Some weeks ago we posted an article (Will the end of Java be after version 11?) regarding the hard turn for Java with the new Oracle Licensing about Java, and the impossibility of using it in Production environments without a license. BTW we did an update with some corrections, the community knows a lot I have to thank them for the corrections.
It wasn’t until some days later that I got to knew previous information from Red hat : Red Hat stopped supporting Oracle JDK on RHEL as December 2018.
Red Hat comes to play
This does not mean that you cannot run Oracle JDK on Red Hat, it means that you will not have support for your applications in Red Hat if they run on Oracle JDK; Should you have a problem you are on your own, or with Oracle if you purchased support. That does not simply applies to Java 11 onwards as you may be expecting, it affect all the Oracle JDK versions previously distributed by Red Hat subscriptions (1.6 to 1.8)
That was surprising yet coherent, Red hat was already supporting OpenJDK and even publishing an Oracle to OpenJDK migration guide so, the probably most spread Linux server versionhad a proper JDK support (should you have your Red Hat subscription, of course)
Second base?
So Red Hat supports OpenJDK , a mayor player on the league, will that make a difference? It will due to this announcement: “Red Hat Introduces Commercial Support for OpenJDK on Microsoft Windows” .
When I read it I had to re-read it twice. What? Red Hat, the Linux Company, supporting something in Windows? But it is not that hard to understand. There may be several causes:
- In this way OpenJDK will have a strong company behind, not just Oracle making compilations or other companies selling support. It is Red Hat, the non-database big red company. Solid foundations there.
- Virtualization. Like in the previous statement, Red Hat is not ignoring other platforms for its products. Openshift is the same.
- Having a slice of the Java cake.
One more to party with
But Red Hat it not the latest player in this world, it seems that Amazon has decided to support also OpenJDK , those are again good news. Not only because the greater inertia of OpenJDK is gaining but also because Amazon Corretto also supports Windows platform.
Amazon Corretto 8 is available since January 31st, 2019 and Corretto 11 is under preview state, with the release date around April 2019.
There are a lot of interesting information at Corretto website, with some highlights like:
Amazon will distribute security updates to Corretto 8 at no cost until at least June, 2023, and to Corretto 11 until at least August, 2024. Corretto includes targeted backports from newer releases, as well as newly-developed enhancements from the OpenJDK community. A
You can check more documents here.
And it has its own public Git repository and the issue tracking can be found here, but their naming does not follow the JDK bug ID, fortunately they are referred and the search engine seems to find them quite easily.
Amazon has re-affirmed that the will have long term support for Java 8 and Java 11 in opposition to Oracle end of support for Java 8.
Oracle will continue to provide free public updates and auto updates of Java SE 8, until at least the end of December 2020 for Personal Users, and January 2019 for Commercial Users
2019 starts with two new global players on the Java scene, much better news than the pay-per-production Oracle announcement. It seems that Jave is not dead after all. Hopefully we will not see Frankenstein resurrecting.
Juan Tavira
Universia
Specialist, architect and interdisciplinary geek passionate about all kinds of innovations. This is easy to say for oneself, but when my computing colleagues, my geek friends and even my wife say so, then it must be true somehow ;-). I also like to build violins as a hobby. I see code
