Oracle threw a surprise Price Hiking Party for Java on this day in 2023 when it quietly switched to an employee-based pricing model. Two years later, Java users are still leaving early and walking away mad… and saving money.
On January 23, 2023, Oracle quietly updated its pricing for Oracle Java SE to an employee-based model. Updated with clandestine precision, the new price list detailed very clearly how its employee-based pricing would work. The price list uses a hypothetical company of 28,000 employees (including contractors and part-time employees) to demonstrate how the Java bill would come to just over $2.2 million per year – regardless of how many employees use Java.
That spring, 82% of participants in the Azul State of Java Survey and Report expressed concern about Oracle’s pricing model change and 72% said they were actively looking at alternatives to Oracle Java SE.
Over the year-and-a-half since, sentiment hasn’t changed. In 2024, Azul’s Usage, Pricing and Migration Report and Survey showed similar results. A meager 14% of participants who used Oracle Java planned to say with Oracle, while 86% had already migrated to another JDK provider, were actively migrating, or planned to in the near future. Most said they were switching because of Oracle Java pricing.
What should you do?
The thought of switching Java providers is a daunting one, but the anticipation is often worse than the procedure. In the Oracle migration report, 84% of participants who had already migrated from Oracle Java to another provider said their migrations went as expected or were easier than expected. 75% of those companies completed their migrations within a year.
If your company is paying for Oracle Java, you have choices:
- Stay with Oracle and very likely pay more
- Upgrade to Java 21 (if you haven’t already) and enjoy free support until 2027, when you will have to upgrade again and every three years after that.
- Switch to a free Java distribution that doesn’t provide patches for vulnerabilities and hope for the best
- Switch to a non-Oracle Java paid distribution with paid support and very likely pay less (66% of such companies in the Oracle migration report said they now pay less than they did with Oracle).
The case for Azul Platform Core
Companies who subscribe to Azul Platform Core save typically 70% compared to Oracle Java SE. Azul Zulu Builds of OpenJDK are TCK-tested, certified compliant with Java SE standards.
Azul delivers security fixes on a strict SLA and typically on the day of Oracle’s releases. Azul enables compliance with security policies (both internal policies and external industry/governmental regulations) without the risk of regression that comes with full updates. This limited-scope release, called a Critical Patch Update or CPU for short, only contains fixes to security vulnerabilities and critical bugs. CPUs are something only Azul and Oracle provide to their commercially supported customers.
Azul also indemnifies against ”copyleft contamination” from their JVM. Azul provides extended updates for Java 6 and Java 7, even though Oracle no longer does. All Azul supported versions of Java received backported CPUs and other updates.
If you’re not happy with Oracle Java SE or your current OpenJDK provider, you have choices. Consider your options carefully. With a Java engineering team second in size only to Oracle, Azul provides an unmatched customer experience. And to us, customer satisfaction matters most.
The second birthday party of Oracle’s pricing model isn’t much of a celebration. If you’re ready to storm out and you want OpenJDK without the high price tag and audits, contact Azul.
