Oracle Java licensing
Oracle's step-by-step rewrite of its JDK terms, which turned the world's most widely installed runtime into a licensing risk.
For two decades Java was free to run in production. With Java 11 in September 2018, Oracle's own JDK suddenly required a paid subscription for commercial use, and in January 2019 free security updates for Java 8 ended for businesses. Java 17 arrived in 2021 under a new no-cost license, NFTC — but only until the next long-term release. In January 2023 came the Java SE Universal Subscription, priced per employee across the whole organisation, regardless of how many actually run Java.
Read the small print and the code itself was never locked up: OpenJDK is GPL with the Classpath exception, and builds such as Eclipse Temurin and Amazon Corretto are functionally equivalent. The trap is Oracle's license audits, which have made Java a standing item in every SAM programme.