Welcome to the No-Fee Terms and Conditions, which makes the Java dev kit a bit more appealing
Analysis Oracle this week made Oracle JDK « available for free, » for personal, commercial and production use, including quarterly security updates, for a limited time. « Free » in this context means the software is now licensed under the Oracle No-Fee Terms and Conditions ( NFTC) license, having been previously under the Oracle Technology Network ( OTN) License Agreement for Oracle Java SE. But « free » does not mean developers may do as they please. Oracle’s NFTC forbids redistribution of its Java software for a fee. « Free » also does not mean the NFTC license conforms with the Free Software Definition or the Open Source Definition, both of which require allowing fee-based distribution. « Even though it is ‘free to use’ – although not really totally free to use, since commercial use isn’t free to use – that is extremely different from Free Software and Open Source, » said Jim Jagielski, an open source veteran who helped co-found the Apache Software Foundation and now oversees open source at Salesforce. « It is still a proprietary implementation, and although you are allowed to use it, you get none of the other freedoms normally associated with open source. When truly free/open source alternatives exist, what exactly is the incentive to use Oracle’s version? » In a blog post, Donald Smith, senior director of product management at Oracle, described the license shift as a response to feedback after the Oracle OpenJDK was put under the GPL and customers said they « wanted the trusted, rock-solid Oracle JDK under an unambiguously free terms license, too. » OpenJDK is open source, under the JDK Project, and serves as a reference implementation for Oracle’s commercially-oriented Java Platform, Standard Edition Development Kit (JDK).
