The biggest problem here is the risk of the JVM losing its suitability for large, scalable projects. Currently JVM on Linux is $0 in licenses. No matter what $N is, it's ∞% more than 0, and the added cost of scaling to X servers is X * N, not 0. Plus, of course, the ridiculous, soul sucking calls with a "consultant" who will try to sell you Oracle licenses and insists on being your pal and "how about I come out on Wednesday, these discussions are easier face-to-face" to actually procure the bloody licences - and then sends you an Excel sheet with 15 different term and payment options that you then have to spend an afternoon parsing. Better for a cash-strapped start up to go with something free instead.<p>This is <i>exactly</i> the reason Microsoft has a BizSpark™ programme, and Ruby doesn't.
And so it begins.<p>While this leaves me with an icky feeling, being a java developer, I'm also cognizant of the fact that one of the major criticisms of Sun from the financial markets was that they could not monetize java very well.<p>It'll be interesting to look back in 10 years and see how Java has fared under Oracle.
The important thing to note from the source comments:<p>commercial flags support features for which Oracle charges a fee for production use, though they're free for development and/or evaluation. There's no enforcement mechanism in Hotspot other than that -XX:+UnlockCommercialVMOptions must first be specified in order to use them.
If nothing else, this proves that Oracle is serious about OpenJDK. If they weren't planning to continue to provide the commercial/patented features under the open source license, why have a gate/switch to disable them ?
The -XX:+UnlockCommercialVMOptions flag has been removed from OpenJDK (<a href="http://j.mp/u9gAJ9" rel="nofollow">http://j.mp/u9gAJ9</a>). It was pushed to an open repository by mistake.
As Mark Reinhold, Chief Architect for Java SE at Oracle, pointed out on Twitter [0], that patch was meant for Oracle's product VM, a minor fork of OpenJDK, which has
"commercial features" just like other vendors' VMs. Since it was checked into OpenJDK by mistake, it has been backed out of OpenJDK again within 24 hours[1].<p>Some of the key points of Oracle's Java SE strategy[2] are:<p>* Oracle plans to contribute the results of the combined Oracle Java HotSpot and Oracle JRockit JVMs to the OpenJDK project.<p>* The Oracle JDK and Java Runtime Environment (JRE) will continue to be available as free downloads, with no changes to the existing licensing models.<p>If you'd like to learn more about it and the ongoing JVM convergence work, I'd recommend reading Henrik Ståhl's blog post from last year here:<p><a href="http://blogs.oracle.com/henrik/entry/oracles_jvm_strategy" rel="nofollow">http://blogs.oracle.com/henrik/entry/oracles_jvm_strategy</a><p>- Henrik is Senior Director of Java Product Management at Oracle and runs a group responsible for product strategy for Java SE, among other things.<p>Dalibor Topic,
Java F/OSS Ambassador,
Java Product Group @ Oracle<p>[0] <a href="https://twitter.com/#!/mreinhold/status/142122264220008448" rel="nofollow">https://twitter.com/#!/mreinhold/status/142122264220008448</a><p>[1] <a href="https://twitter.com/#!/mreinhold/status/142102137130844161" rel="nofollow">https://twitter.com/#!/mreinhold/status/142102137130844161</a><p>[2] <a href="http://www.oracle.com/us/corporate/press/173782" rel="nofollow">http://www.oracle.com/us/corporate/press/173782</a>