Adobe Flash beats Oracle to charging for premium features: http://www.slashgear.com/adobe-reveals-flash-tax-for-popular-developers-28220332/
I’m not counting things like enterprise support that Oracle already charges for.
This is Adobe charging royalties to developers, not to the users, who it would appear always have the extra features bundled (probably needing to be unlocked with a signed key provided per-app).
Frankly I think the initiative is going to crater – Flash has already lost the biggest pool of ISV’s in its target market, since it doesn’t work at all on the iPhone/iPad and barely works on Android. So what developer is going to decide to pay for the privilege of having a desktop-only distribution?
Unlikely to happen to Java SE, the cat is already (mostly) out of the bag with it being GPL and client side just isn’t a focus for Oracle. However they already do charge for the old bits from the JRockit VM.
When I read it, it just brought to mind the speculations everyone was making about how Oracle might monetize Java right after they bought Sun. Some examples were pay-for-features like new garbage collectors, etc. I guess it’s a little different because they already do that with JRockit, but that doesn’t bother me since the free JVM is still fully functional, just not as “optimized”.
With Adobe’s model, they’re limiting feature sets. So I definitely agree that it will crater.