Red Hat the New Steward of OpenJDK 8 and OpenJDK 11

OpenJDK 8 and OpenJDK 11, two of Java's popular versions, now under the stewardship of Red Hat now, the company announced last week.

Orcale acquired Java in 2008 and since then, its release cycle changed while typical programming languages such as C and C++ receive modest maintenance updates every few years, Java versions, as of Java 9, are incremented every six months, with OpenJDK 11 designated as the first long-term (LTS) version of Java.

The problem is, OpenJDK 8 is still the most widely-used version of Java on desktops—doubtlessly due in part to Minecraft, though a variety of enterprise applications also rely on OpenJDK 8.

From last January, Oracle stopped providing security updates OpenJDK 8, a move aimed at getting organizations into paid licensing agreements. This meant that versions that ran out-of-date were deemed to be insecure versions of Java, thus making the companies choose to either pay to maintain support for something that was once used for free or attempt to move an application off of Java entirely (if possible).

However, now there is a viable third option - Using a non-Oracle distribution of Java. Because Java is still fundamentally open source, any organization that wishes to ship its own patched version of OpenJDK can do so. Red Hat—which contributes to Java upstream, and ships a number of their own products built on Java now enters the pictures.

The stewardship of RedHat over the two said versions of OpenJDK 8 and OpenJDK 11 will take place until June 2023 and October 2024, respectively. It is to be noted that any new features are not expected for either version, as both are essential in maintenance mode.

As mentioned earlier, version 8 predates the six month release cadence, and version 11 is an LTS version. Because of this, versions 9 and 10 will remain unsupported. Red Hat already maintains OpenJDK 7, and will continue to do so until June 2020.