Oracle's policy on ojdbc8 redistribution has been relaxed in part due to their new Oracle Free License, found here.

This shift in their policy does mean that we can begin to include the ojdbc8.jar as part of the community release of the Oracle connector, which will simplify the connector deployment for many users.

• LICENSE-3rd-PARTIES.txt should include the Oracle Free License
• Verify Debezium for Oracle package contains the ojdbc8 dependency
• Verify Debezium Server package contains the ojdbc8 dependency
• Verify ojdbc8 dependency is omitted in downstream distributions

NOTE
This will need to be called out in both the release notes and announcements so that users who may be building images themselves should now be aware that if they've been injecting their own ojdbc8 jar dependency that is no longer needed when using the community version to avoid version conflicts.

Additionally, for XStream users, we'll likely need to clarify that they'll need to make sure that the InstantClient and ojdbc8 versions align, or they'll need to replace the distributed ojdbc8 jar with the right version that matches the instant client.