Then why is it every time the Oracle reps come around, we are audited by our use of Java, what machines they are on, how many cores, etc as additional line items to our Oracle agreements that we have to fight, every year, to get removed? They state themselves, they charge per-employee, not per core now…
While everything you say sounds true, it’s not free - it’s gunpoint, it’s a lie, and if you’re big enough Oracle will come after you for subscription fees.
RedHat does the same crap. Heaven forbid you run RHEL on RHEL in containers, you’re gonna get fleeced.
Your company has bought support from Oracle - either for the JDK or for some other product bundle - and that's part of the terms of whatever commercial service your company bought. There are no audits and no cost for people who just download and use the JDK. Oracle doesn't collect names or contacts, you don't need to provide any when you download the JDK, and the licence expressly permits commercial use (even if you choose the non-open-source licence; the download page for the non-opensource distribution says [1]: "JDK N binaries are free to use in production and free to redistribute, at no cost"). There used to be lots of use restrictions back in the Sun days, but Oracle removed them.
[1]: https://www.oracle.com/java/technologies/downloads/
> Heaven forbid you run RHEL on RHEL in containers, you’re gonna get fleeced.
You can run unlimited RHEL containers on a subscribed RHEL system. It's even set up where if you run a UBI container (a redistributable subset of RHEL content) on a subscribed RHEL system it automatically upgrades to full RHEL.