Oracle ended public updates of JDK6 at the end of last month. Many people seem to have concluded that the OpenJDK6 project will therefore end at the same time. This is incorrect: OpenJDK6 will continue, but will be maintained by the community outside Oracle.
This will require some infrastructure changes. In particular, because we are to maintain OpenJDK6 outside Oracle we need a bug database to which we have full access. At present, only people inside Oracle can create and update bug reports. Oracle intend to rectify this situation sometime in the summer, but in the meantime we need something we can use. I therefore propose to create an OpenJDK 6 project on java.net and use a JIRA bug database there. Once Oracle has a fully-open bug database we can transfer bugs to it. While I'm aware that this is not ideal, I believe it is the only way that we can run this project independently of Oracle. A few questions I've been asked: * What will be the policy for future changes? OpenJDK 6 is a legacy project. People only use it because they want long-term stability and compatibility. Therefore, only changes that fix significant bugs should be made. This is not a policy change from that discussed on http://openjdk.java.net/projects/jdk6/ * What about security updates? We'll back-port them as they arrive and commit them to OpenJDK 6. However, there may be some delay because of the effort and testing that back-porting requires. Therefore, if you want the most secure and up-to-date version of OpenJDK, you should update to OpenJDK 7. We'll also fix any security bugs that are found in OpenJDK 6 alone, but again there may be some delay. * What about Windows/Mac/etc builds? I really don't know. If the Windows/Mac/etc community want to get involved, then there will be updates for those platforms. If not, there won't be. It's up to them. * How long will this project continue for? The duration of support for OpenJDK 6 depends on how active its developers remain as part of the OpenJDK community. As things stand today, Red Hat (my current employer) is taking the lead in supporting the OpenJDK 6 project. It is conceivable that this project will be maintained beyond the duration of Red Hat's commitment. That ultimately depends on the community. Finally, this is a significant moment for OpenJDK. We look forward to working with the wider community of OpenJDK 6 users and developers on this project. Andrew.
