I was at a Java conference recently, and sat in a session with an Oracle guy showing this off and answering a lot of questions about this topic.

It's really not that nefarious. The bottom line is that they haven't come up with pricing yet, because it's not at a point where the people who would pay are interested yet.

Oracle's target audience is large companies that will pay out the wazoo for something enterprise-grade and fully-baked. And it's just not there yet. It doesn't support the current version of Java. It doesn't run on Windows, which is 95+% of the developer workstations in those environments. The debugger story is pretty weak (i.e. do all your debugging in a regular JVM, and hope for the best after you compile to native). For that crowd, it truly is at the stage of, "Check it out at conferences, and be aware that it's coming, but don't plan any project work around it yet".

At that stage of a product's lifecycle, the architects might be tinkering with it, but the management and business stakeholders with budget authority don't even want to hear about it.

Spoiler alert: it's probably going to be expensive. If you're hung up on this question, then you probably aren't going to get to use it. How many HN and Reddit commenters use any paid Oracle products at all? But for the startup/indie/student crowd that dominates here... there's plenty of interesting benefit to the open-source version, and there's no "catch" to its licensing beyond that of OpenJDK itself.

I’d say it is nefarious to put out an EE version that’s marked ‘production use requires a license’ and then make it impossible to figure out how to get a license or what one would cost.

Even enterprises would deep budgets would not let their devs near such an arrangement - they could be held to ransom by Oracle!

If it’s not ready or ‘fully baked’ as you say then mark it as beta and say that future versions will require a license.

Well, yes. Devs in that environment would not go near it (at least not for anything beyond a POC). In those environments, you have to go through a review board process in order to use some new open source JSON-parser library from Maven Central. Devs aren't just cowboy'ing a new compiler into their workflow.

"Production use requires a license" is a NOT an indicator that it's ready for production use (there are a number of warnings against this). The fact that you need a license, yet can't get one, is a clear signal that it isn't ready for production use. The people in Oracle's target audience see this sort of thing a lot with preview software, and aren't confused by it.

> The fact that you need a license, yet can't get one, is a clear signal that it isn't ready for production use.

Everything you said is reasonable except this. If it isn’t ready for production use then no need to beat about the bush by advertising a commercial license you can’t get? And if one doesn’t exist by the way how are Twitter using it in production?

I honestly don't know how to explain this more clearly. They are not "advertising a commercial license". They are saying NOT to use the Enterprise version in production, because licensing is not yet available.

The only reference I've ever seen to Twitter using GraalVM in production is in this discussion thread. And that commenter clearly states that Twitter is using the open-source community edition.

No one who would ever conceivably be a paying Oracle customer would be confused by any of this. When that much money is on the table, there are experienced people in the room with reading comprehension.

> They are not "advertising a commercial license".

https://blogs.oracle.com/graalvm/announcement "GraalVM Enterprise is available for purchase and is free on Oracle Cloud."

> They are saying NOT to use the Enterprise version in production

[citation needed]

> The only reference I've ever seen to Twitter using GraalVM in production is in this discussion thread.

Considering that Twitter has been talking about this in public for some time, this statement is unlikely to make the point you were trying to make: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pR5NDkIZBOA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PtgKmzgIh4c https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZbccuoaLChk

Twitter uses the free GPL Community Edition in production. EE is faster but a lot of the magick is in the open source one.

> a lot of the performance benefits are in the EE version

I think Twitter get something like 13% with the CE version. That’s absolutely massive in terms of JVM performance increase for the same code.

Have you benchmarked anything to see any difference between CE and EE or are you just going by their download page? I am super interested in meta-compilation approaches and reading a bit of literature on Rpython and Graal.

We have compared both versions and for the most use cases performance are similar and EE is a bit faster but for some even the CE is faster.

I know projects that are 100% open source would be nice, but the reality is that it is not a bad idea to have a business model attached to an open source IMO increasing its sustainability.

Here is more information about EE version : https://docs.oracle.com/en/graalvm/enterprise/19/guide/overv...

> Several months ago I emailed them [...] haven’t heard a peep since.

Stupid question: Why don't you ask again? Several months ago it was in release candidate mode, while now it is a real product. You should probably be able to get more concrete information now.

Profile guided optimization is part of the EE version, that is probably the biggest difference.

I also saw that the EE version is free of charge on Oracles cloud, smart !

Seriously though.

Anyone have any idea what it might cost?