[gutnor]

Most likely, organisation that needs this kind of workaround do not have sysadmin that monitor or track JVM updates. They just have inflexible process guardian with a 2 week lead time and at least 1 man-week worth of effort on a specific budget code. Of course the only source of change request would be the developers themselves.

I have seen organisation devolve like that on the database side. At one time you have a DBA team monitoring server, planning for capacity, upgrade, optimising script and owning datamodel. A few years of cost cutting and 3 guys own the datamodel of tens of application, over hundreds of servers, basically becoming a huge bottleneck for the 300+ developers. When adding a column is eating half of your project budgets and adding uncertainty on delivery date, developers become creative. The best of them sneak a way to get DBA access, the others multiplex value in existing columns (Hello, "PROPERTIES" xml column !)