Concerns over changes to Oracle’s Java licensing strategy are hitting more than nine out of ten users as businesses struggle to adapt to the regime, according to research.

A study from Dimensional Research shows that 92 percent of the 2,000 respondents reported being concerned about Oracle Java pricing, up from 82 percent in the same survey last year. Those stating they were very concerned about the changes leapt from 19 percent in 2025 to 29 percent this year.

In 2023, Oracle changed its Java SE subscription model, shifting from a per-user or per-processor basis to per-employee. Critics called the move “predatory” as organisations that were using little Java but had a large number of employees could be hit hard by the cost increase.

Later that year, research from Gartner showed that costs could be between two and five times greater under the new licensing model for using the same software.

Anxiety over the new charging model is a major driver pushing Java users to look for alternatives. Eighty-one percent of users have migrated, are migrating, or plan to migrate all or some of their Oracle Java to an open source alternative, according to the survey of global tech pros.

A number of alternatives to Oracle exist for running OpenJDK applications in production, including Bellsoft Liberica, IBM Semeru, and Azul Platform Core. Concern over the licensing change continues to spike because awareness is still filtering through the user community, said Gil Tene, CTO and co-founder of Java support and technology provider Azul Systems, which commissioned the research.

“For most of them, the way they find out is a conversation with an Oracle salesperson, and that conversation starts at some place in the organisation, but then it takes a while for that to make it through the organisation, to the people actually looking at financial implications and the budget.”

Tene said the users were also waking up to the fact that a strategy to gradually move off Oracle Java does not solve the licensing problem.

“The shift that happened about a little under three years ago is that they went from volume-based to employee-based pricing. It’s enough for one employee in the company to use one copy of Java from Oracle, for the company to be on the hook for paying per employee, for the entire employee base,” he claimed.

A separate study from Dimensional Research published last year found that 73 percent of Oracle Java users had been audited in the last three years.

Another pressure on Java costs has been the shift to the cloud. The latest Dimensional Research data shows 97 percent of participants have taken actions to reduce their public cloud costs, including using a high-performance Java platform (41 percent). However, 74 percent of organisations say they still have more than 20 percent unused compute capacity in their public cloud environments.