Thanks Igal mt> OpenJDK is very close to the Oracle JDK these days. I regularly run mt> Tomcat's unit tests with the latest OpenJDK and have yet to find an mt> issue that is OpenJDK specific.
is> I asked Gil Tene about this a couple of weeks ago. Gil is a co- is> founder of Azul Systems, an OpenJDK committer, and on the Executive is> Committee of the JCP. My understanding from him is that there is no is> JDK development outside of the OpenJDK. The Oracle developers that is> work on the JDK commit directly to OpenJDK. Oracle might add some is> other things when they package their edition of the JDK for is> distribution, but the JDK itself is the same one from OpenJDK. Good to know. is> The main problem with the rapid release cycle and six month support is> is that due to late adoption, many of the bugs in a given Java is> release are only discovered after more than six months of the release is> date. That means that the free support will end while bugs and is> vulnerabilities are being discovered, forcing many organizations to is> pay for support. Or frequent Java installations. RAMBLE: Too bad there can't be an Apache OpenJRE umbrella project, with specific Apache OpenJRE [version X] sub-projects, that maintain JRE [version X]'s indefinitely. One source (Apache) for all the different JRE's for the Java community at large, rather than depending on a bunch of different companies. The OpenJRE source code could pull from the OpenJDK repository. A potential issue could be back-porting bug fixes from later versions into earlier ones when the source code base has shifted drastically, making merges difficult. -- Cris Berneburg CACI Lead Software Engineer
