I am trying to get my head around the personal and commercial usages of oracle jdk vs open jdk and need validation and inputs on my understanding.
OpenJDK: Free for personal and commercial use.
Oracle JDK: Free for personal, paid for commercial.
From an organization's perspective, it will be cost-sensible to go for a free version using open jdk rather than shell out money on licenses. So why ever opt for an oracle jdk? What's the trick here?
One possibility I can think of is support. Open JDK has no long term support, has a new version release every 6 months, so if my application is running on Open JDK 8, after 6 months with the new jdk being made available, there are chances of my application to stop working? If yes, that leaves me with the following options.
- I would need to either migrate to the newer open JDK version.
- Had I been using oracle JDK all along I had the guarantee from Oracle that my app still works even after whatever new releases.
Since up-time of products is crucial to the organization, folks don't mind shelling out on oracle jdk licenses than landing up in a situation where you saved bucks but on one fine day your processes stop working.
Is my understanding correct, and if not what all am I missing?
Yet another perspective I have in mind is how is the release of new open jdk version going to stop my applications from working, my app is still running on previous version of openjdk which is perfectly compatible - but yes I might not be able to leverage the new features released in the jdk if I do not migrate.
Thoughts?