Oracle checks in -XX:+UnlockCommercialVMOptions in JVM (opens in new tab)

Suddenly, putting a bit of money in the JVM allows you to go faster. In the beginning, the community will be disciplined about it and make sure that libraries and applications that use these features degrades gracefully, so you can make use of them without getting the commercial JVM. But already here it starts smelling, there are now two target JVMs. Testing just doubled in complexity.

Soon, small, clever libraries that does immensely useful stuff with the new features appear - like what Google Collections did for generics - and pretty soon you're wilfully handicapping your developers by not using commercial JVM. When you already have a revenue-generating code base, throwing Oracle a little money is a no-brainer. There's no way they'd make licensing so expensive that it wouldn't get a CTO fired NOT to buy it. But now they've introduced the drag at the start-up level which I'd voice concern over in my previous post. This is especially sad at a time when the JVM and even Java seems to be enjoying a bit of a renaissance.

Open source projects like Ruby naturally don't need anything like this; the whole open source model is more open and accessible for everyone than even Microsoft's free offerings.

Ruby doesn't need such a program because the cost of licensing Ruby for a company that only has 2 servers and the cost of licensing Ruby on a fleet of 10,000 servers is still $0. The same is true for Java, for now...

One way to look at it is like this: Previously, to increase performance of a production Java app you would pay the best Java developer you could find a lot of money to make it run fast.

Now, you might still do that, but first you will pay Oracle some licence fee so you can use their commercial JVM options (and good Java developers are likely to insist on using those feature because generally JVM tuning options work very well). That take money out of the budget for Java talent.

You can download it for free on the web.

From http://www.orafaq.com/wiki/Oracle_Licensing:

  A license is the "right to use" (RTU) the software and
  not the software itself. If you have a license, you can
  obtain a copy of the software through whatever means -
  order, download, use the CDs from your last project, etc.
  Please note that Oracle doesn't use software keys. You can
  just install the software and use it. It is up to you and
  your consciences to license the software before using it.