Oracle JDK is free for commercial use again!According to the newly released “Oracle No-Fee Terms and Conditions” (NFTC) license, the 2018 decision to charge commercial fees for Oracle JDK has been withdrawn, and the release of Oracle’s OpenJDK will not be affected. The latest NFTC applies to the recently released Oracle JDK Version 17 and subsequent versions.
existIn a blog post published recentlyDonald Smith, Oracle’s senior director of product management, explained the reasons for this decision. He wrote:
Providing the Oracle OpenJDK build version under the GPL is very popular, but the feedback from developers, academia, and enterprises is that they also hope to obtain a trustworthy and rock-solid Oracle JDK under a clear free license. Oracle is grateful for the feedback from the developer ecosystem and is pleased to announce that starting with Java 17, we will fully meet this requirement.
Smith made it clear that the new version of the NFTC “includes commercial and production uses”, although the NFTC does not seem to emphasize this fact, and “as long as there is no charge, redistribution is allowed.”
Oracle promises to update the Java LTS version under the new version of NFTC until one year after the next LTS version is provided to the Java community. In view of Oracle’s proposal to shorten the release cycle of Java LTS from 3 years to 2 years, security updates will have a total of 3 years. After that, further use of Oracle JDK in production requires a commercial license. NFTC also includes quarterly security updates for non-LTS JDK versions.
Customers can still get Oracle JDK 17 through a commercial Oracle Java SE subscription, paying per user or per processor. This subscription includes Java Management Service, Advanced Management Console, GraalVM Enterprise and support. Oracle does not provide commercial support for its OpenJDK release.
As Simon Ritter, deputy chief technology officer of Azul Systems, explained, NFTC has added two other licenses for Oracle JDK: Oracle Install Code License and Oracle Technology Network License Agreement. It is recommended that companies carefully review the NFTC before using it with Oracle JDK.
Investigations show that Oracle’s JDK release is no longer the most popular Java release. Developers seem to prefer AdoptOpenJDK (now Eclipse Temurin), Amazon,Microsoft, Azul, and other vendors’ OpenJDK distributions. These organizations also provide commercial support for their distribution. In the case of Eclipse Temurin, Azul provides such support.