ActiveMQ community: The ActiveMQ team has formed plans for releases moving forward.
The v6.3.x release branch is a significant baseline going forward as it aligns the core dependencies to stable LTS releases (JDK 17, Jakarta EE, Spring 7 and Jetty 12.1). All v6.x release branches are now recommended to upgrade to a v6.3.x release. With the v6.3.x baseline in place, we can now more readily iterate features and enhancements. The plan going forward is to keep 1-2 minor releases active in the v6.x series. A key area of focus is full JMS 3.1/2.0 specification compliance. Follow the Jakarta Messaging 3.1 GitHub Milestone here: https://github.com/apache/activemq/milestone/4 That brings us to planning the v5.x series end-of-life. It is no longer realistic to continue balancing using modern Java runtime and language features to improve ActiveMQ while also retaining the ability to back port to v5.x which runs JDK 11 — especially given the JDK 25 minimum recommended runtime for Virtual Threads and the JDK 17 minimum for key dependencies. The versions of Spring (5.x) and Jetty (9.x) have been end-of-life for a long time now, and there are outstanding CVEs that require paid subscriptions, so Apache ActiveMQ is not able to distribute a release with those fixed. That being said, here is the 6-month notice: => Apache ActiveMQ v5.x series will cease being active as of February 28th, 2027. Please begin making your upgrade plans accordingly. Client and Server compatibility note: ActiveMQ v5.x clients are compatible running against v6.x servers and vice-versa. If you have older applications that need JDK 11, javax.jms, or can’t upgrade right away — you can continue to use the latest v5.19.x activemq-client which is free of the Spring and Jetty dependencies. Thanks! Matt Pavlovich Apache ActiveMQ PMC
