Organizations that do not consider themselves Oracle customers, but who use Java, can expect a call from the Big Red in the next three to nine months, according to a software licensing specialist.
House of Brick, which has spent years advising clients on how to manage their commercial arrangements with Oracle, said it had noticed an uptick in organizations seeking advice after being contacted by the tech giant about their Java use.
"Even if you are not an Oracle customer, they are tracking product downloads and matching the IP addresses to your organization. Oracle has deployed a whole team of people in India that are contacting organizations worldwide with claims of non-compliant Java SE usage," the company said in a blog, referring to the runtime environment.
While most Oracle and Java users have become aware of the changes, those who have never dealt with Oracle for their applications, database or middleware software might be new to the arrangement.
"They don't have a relationship with Oracle. But Oracle has tracked Java SE downloads to their company. And then Oracle approached them saying 'We see that you've been downloading our Java SE product, it requires a licence.' This might be an email coming from a person that has an audit or similar title in their signature," said Nathan Biggs, House of Brick CEO.
For example, Oracle is likely to ask for the installation date and ask whether the customer also deploys on VMware.
But Oracle will be leading towards an "offer" to overlook earlier unlicensed software if they agree to sign up to the new subscription model, Biggs said.
Organizations should be careful before they take up the offer, he said. Users with legacy Oracle agreements face more than 100 percent — even 1,000 percent — cost increases when moving to the new terms. Bills going from tens of thousands of dollars to more than a million have been confirmed by multiple licensing specialists.
He said Oracle is entitled to ask for backdated payments for people already using Java since the paid-for deal was announced. But whether they should be forced to adopted the 2023 per employee arrangement is a moot point.
To start with, Oracle will limit the back-payment to three years. But it will also try to charge users under the Universal pricing arrangement introduced in January 2023.
"This is absurd because the universal pricing has only been around for a year. We always then push back on Oracle," he said.
The way the article makes it sound is, if individual employees download OracleJDK while on the company network, and use it for small personal scripts or automation, then that might be enough to trigger Oracle to act.
If your company is large enough, then enough employees may have done that to make you a reasonable target for litigation if you don’t work something out with Oracle. And Oracle is an expert at litigation.
I think that the best defense for a large company would be to IP block all Oracle domains and periodically scan employee laptops for any Oracle products (especially JDK and VirtualBox guest additions) and delete them.
You really have to treat anything that Oracle touches as malware if you want to protect yourself.