No, you don't need to pay for performance. The only people paying Oracle are those who choose to.
There are many JVM vendors - each with their own secret sauce, pros/cons and add-ons. Some charge to use, some charge for support, some just give it away. Almost all offer a for-free OpenJDK version as well.
Vendors include some of the biggest names in tech, such as Amazon and IBM, and many others you might only be aware of if you're in the ecosystem such as Eclipse Foundation, Azul Systems, Bellsoft, and more.
I would say the Oracle JDK/JVM is likely in the minority of JDK/JVM deployments today.
Oracle deliberately positioned themselves to be just another JDK/JVM vendor a few years back. All of the vendors can offer support etc. Oracle has no special control over OpenJDK these days, even if they pay the most full-time staffers to work directly on it.
Then what is the selling point of that, if you say crucial features are not closed-sourced and gated behind costly licensing?
I feel like this is among many other reasons that people get PTSD which causes them to throw the baby (C# of du jour bundled in public perception with Java) out with the bathwater (Java ecosystem) and move to, inferior in many ways, Golang.
The contribution graph says precisely what I claimed.
> Then what is the selling point of that, if you say crucial features are not closed-sourced and gated behind costly licensing
Each vendor can do what they want. As I have already said twice, some vendors give away their inhouse-built JVM/JDK and only charge for support, some charge to use it at all, and some just give it away entirely for free. Motivations for each vary by company.
The point is, you have a ton of choice within the JVM ecosystem. You have 1 choice for .NET... the ecosystem and community are not the same. The JVM ecosystem and community are vastly better by any measurement.
C# developer's only valid criticisms are levied at the Java language - failing to realize the slow development pace is deliberate and prevents people from having to rewrite everything every couple years...
Despite that, there are many languages that run on the JVM - so you don't even need to use Java to experience the greatness of the JVM ecosystem and community.
I'd rather not experience "the greatness of the JVM ecosystem and community" nor I have to rewrite code every two years, the only big break was ~8 years ago with .NET Framework -> FOSS .NET ordeal, all subsequent changes are minor and incremental and pretty much in the libraries only. In general, this view is unfortunate but not unexpected, and is common with Java or, for some reason, Go.
There's a world of different projects, beyond back-end applications, written in C# or even F# like games, scientific instrumentation and analysis, desktop and mobile applications (multi-platform or otherwise), trading systems, malware and anti-malware, and more. It's a really versatile and powerful tool.
Let's talk again when the project Valhalla is done and Panama vectors are actually usable for writing implementations that can compete with C++.
