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by dnomad 2827 days ago
GraalVM is itself an open-source project that is licensed under the exact same license as OpenJDK [1]. Feel free to download it and build it yourself to be extra sure [2]. All the FUD around this stuff and Oracle is a bit comical. It's all... right there.

[1] https://www.graalvm.org/docs/faq/

[2] https://github.com/oracle/graal
2 comments
ptx 2827 days ago
But it's not "all" there - some things are reserved for the enterprise edition. So if people start adopting it now in the hope that its remaining technical limitations will eventually be adressed, we might discover that the improvements only apply to the EE version, while the open source version is kept more or less where it is to encourage people to pay up.
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dnomad 2827 days ago
This is true of every freemium project, from Gitlab to all the commercial Linux distros that sell support+prop extensions on the side. Given that GraalVM is a virtual machine there's strong incentive to push it far and wide. History suggests that VMs that are free and widely available survive and thrive (eg Java and .NET) while VMs that are expensive and/or difficult to redistribute die (eg Smalltalk). Oracle's incentives here, seeing as they want languages and library developers and ultimately application developers to actually deploy on GraalVM, is to go "far and wide" and not deep and narrow when it comes to their customers.

> its remaining technical limitations will eventually be adressed

It's not clear there are any technical limitations that separate CE and EE. Supposedly EE is faster but I don't think anybody has proven this with real benchmarks. All of this is clearly documented in https://www.graalvm.org/docs/faq/.

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pritambaral 2827 days ago
> This is true of every freemium project, from Gitlab to all the commercial Linux distros that sell support+prop extensions on the side.

GitLab and RedHat have a quite different history with litigation than Oracle does.

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divs1210 2827 days ago
The native binary produced by Graal CE does not support runtime optimizations - that is EE only. As such, native binaries will start faster, but run slower.

https://github.com/oracle/graal/issues/447#issuecomment-3995...

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repolfx 2827 days ago
This is true of many, many open source projects and has always been true. My first Linux was SuSE. Had to pay for it. The source was there but if you wanted Linux in an easy to use form, not so much. It was no big deal to pay because I knew it was funding the open source work. My first smartphone was an Android phone. I've paid for them, sometimes mostly to get software upgrades, because the pure open source builds were not as good. I buy a Mac even though I mostly use open source apps available for Linux and even though parts of macOS are themselves open source, because I want the extra proprietary features.

In the end most open source software I use is ultimately funded by better paid-for versions that people opt in to. The sky doesn't fall.

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zcam 2827 days ago
Right it's also gpl my bad.

The fact you can download and build it doesn't mean much in general tho.

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