Disputes With Oracle Over Java SE Licensing Proliferate

On January 23, 2023 Oracle changed how it licenses Java SE moving away from named user plus and processor metrics and instead transitioning to an employee metric based on the total number of full and part time employees and contractors of a company. You can read more about the changes here. For many companies the prices for licensing Java exploded with the new metric as all employees need to be licensed rather than just the ones using Java.

We have received reports that for many months prior to the price change the Oracle Java sales team had been reaching out aggressively to companies about licensing Java. As part of Oracle's approach, the Java team requested detailed information about a company's IT environment, including its virtual environment. Reportedly Oracle sales sought information about servers, even ones that were not running Java and where no Java software was installed. Many companies innocently provided the information not understanding that Oracle