OK, Sounds Like a Tipping Point

Not withstanding my criticisms of Amazon, it is probably not the most evil tech company out there.

It's probably Oracle, and that's not even considering the wide spread rumors about former CEO Larry Ellison's sexual harassment.

So, Sun created the Java programming language, released it as open source, and then Oracle bought Sun, and promptly tried to extract money from users who had adopted it on the basis of it being FOSS.

As any Oracle user can tell you, their business model is very much like that of a hostage taker, and they use audits, and the threats of audits to extract more money from their customers than had previously agreed to.

Well, it appears that Oracle's terms for Java have gotten so egregiously unfair that a majority of their customers have decided to shoot the hostage.

They changed the licensing terms for their development environment, which is not FOSS, just the Java language is, and almost ¾ of their existing customers are heading for the exits:

Only 14 percent of Oracle Java subscribers plan to stay on Big Red's runtime environment, according to a study following the introduction of an employee-based subscription model.

At the same time, 36 percent of the 663 Java users questioned said they had already moved to the employee-based pricing model introduced in January 2023. Shortly after the new model was implemented, experts warned that it would create a significant price hike for users adopting it. By July, global tech research company Gartner was forecasting that those on the new subscription package would face between two and five times the costs compared with the previous usage-based model.

As such, among the 86 percent of respondents using Oracle Java SE who are currently moving or plan to move all or some of their Java applications off Oracle environments, 53 percent said the Oracle environment was too expensive, according to the study carried out by independent market research firm Dimensional Research. Forty-seven percent said the reason for moving was a preference for open source, and 38 percent said it was because of uncertainty created by ongoing changes in pricing, licensing, and support.

………

The survey found three-quarters of Java migrations were completed within a year, 23 percent within three months.

I've never understood the success of Oracle.

It's always seemed to me that dealing with was akin to hiring a rabid wolverine as a babysitter.