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Cake day: July 24th, 2023

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  • This is only very indirectly related to Java as a whole. the reference implementation of the jvm is open source and managed by a coalition of companies under a GPL license, the OpenJDK.

    Oracle has its own set of enhancements to the reference jvm that handle things like just-in-time compilation and garbage collection differently and have some additional flags that allow for more fine-grained tweaking of certain features.

    There are many other companies that do the same.

    Oracle only started doing this in 2019 so many companies who were running Java before this used the Oracle JVM out of convenience, even if they weren’t going to use the tweaked parts. So everyone switched to another implementation, OpenJDK, Amazon Coretto, Eclipse J9 or some other available JRE/JDK.

    In 2023 Oracle cracked down harder trying to get people to pay for licenses and changed their terms such that any company with even 1 employee using an Oracle JVM had to pay for every employee in the company. ridiculous I know.

    This is just more news about Oracle’s licensing crackdown and not about Java as a whole at all. Think of it more like the Unity licensing change and you’re telling people to stop coding in C#.