[German]Using JAVA? Then you should be prepared for Oracle knocking on your door and wanting to talk about license fees. Top 200 companies have already faced an audit where Oracle checked the "license per user" and made additional demands if necessary. This is set to increase over the next 6 to 9 months. And Oracle is probably tracking down users who are using JAVA without licenses.
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JAVA licensing per user
I haven't discussed the topic of JAVA here on the blog for ages. I gave up blogging about JAVA updates, when JAVA became chargeable. I then switched to Amazon's Corretto for the Android SDK, which I occasionally use for my Android books (see Java: Amazons OpenJDK Corretto released). For customers who rely on Oracle JAVA, it's probably getting pretty expensive now (see my post On the license hook: 3 times higher license costs for MS SQL Server, user-based Oracle Java SE licensesLicensing hooks: MS SQL Server license increased by factor 3, and user-based Oracle Java SE licenses), as Oracle now requires user-based licenses.
Audits in Fortune 200 companies
The Register quotes in this article that Oracle, according to a licensing expert, has started sending Java audit letters to Fortune 200 companies for the first time. The background to this is the change to the licensing terms in 2023, which now provide for user-based licensing. Oracle believes it can offer customers with the Java SE Universal Subscription "a simple, cost-effective monthly subscription that includes Java SE licensing and support for use on desktops, servers or cloud deployments".
Companies with limited Java usage will have to license the software per employee under the new model. The Register quotes industry experts as saying that this is a drastic change from the CPU based licensing model previously offered by Oracle. Gartner estimates that the per-employee subscription model will be two to five times more expensive than the previous licensing model.
According to The Register, only smaller companies with up to one hundred employees have received audit letters from Oracle. The letters asked the companies to clarify their Java licensing. According to Craig Guarente, founder and CEO of Palisade Compliance, an independent Oracle licensing consultancy, Oracle has also begun targeting large companies in recent weeks. The companies received notifications for an audit.
The Register article cites a retail company that switched its point-of-sale systems to a user-based license using JAVA. Oracle's claim amounted to 4 million US dollars, whereupon the company switched to Open Java, saving 90 percent of the costs.
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Craig Guarente advises JAVA users to check where licensing is really required before signing a long running license agreement with Oracle. This could be expensive and cement dependencies. The Register quotes the licensing expert as saying ""If you're paying Oracle a million dollars a year and you're on a three-year subscription, what do you think is going to happen at renewal? It's not going to be a million dollars, it's going to be as much as Oracle can generate, and if you're locked into Oracle and you can't break away from Oracle within 30 or 60 days, your renewal is going to be much higher."
Warning to users not to reveal too much
In another article, The Register reports that Oracle is sending unsolicited emails to companies offering to discuss Java subscription contracts as part of a "New Universal Subscription Site License". The aim is apparently to obtain information in order to score points in future license negotiations.
Fredrik Filipsson, director of software licensing consultancy Redress Compliance, is quoted by The Register as saying that three small companies have contacted the company about the email in the last four weeks. Filipsson cites one company that used Java on five servers. Oracle put the (user-related) subscription at 127,000 dollars.
In a blog post SAY NO TO THIS "ORACLE JAVA AUDIT", Filipsson discusses the talks between companies and Oracle about Java licensing. He says that if a customer provides Oracle with information about their Java usage, Oracle can claim that "the customer has to license hundreds, sometimes thousands of processors because of a few Java installations on VMware." The advice is not to give out any information and to consult an independent consultant to clarify what really needs to be licensed by Oracle.
Hunting JAVA users
Even those who are not Oracle customers but use JAVA could be contacted by Oracle in the next nine months, according to this The Register article. House of Brick, a consultancy firm, has recently been contacted by various companies about this. In a blog post about the risks of using JAVA runtime licenses, the company goes into details.
For example, Oracle probably asks for the installation date of certain software and wants to know whether the customer also uses VMware. This results in a user-related license invoice that can run into the hundreds of thousands. Oracle comes across the companies by tracking and tracing the IP addresses of downloads of the JAVA runtime. Oracle has deployed an entire team of employees in India to contact organizations around the world about non-compliant use of Java SE, according to The Register article, which refers to House of Bricks. Organizations using the JAVA runtime environment should be prepared for an audit or mail.
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