I am confused by the license. The way I read it, a "bundling" with commercially licensed Software is forbidden, that is, you can't ship the JRE along with a product that you are selling. So your users will face rxtra installation steps

They are, however, making a commitment to scripting friendly URLs for the JDK downloads, making it feasible to automate the install.

Still, it is pretty lame, since they've been advocating bundling of the JDK since they deprecated the WebStart.

OTOH, since Oracle JDK and OpenJDK are identical save for branding and licensing, not sure why you wouldn't just bundle an OpenJDK build in that case.

This new license seems to be targeted to two main groups: those who depend upon a "system" install of Oracle Java for running third party apps, and those who are for some reason unwilling to use OpenJDK.

JRE stopped existing in Java 8. The idea now is you "link" a JVM for your app, which customizes and optimizes it. Then you ship both together. It's the fully supported way and has no license implications.

Seems like the new Oracle JDK license is a lot more flexible than before. In reality it's kind of cosmetic because lots of people were using the (100% compatible) Amazon or Azul spins, or just regular OpenJDKs.

So the comments above seem to indicate that bundling 'JRE' with an app requires a license. Are you indicating that post-java8 model which builds a 'Custom JRE', and distributing that with your app does not require a license?

Correct. It doesn't count as either a JDK or JRE once linked.

Or you can pay to license the JRE and include it.

Only JDK 17 is free. Earlier versions are not.

Of the Oracle branded JDK releases, only version 17 (so far) is free.

OpenJDK (which is built from functionally the same source code) has been free under GPL v2.1 + Classpath Exception for a while now.

Probably they got too much flak and a drop in market share (aka companies uninstalling Java, which they probably track in the uninstaller)...