TL;DR:
Is there a way to connect to an Oracle DB via JDBC without the Oracle JDBC driver? Or any other way (e.g. hibernate)?
Full story:
We have an existing Spring Boot app, which connects to an Oracle 11c database instance using OJDBC driver. Spring Boot internally uses JdbcTemplate to execute a few inserts and selects, basically 5 or 6 type of statements. Technically it is working fine.
However we are in an interesting situation, the code we built has to pass through a series of checks (we are working as subcontractors under a larger international company), and part of these checks is a license inspection. BlackDuck (https://www.blackducksoftware.com) is used to report every single library which is linked in the solution (around 280 in our case), and we had to manually add the copyright statement to each (for example: "Copyright © 2005-2019 The Apache Software Foundation. All Rights Reserved."). We added the Oracle Technology Network license to the Oracle Driver, and it was rejected by the legal team of the international company:
"Unless we are actually licensed to use an Oracle database (which you are not), we cannot allow the use and distribution of the Oracle JDBC drivers. Those drivers are licensed under the Oracle Technology network license and it obligates XXX [company name] to designate Oracle as a 3rd party beneficiary, which is not something our legal department allows. You must therefore find a compatible replacement that is licensed under open source."
Now, we are obviously trying to get around this thing (seeing as the end client who is receiving the solution has a licensed Oracle DB installed, and we can see earlier versions of the OJDBC driver in the company's Nexus repository), but I wanted to ask, is there a way to connect to an Oracle DB via JDBC without the Oracle JDBC driver? Or any other way (e.g. hibernate)? To my knowledge, Oracle DB communication protocol is not fully standard, that's why you need the Oracle drivers. Is there an open source alternative that I don't know of?
