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UK unis to cough up to £10M on Java to keep Oracle off their backs
(www.theregister.com)
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this post was submitted on 14 Jun 2025
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This is a reason of why we should avoid using Oracle Java, especially for commercial purposes and in-use for enterprise purposes, and we can see here, its also cost for education institutional too.
Java is still free, but just avoiding using Oracle Java. Oracle providing OpenJDK for free too, but guess, there are third-party 'forks' which seems is more better. Here's the website you can consult: https://whichjdk.com/ and the author of that website recommends: Adoptium Temurin, Azul Zulu, Bellsoft Liberica, & Amazon Corretto.
Personally, Im stick to using Amazon Corretto 😅
More references:
Literally nobody I know uses Oracle Java. It's either Open JDK or nothing. Even popular frameworks recommend using others (ex. Spring recommends using Bellsoft Liberica).
These alt forks are supported for longer and have the latest security patches while Oracle's Open JDK only provides updates for six months, even for LTS releases. Is there even any legitimate reason to be using Oracle JDK at this point? If it really came to that I'd rather give my money to Bellsoft or Azul over Oracle.
I think its will be goes to deeper specific technical & business sides to looking justification to use Oracle Java SE. Its pretty uncommon, but generally, most of us here just developing application and/or backend for commercial implementation, and didn't require much deeper technical things, like using other JDK's than Oracle Java SE is still handling good in most of our cases.
If you pay to Bellsoft or Azul, I think you'll pay for commercial support from them, like if you running company and using much Java in productions, implementing Java in mass scale, and/or enterprise support, and really need or require support system from Bellsoft/Azul.
*cmiiw
I agree. The main reason to pay Oracle or any other JDK provider is to get support and patches. There are also specific use cases such as performance considerations where commercial JVMs may have low level optimizations that may be beneficial in certain use cases.
But for general development, even on enterprise level, you'd be fine with regular community editions of OpenJDK. In fact I don't know of anyone who pays for commercial JDKs.
My main gripe is with Oracle, whose business model regarding Java is just scummy in general. If you use Oracle JDK and they come knocking, you deserve whatever happens to you. Google learned this lesson the hard way, we should learn from their experience.
So you're avoiding a corporate ass-hat to go with a corporate oligarch?
As @[email protected] answered, and adding my personal answer, personally I didn't see any problem by using Amazon Corretto.
Currently, there are no contracts nor paid licenses by using Amazon Corretto in commercial use and even in enterprise environment. Nothing, just use it. Compared with Oracle Java SE where if you use it in commercial purpose, Oracle may caught and demand you to pay.
And I spent some of times in AWS too, and I felt, using dual JDK's builds (Corretto for work, and another builds (let say Temurin or Zulu) for personal) is still kinda inefficient. This is the reason of why I stick to Amazon Corretto.
But, if you didn't using AWS and/or didn't like Amazon in general, nobody can force and stop you, there are alternatives, and you can use Temurin, Zulu, or Liberica.
Amazon Corretto is free even for commercial use and is optimized to run on AWS infra.
If you're not on AWS then you have little reason to use it though it's not a bad JDK distro itself.
I personally use Eclipse Temurin both in personal projects and at work.