The code is GPL, but the official Oracle binaries are not (since Oracle owns the copyright, they are free to release under multiple different licenses) and they use Oracle's predatory "free" licensing - you când download and run for free for 6 months, but you owe them money if you keep running those binaries after the moment the new version is released. There is no explicit enforcement mechanism - it's up to you to be careful, otherwise their lawyers will notice at some point and bill you for all the times you weren't.

> The code is GPL, but the official Oracle binaries are not (since Oracle owns the copyright, they are free to release under multiple different licenses) and they use Oracle's predatory "free" licensing...

And once they started doing that, everyone switched to some flavor of OpenJDK, many distributions of which are backed by organizations of at least Oracle's size.

https://adoptopenjdk.net/

https://aws.amazon.com/corretto/

https://developers.redhat.com/products/openjdk/overview

https://www.microsoft.com/openjdk

Oracle's OpenJDK binaries are GPL; the Oracle JDK has a better license as of a few months ago (v17): https://blogs.oracle.com/cloud-infrastructure/post/introduci...

So build it yourself or get someone else to build it for you.

For the past 2-3 ( may be 4 ) years there is a narrative / movement that Open Source doesn't just mean the sourced code are opened, open source means the "community". And the result of that community must be both free in beer and free as speech.

So it can be avoided by compiling the code yourself?

Or just using a package manager like a normal person.