better processes on how proprietary code is distributed internally. Most companies have a review process for thins like this.

The download page [1] has a large bold warning that the license terms have changed. What else would you like them to do?

[1] - https://www.oracle.com/technetwork/java/javase/downloads/jdk...

Hmmm. At most you're mad because the bright yellow warning box that tells you specifically to re-read the license because it changed is not clear enough for you, even though apparently being sure about exactly that is your job.

I'm not sure you can blame Oracle for this. They could I guess give you a tl;dr summary in the box. But, how long would it take you to study the new situation? A few minutes?

I am not mad. I am thankful. And yes I am a ignorant engineer who cares more about features than legal crap. The only thing I am 100% sure is that I am not alone.

If you don't care about all aspects of your software, including security, ethics, and legality, you are not an engineer. Engineering implies professionalism.

It's debatable whether there are any true software engineers (we're certainly not licensed like traditional engineers), but all software professionals should be concerned about licenses. It's part of the job, as are all ethical considerations of your work.

It's fairly common to automate that stuff away, and not just for Oracle.

For example, if agreeing to TOS was neccessary, Let's Encrypt could no longer be "totally automated". Therefore certbot has an "--agree-tos" option, present in oh so many ansible repositories.

How do you automate that? You need some kind of cookie to download JDK and you're getting it by clicking a button. The only way to automate it is to simulate "agree" click.

I'm not saying I'd write an "I Agree" bot, but I've certainly written scrapers of comparable or greater complexity, and I'd be quite surprised if there was nobody that did this.

If you haven't written a bot, but you habitually download the JRE/JDK from Oracle's website, accepting the license manually each time, is there really a difference? How many people are rereading the license each time they do this? I would guess the number of people that do this is roughly a rounding error above 0.

Writing an "I Agree" bot without checking out what the license was...

Entering a contract without checking out who the customer was ...

Curl lets you keep a cookie jar around, for example, so yes, it's pretty simple. It's also a terrible idea, but doesn't seem to stop people.

You'd have to update the URL anyway because the v8 JDK hasn't changed, from what I remember. So those scripts wouldn't be affected.