Comment by gf000

Comment by gf000 2 days ago

I have made a bunch of claims, that are objectively true. From there, basic logical inference says that you can completely freely use Java. Anything else is irrelevant.

I don't know what/which university you talk about, but I'm sure they were also "forced to pay $$$" for their water bills and whatnot. If they decided to go with paid support, then.. you have to pay for it. In exchange you can a) point your finger at a third-party if something goes wrong (which governments love doing/often legally necessary) b) get actual live support on Christmas Eve if needed.

traceroute66 2 days ago

TL;DR: Its impossible to know if anyone on campus has downloaded Oracle Java....

Quote from this article:[1]

     *He told The Register that Oracle is "putting specific Java sales teams in country, and then identifying those companies that appear to be downloading and... then going in and requesting to [do] audits. That recipe appears to be playing out truly globally at this point."*

[1] https://www.theregister.com/2025/06/13/jisc_java_oracle/

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gf000 2 days ago

That's also true of torrented PhotoShop, Microsoft Office, etc..
Also, as another topic, Oracle is doing audits specifically because their software doesn't phone home to check licenses and stuff like that - which is a crucial requirement for their intended target demographics, big government organizations, safety critical systems, etc. A whole country's healthcare system, or a nuclear power base can't just stop because someone forgot to pay the bill.
So instead Oracle just visits companies that have a license with them, and checks what is being used to determine if it's in accord with the existing contract. And yeah, from this respect I also heard of a couple of stories where a company was not using the software as the letter of the contract, e.g. accidentally enabling this or that, and at the audit the Oracle salesman said that they will ignore the mistake if they subscribe to this larger package, which most manager will gladly accept as they can avoid the blame, which is questionable business practice, but still doesn't have anything to do with OpenJDK..

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josefx 2 days ago

> Quote from this article:[1]
The article tries very hard to draw a connection between the licensing costs for the universities and Oracle auditing random java downloads, but nobody actually says that this is what happened.
The waiver of historic fees goes back to the last licensing change where Oracle changed how licensing fees would be calculated. So it seems reasonable that Oracle went after them because they were paying customers that failed to pay the inflated fees.

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