Oracle Java SE Access
Changes Affecting Red Hat’s Distribution of Oracle Java software
What is happening?
Red Hat has provided access to Oracle Java SE software bundled with certain Red Hat Enterprise Linux and JBoss Middleware subscriptions. Customer access to the Oracle Java SE software with those subscriptions through the Red Hat Customer Portal has changed as of November 30, 2017.
What does this mean for you?
Red Hat customers who purchased eligible RHEL and JBoss Middleware subscriptions on or before 30 November 2017 bundled with Oracle Java SE will continue to have access to the Oracle Java SE software listed below and will receive support and updates from Red Hat until November 30, 2018. After November 30, 2017, the Oracle Java SE software will no longer be accessible from the Oracle Java channel in your Red Hat Customer Portal account. Red Hat will be in touch with these customers shortly to provide additional information with respect to continued access to the support and updates.
While you may continue to receive access to support and updates for eligible RHEL and JBoss Middleware subscriptions purchased on or before 30 November 2017, you may not use the Oracle Java SE support or updates with any Red Hat subscriptions purchased after November 30, 2017. Please refer to the relevant Oracle end user license agreement here for terms related to use of the software.
Please contact Red Hat Technical Support with any questions.
What is OpenJDK?
For an integrated Java solution consider OpenJDK (Open Java Development Kit) which is the default Red Hat Java development and runtime environment. OpenJDK is an open source and fully compliant implementation of the Java Platform, Standard Edition (Java SE). The OpenJDK upstream community project is currently sponsored and led by Oracle; the OpenJDK software is released under the GNU General Public License (GNU GPL 2 and 2+). Red Hat is committed to ongoing support of the OpenJDK platform.
The following list of Red Hat Knowledgebase articles provide more information about OpenJDK:
OpenJDK Life Cycle and Support Policy
Oracle JDK vs. OpenJDK
Is OpenJDK supported on Windows?
Oracle Java Packages
The following Oracle Java packages distributed by Red Hat are affected by this notice:
- java-1.6.0-sun
- java-1.6.0-sun-demo
- java-1.6.0-sun-devel
- java-1.6.0-sun-jdbc
- java-1.6.0-sun-plugin
- java-1.6.0-sun-src
- java-1.7.0-oracle
- java-1.7.0-oracle-devel
- java-1.7.0-oracle-javafx
- java-1.7.0-oracle-jdbc
- java-1.7.0-oracle-plugin
- java-1.7.0-oracle-src
- java-1.8.0-oracle (RHEL 6.6+, 7.1+)
- java-1.8.0-oracle-devel (RHEL 6.6+, 7.1+)
- java-1.8.0-oracle-javafx (RHEL 6.6+, 7.1+)
- java-1.8.0-oracle-jdbc (RHEL 6.6+, 7.1+)
- java-1.8.0-oracle-plugin (RHEL 6.6+, 7.1+)
- java-1.8.0-oracle-src (RHEL 6.6+, 7.1+)
Thank you for your understanding during this transition. Please contact Red Hat Technical Support with any questions.
13 Comments
"After November 30, 2017, the Oracle Java SE software will no longer be accessible from the Oracle Java channel in your Red Hat Customer Portal account."
WTF? You yank access to the channel on Nov. 30th and don't notify customers until the day after?!? And all Errata links referring to Oracle Java now 404 across the site? And other links get "Access Denied"?? With NO explanation as to why and NO transparency. Wow ... just wow.
We have standardized on the java-1.x.0-oracle JRE RPM set ... thanks for the advance warning, Red Hat! Great way to treat your paying customers.
Agreed, extremely poor work on this one, our license renewed on the 27th of November, so we should technically continue to have access to Oracle Java, but nope, nothing.
Agreed. Sounds like we have to go through support to get access even though we have contacts in place prior to Nov 30, 2017. But even then, we only get support for 1 year.
Update:
To anyone who is interested, we opened a Support case and in reply received 2 attachments with links to large tarballs for RHEL 6 and RHEL 7. Unfortunately the RHEL 7 tarball is missing
Oracle-Java-7-x86_64/java-1.7.0-oracle-1.7.0.161-1jpp.4.el7.x86_64.rpm.xz
so we are still pursuing the case we opened.
Some very unhappy customers. "With regards to the attached email we have received, I am very disappointed that there was no forewarning of this happening. Indeed I wasted a whole day trying to get the packages to download only to receive this email more than 24 hours after the fact. As we have purchased our subscriptions prior to November 30th can you let me know when I can expect to have access to the Oracle java channels again?"
I see only 'What', but the most the evenly important 'Why' is not included. How can i explain inside my company that changes are needed.
Also getting the software not anymore for new subscriptions after 01.12 with Satellite in the middle does not work. This makes it even harder because you can put those same subscriptions in the joined pool, because then it is a lottery on which hosts the repo will be available and on which not.
A very poor customer experience here for entreprise software that is know for it backwards compatibility.
I'll speculate on the why, money or rivalry. Perhaps the costs increased dramatically from Oracle to Red Hat, Oracle isn't exactly known for making things cheaper. Or perhaps this is part of the longer term move away from Oracle that seemed to start around the Unbreakable Linux release that upset Red Hat so much. Satellite moved away from Oracl DB etc. Just my guesses at the base level, now what a PR person will say, who knows... Perhaps it was about increasing synergy in forward thinking serverless environments :).
Agree, no notification ahead and no one from RH got in touch with us.
"Red Hat will be in touch with these customers shortly to provide additional information with respect to continued access to the support and updates." - this is something that would be great about month ago but didn't happen ...
The article says "Red Hat customers who purchased eligible RHEL and JBOSS subscriptions on or before 30 November 2017 bundled with Oracle Java SE will continue to have access to the Oracle Java SE software listed below and will receive support and updates from Red Hat until November 30, 2018. " But, does not provide any channel for us to download the package.
We just got a notice saying this article was updated. I see nothing to indicate that there was an update.
Meanwhile, we have discovered that the 2 tar bundles we have been provided are missing both the JDK ("java-1.8.0-oracle-devel") and the JavaFX ("java-1.8.0-oracle-javafx") RPMs. What a debacle this is.
Hello William,
I see the "java-1.8.0-oracle-devel" was provided to you in the case, as requested. I notice that "java-1.7.0-oracle-javafx-1.7.0.161" was included in the RHEL 7 bundle that was provided, but the "java-1.8.0-oracle-javafx" were not. It's not clear in the support case that this was missing as well, I just happened to see this comment. Shall I inform the engineer to attach the below packages to the case as well?
Regards, Sandeep MJ
Sandeep,
Here is the list of RPMs we have received via our open case so far:
We are still missing the following:
It feels like the '-devel' (i.e. the JDK) and '-javafx' RPMs were deliberately left out of the 2 tarballs!
I don't really even understand what the purpose of sending us the 2 tarball attachments was when they don't even contain HALF of the necessary RPMs.
Okay, so you want us to switch to SuSE or Ubuntu enterprise services? Really?!