As of January 1, 2019, Oracle will no longer offer free updates to Java 8 for commercial software. After this date, all end-users, which include customers of X-Formation, will be required to pay to get Oracle Java 8 updates. All Java 8 JDK and JRE released before 2019 are running on a previous license that allows end-users to use Java for free, including all X-Formation products that use Java installers and were released up until the end of 2018.
Oracle will continue to deliver commercial licenses for the newest supported Java version for free. As an example, Java 11 (https://jdk.java.net/11) will be supported for free until March 2019, when Java 12 will be released. According to Oracle, Java will have a 6-month life cycle with free support.
In response to this new licensing policy being put in place by Oracle, X-Formation will adapt our products to ensure our customers do not need to pay for commercial licenses of Java 8 and newer delivered by Oracle. As of 2019, we will be delivering software fully compatible with the currently supported version of Java. For example, License Statistics v5.15 will be released with Oracle OpenJDK 11 in the beginning of 2019.
In case of any issues or further licensing changes by Oracle, which we cannot predict, we may choose to use one of the alternative Java compilations delivered by other vendors; e.g., AdoptOpenJDK, Azul, IBM, or Red Hat. X-Formation is not currently planning to use these alternatives, but we reserve the right to change our Java provider due to technical or legal issues.