A lot. For all practical purposes, it very hard to get projects to move to big version numbers in large enterprises.

Its not as simple as just recompiling code. Something like the entire ecosystem has to move, you will have plenty of compatibility problems, code breakage and catch-22 situations.

This is not good news for Java.

Also a lot of 'Architects' will be forced to think if they will be made to pay for Java later. Hence should they use something else to build their latest projects?

Moving to something else entirely is even more costly than just moving to the next major version.

The EOL for JDK 8 has been known for quite some time now.

Architects who haven’t taken that into account yet have been negligent regardless of Oracle charging for future updates or not.

Migrations almost always require quite some effort but there was plenty of time to prepare in this case.

Im not talking about the existing projects.

Either way, if it comes to a point where you have to pay for something like using a programming language. Pay whatever you have to now. But start moving to something other tech over time.

And yeah, don't start new projects in Java.

You don’t have to pay for using Java. You have to pay for continued support for a specific Java version.

You can even continue using JDK 8 for free indefinitely. Just don’t expect any future updates from Oracle, security or otherwise.

If you absolutely have to use JDK 8 another option is OpenJDK, which unlike Oracle’s JDK probably will continue receiving updates even for version 8.

I also don’t see why one shouldn’t use Java for new projects. With its huge ecosystem and modern toolsets such as Spring Boot Java is a highly viable option for developing new applications.

Signaling is everything here. Once you've announced that you are going to charge for something like this, you've also in a way announced you could charge for other things as well.

At that point, you are just better off using something else to insulate you from things like these.

>>Just don’t expect any future updates from Oracle, security or otherwise.

That's a very big problem for most shops.

>>With its huge ecosystem and modern toolsets such as Spring Boot Java is a highly viable option for developing new applications.

Spring Boot isn't a configuration less framework. Its basically a only one configuration works framework, change something small and nothing works. Also code comes out so unmaintainable no one apart from the original authors generally understands anything about it.

Your last statement simply isn’t true. I’ve been using Spring Boot for years in a variety of configurations and it works absolutely fine.

As long as we're going with anecdata, I'll add that in my experience Spring is a goddamn nightmare. I've spent X too many times in dependency hell with it and have vowed to never voluntarily use it again.

That’s exactly the point of Spring Boot. It makes an opinionated choice of libraries that work well together so you don’t have to.

i worked on a project last year that upgraded to 1.7