UK unis to cough up to £10M on Java to keep Oracle off their backs

Re:UK unis to cough up to £10M on Java to keep Oracle off th... by cookiengineer on Friday June 13, 2025 @11:57PM (#44274089)

I still don't understand why companies keep using Java.

It's like they are masochistically believing in a religious entity or something.

Risk assessment over the years says: Never use Java. I wouldn't risk my company over something as stupid as choosing an SDK from Oracle. As a company I would DNS block all Oracle domains and services by default and write it down in the contracts to make using Java a hostile action against the company.

Java is almost unmaintained, and will always be. There are better alternatives, even when you are too stubborn to use a lower-risk-to-the-company language.

At this point, even Perl is a lower operational risk because at least you won't get sued for using it.

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Re:UK unis to cough up to £10M on Java to keep Oracle off th... by jimbob45 on Saturday June 14, 2025 @12:22AM (#44274165)

There are legitimate use cases where you would want first-party support from Oracle and would be willing to pay for it. I know we clown on those who didn’t just start with OpenJDK but let’s not forget that Oracle actually sells a top-tier product for those who need it.

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Re:UK unis to cough up to £10M on Java to keep Oracle off th... by cookiengineer on Saturday June 14, 2025 @12:26AM (#44274179)

A top tier product isn't one that changes its licensing terms this way.

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Re:UK unis to cough up to £10M on Java to keep Oracle off th... by burnt-resistor on Saturday June 14, 2025 @12:32AM (#44274198)

Tell that to every bank.

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Re:UK unis to cough up to £10M on Java to keep Oracle off th... by revendell_elf on Saturday June 14, 2025 @12:32AM (#44274200)

It's not about Java but Oracle and their shady licencing practice.

Java (and it's derivatives) is an amazing language and JVM is nothing short of an engineering miracle. It's highly useful in building reliable enterprise services.

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Re:UK unis to cough up to £10M on Java to keep Oracle off th... by foobazgt on Saturday June 14, 2025 @12:36AM (#44274213)

This is so backwards, it's hard not to take it as a troll.

There is zero risk to using Java. People standardly use OpenJDK builds, which are freely and widely available under open source licensing (GLPv2 + classpath exception). In regards to maintenance, Java continues to be one of the most highly invested languages in existence.

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Re:UK unis to cough up to £10M on Java to keep Oracle off th... by cookiengineer on Saturday June 14, 2025 @01:01AM (#44274299)

The question to you in response is:

Are you talking about Java(tm) or Java, the language? Because that is a big operational risk difference.

Edited my original comment.

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Re:UK unis to cough up to £10M on Java to keep Oracle off th... by jcgrillo on Saturday June 14, 2025 @01:57AM (#44274512)

In addition to the licensing risks there's significant technical risk, IME. Chief among them is making sure your colleagues are sufficiently literate to have read Bloch's and Goetz's (et al.) books, and sufficiently tasteful to synthesize those lessons into code which isn't horrible. This is exceedingly rare in practice. So there's the same risk, approximately, as with every other programming language and that's reckless Dunning-Kruger ass programmers.

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