Lastly, Oracle states that this change does not apply to prior versions. For purposes of clarity, the “to develop” grant includes using the Programs to run profilers, debuggers and Integrated Development Environments (IDE Tools) where the primary purpose of the IDE Tools is profiling, debugging and source code editing Applications.” “Development Use” is defined as “… Your internal use of the Programs to develop, test, prototype and demonstrate Your Applications.

“Personal Use” is defined by Oracle in that same document as “… an Individual’s use of the Programs solely on a desktop or laptop computer under such Individual’s control only to run Personal Applications.” (i) Personal Use, (ii) Development Use, (iii) Oracle Approved Product Use, and/or (iv) Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Use. Oracle grants You a nonexclusive, nontransferable, limited license to use the Programs, subject to the restrictions stated in this Agreement and Program Documentation, only for:

That agreement currently includes the following language:

Third, once the free-use period ends, Java SE subscriptions will once again be governed by the Oracle Technology Network License Agreement for Oracle Java SE.

The next LTS release, as of this writing, is Release 21, which is due to become available in September 2023 (but per Oracle, these designations of LTS or non-LTS are subject to change). Oracle had been gone on record as making every third release an LTS release. This free-use period is referred as No-Fee Terms and Conditions or “NFTC”. When the next Long Term Service or “LTS” release is made available, the period of free use will end one (1) year later.

Second, this announcement has an event horizon.

The JRE for commercial or production use remains licensable. Since Java SE 10, there has been a single download, but Oracle will now make the JRE (“Java Runtime Environment”) and the JDK separate.

First off, this is only the Java Development Kit or “JDK” which again will be a separate download.

On Tuesday, September 14, 2021, Oracle announced that it is making its “Oracle JDK available for free” even for commercial and/or production use, but the JRE (Java Runtime Environment) is still a licensed product for a fee

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