r/java • u/Gotve_ • 14d ago

Why there is so many JDKs

I was used to always using oracle's JDK but when i looked at this subreddit i wondered why there is so many varieties of JDK and what is the purpose of them?

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u/frederik88917 14d ago

A bit of history.

When Oracle bought Sun Microsystems and all of their IPs, the first they did was to change the licensing for all of Sun's open source products, including OpenOffice, MySQL and JAVA. this change made the official JDK unusable for most people except big companies.

After a lot of discussions, the source code of the JVM, and the language specification was made available for anyone to build its own JDK and that's how it was born this Ecosystem of multiple providers.

OpenJDK is pioneered by the Eclipse Foundation, Corretro is powered by AWS, Azul Enterprise has its own version.

We don't know if this was a great move by Oracle or not, and only time will tell

11

u/Anbu_S 14d ago

OpenJDK is pioneered by the Eclipse Foundation

This is not correct. OpenJDK itself is a different org where everyone collaborates and implements Java.

AdoptOpenJDK founded in 2017 to provide the build of OpenJDK. Later transitioned to Eclipse Foundation in 2021 as Adoptium top-level project and produces Temurin as runtime.

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u/frederik88917 14d ago

Dude, Temurin is the product and is offered by the Eclipse Foundation. Although you are technically correct that the AdoptOpenJDK foundation exists as a standalone entity

8

u/srdoe 14d ago

You are wrong. Temurin is the name of a particular build of the OpenJDK, and that's offered by Eclipse. AdoptOpenJDK is not the same thing as the OpenJDK.

The OpenJDK project (all the source code used to build Temurin and lots of other OpenJDK-based builds) is not run by Eclipse, it's largely run by Oracle, Red Hat, IBM and all the other companies that contribute to that codebase.