Miro Consulting has a long-term Client for whom Oracle is pressuring for their Java licensure. Oracle is using the existence of client downloads of for-fee versions of Java licensing to claim unauthorized usage. Whether these will be used on workstations or servers doesn’t matter. And the fact that it’s not installed and running doesn’t seem to matter to Oracle either. But what does matter is the following.
- The Java release is going to be or is currently used in development. Per Oracle’s own Oracle Technology Network License Agreement for Oracle Java SE, development use is free of charge, containing the language below:
|
And, in fact, all of these grants are defined in the same document just before this language.
- The Java release is going to be or is currently used with a third-party product, the vendor for which already has an agreement with Oracle.
What makes Oracle’s approach to this somewhat unsound is that the preceding circumstances are documented by Oracle. But Oracle doesn’t provide this agreement, focusing instead on all workstations and every server.
In the first instance cited above, there is no way that Oracle could know that the release of Java would be installed in development, either at the time of download or in the foreseeable future.
In the second instance cited above, Miro’s long-term Client was told – and given documentation – that the licensing of Java separately was precluded.
These situations make the exposure quite lower than the original proposal by Oracle.
Contact Miro, your trusted software licensing advisor, for more information.