A New GraalVM Release and New Free License (opens in new tab)

> Your license is contingent on compliance with the following conditions

> [...]

> - You do not cause or permit reverse engineering, disassembly or decompilation of the Programs (except as allowed by law) by You nor allow an associated party to do so.

> For clarity, any source code that may be included in the distribution with the Programs is provided solely for reference purposes and may not be modified, unless such source code is under Separate Terms permitting modification.

This is not a "free" license in the widely-understood sense. At least Oracle ain't calling this "open source", but still. This trend of corporations inventing newfangled non-free licenses and calling them things they clearly are not really needs to stop.

Their licensing is pretty confusing to me. Seems like you can now use the Enterprise edition under a custom license. I'm not a lawyer, but the new license lets you

> internally use the unmodified Programs for the purposes of developing, testing, prototyping and demonstrating your applications, and running the Program for Your own personal use or internal business operations

I would be pretty hesitant to use this without consulting a lawyer first. It's doesn't allow external usage, but the license doesn't clarify what's defined as internal vs external usage.

> Oracle grants to You, as a recipient of this Program, subject to the conditions stated herein, a nonexclusive, nontransferable, limited license to:

(a) internally use the unmodified Programs for the purposes of developing, testing, prototyping and demonstrating your applications, and running the Program for Your own personal use or internal business operations; and (b) redistribute the unmodified Program and Program Documentation, under the terms of this License, provided that You do not charge Your licensees any fees associated with such distribution or use of the Program, including, without limitation, fees for products that include or are bundled with a copy of the Program or for services that involve the use of the distributed Program.

License question …

Does (b) before mean you can’t use Graal for a paid SaaS offering?

I see you’re granted rights for internal usage from (a).

But external usage seems to imply your bundled offering cannot cost the customer anything.

Am I wrongly reading the license grant above?

> Oracle GraalVM

Is this basically GraalVM EE released for free under a "limited" license?

Until Oracle changes the terms on you...

I was excited for a while.. Reading the license FAQ is worthwhile, it discusses what seems to be the limited lifetime applicability of the no charge license. As a non lawyer, it is nice that it seems to be legal to write and run your own software in your own home or business using it, but it does not explicitly allow you to even publish an application for others. It would be useful if Oracle would clearly allow developers to publish applications created with it, and give it a three year or longer supported term, so we know it won't morph into very expensive enterprise software while we rely on it. I don't doubt Graal is awesome, but if no one uses it, it remains just a lab research toy forever.

Anything Oracle / Microsoft = mistrust

Like my coworker

It's dead Jim...