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.
"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.
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?
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.
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
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.