Licensing is the part of middleware that engineers most often leave to procurement, and the part senior interviews most often use to separate people who have run an estate from people who have used one. The numbers below are list prices observed on 26 September 2026 — a large bank pays materially less under an enterprise agreement — but the metric a product is charged on decides how the bill grows, and the metric does not change with negotiation.

1. Nothing, for the software. Apache httpd, Nginx open source, Tomcat, Jetty, WildFly and Open Liberty are free to use. The cost moves to people: someone must patch, support and answer for them, and many banks buy third-party support to have a contract to point to.

2. Per core, by subscription. Red Hat sells JBoss EAP as an annual subscription per band of cores. Red Hat’s own store lists Standard at US$8,800 a year and Premium at US$13,200; resellers’ listings of the same product codes show each subscription covering 16 cores. Premium adds round-the-clock support for severe issues. It is a subscription: the entitlement to updates and support lasts exactly as long as the payments.

3. IBM’s processor metrics. IBM licenses WebSphere, IBM MQ and much of its software on one of two units. A Processor Value Unit (PVU) is a rating IBM assigns per core by processor type — 70 PVUs per core for the common two-socket Intel Xeon or AMD EPYC server, more on larger machines. A Virtual Processor Core (VPC) is simply one virtual core (not to be confused with the other VPC, a cloud provider’s Virtual Private Cloud network). IBM steers newer and container deployments to VPCs.

4. Oracle’s per-processor metric. Oracle licenses WebLogic per “processor”, where a processor is the number of cores multiplied by a core factor — 0.5 for Intel and AMD x86 — except Standard Edition, which counts occupied sockets. Oracle’s technology price list, as reproduced consistently by independent licensing advisers, gives WebLogic Server Standard Edition $10,000, Enterprise Edition $25,000 and WebLogic Suite $45,000 per processor, plus annual support of about 22% of the licence. We could not retrieve Oracle’s own price-list document directly, so treat these as attributed, not verified. Suite adds Oracle Coherence, an in-memory data grid, and Java SE Suite; Standard Edition excludes clustering, so it rarely fits a production bank estate.

5. Per employee — for the Java underneath. Since 23 January 2023, Oracle has sold its Java runtime commercially only as the Java SE Universal Subscription, priced per employee, not per installation: $15 per employee per month for up to 999 employees, falling through bands — $12 up to 2,999, $10.50 up to 9,999 — to $5.25 at 40,000–49,999, with larger organisations quoted individually. “Employee” includes contractors and outsourcers supporting internal operations, whether or not they ever touch Java. (Oracle also publishes recent Java releases free under its No-Fee Terms and Conditions for a limited period; the subscription is what buys updates for older releases, and support.)

Both large vendors price on processors, and both have rules about virtual machines that turn a small server into a large bill.

IBM: sub-capacity needs a tool. IBM allows you to license only the virtual cores a product can use, rather than the whole physical host — sub-capacity licensing — but only if you run the IBM License Metric Tool (ILMT) or another approved tool that records usage. IBM’s own terms state the consequence plainly: “Failure to comply with the above will result in charging under full capacity for the total number of physical processor cores activated and available for use on the server.” An 8-core virtual machine on a 64-core host is an 8-core licence with ILMT and a 64-core licence without it.

Oracle: soft partitions do not limit the licence. Oracle’s partitioning policy distinguishes hard partitioning, which it accepts as limiting the cores to be licensed, from soft partitioning, which it does not — and it has treated common VMware deployments as soft, so the licence follows every physical core the virtual machine could run on. The policy is a separate Oracle document that changes over time; check the current version before any design review.

Apache httpd and Nginx open source cost nothing; IIS is included in the Windows Server licence; IBM HTTP Server is supplied with WebSphere. NGINX Plus is sold by F5 per instance on an annual subscription through resellers; public figures conflict, so ask for a quote rather than trusting a blog. Load balancers — F5 BIG-IP, NetScaler — are priced by appliance or throughput tier, usually through a quote.

Oracle’s own banking products — FLEXCUBE among them — are built to run on WebLogic, which is one reason WebLogic persists in banks that use them; the core-banking landscape is in core banking.

• If a core-banking or payments vendor certifies only one server, that decides it. Running an uncertified stack forfeits vendor support for the application.
• New Java services: an embedded server (Tomcat in Spring Boot, or Liberty, or Quarkus) in a container, on an OpenJDK build.
• Large existing Java EE estates: stay on the current full server while planning the jakarta move, or move to Liberty or JBoss EAP where the licence saving pays for the testing.
• Before any of that: fix the Java runtime licence and the ILMT position. Both are cheaper than any migration and frequently larger.

• “How would you reduce the licence cost of our WebLogic estate without rewriting anything?” (Runtime first, then core factor and partitioning, then consolidation, then a move to JBoss or Liberty for what is left.)
• “What is a PVU, and why does ILMT matter?”
• “Why can a small virtual machine produce a large Oracle bill?”
• “We have 8,000 staff and one Java application. What does Oracle Java cost us?”
• “Tomcat is free. Why would anyone pay for WebSphere?” (Transactions, messaging, clustering, vendor certification and a contract to point to.)