What?!!? When did they start charging for the runtime? Admittedly, it has been a while for me, but I remember the runtime and the SDK being free. Is my information out of date, or are you confusing it with Visual Studio?

I'm referring to Windows.

The .NET runtime doesn't cost money. The tools to write .NET programs cost money. Some of them.

The .NET runtime is a part of Windows which costs money.

Mono falls in the same category as OpenJDK: Not relevant for this discussion.

The money Windows cost are nothing compared to Oracle fees.

You can buy Windows server editions for less that a developer's week salary. You'll need MUCH MUCH more than that for Oracle.

It's very unlikely that the license to run the commercial JVM will cost the same as a license to run the Oracle DB. These are two very different beasts.

In fact, I would guess that the cost of a Windows server license would be something of a benchmark for the price of the commercial JVM license.