Surveys suggest that Oracle's JDK distributions are not the most popular Java distributions anymore. Its new version 3.0 covers Oracle's NFTC. That is why Java champions banded together and clarified matters with the popular ' Java is still free' article. Oracles' decision to start charging for its JDK in 2018 led to considerable uncertainty and confusion in the Java community. Organizations are advised to carefully review the NFTC before using it with the Oracle JDK. Oracle offers no commercial support for its OpenJDK distribution.Īs Simon Ritter, deputy CTO at Azul Systems, explains, NFTC joins two other licenses for the Oracle JDK: the Oracle Binary Code License and the Oracle Technology Network License Agreement.

This subscription includes the Java Management Service, Advanced Management Console, GraalVM Enterprise, and support. The NFTC also covers quarterly security updates for non-LTS JDK releases.Ĭustomers can still get the Oracle JDK 17 under the commercial Oracle Java SE Subscription, paid for either per user or per processor. After that period, further use of the Oracle JDK in production requires a commercial license. Given that Oracle proposed to shorten the Java LTS release cadence from three years to two years, security updates will be available for a total of three years. Oracle promises security updates for a Java LTS release under the NFTC until one year after the next LTS release is made available to the Java community. Smith explicitly stated that the NFTC 'includes commercial and production use,' although the NFTC does not seem to highlight this fact, and that 'redistribution is permitted as long as it is not for a fee.' Oracle appreciates the feedback from the developer ecosystem and are pleased to announce that as of Java 17 we are delivering on exactly that request. Providing Oracle OpenJDK builds under the GPL was highly welcomed, but feedback from developers, academia, and enterprises was that they wanted the trusted, rock-solid Oracle JDK under an unambiguously free terms license, too. The NFTC applies to the recently released version 17 of Oracle JDK and future versions.ĭonald Smith, senior director of product management at Oracle, explained the reason for this decision in a recent blog post, writing: This move reverses a 2018 decision to charge for Oracle JDK production use and does not affect Oracle‘s OpenJDK distribution.

The Oracle JDK is available free of charge for production use again - under the new ' Oracle No-Fee Terms and Conditions' (NFTC) license.

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