Category: Java
In 2017, Oracle’s changes to Java licensing resulted in enterprises re-evaluating their requirements for a stable Java distribution with reliable support at a reasonable cost. The following are non-commercial JDK alternatives.
AdoptOpenJDK/Eclipse Adoptium is a community group which provides prebuilt unbranded builds of Open Java Development Kit (OpenJDK) under the GPL license with a “Classpath Exception” making it safe for commercial use.
AdoptOpenJDK/Eclipse Adoptium builds differ from OpenJDK Oracle builds in that they provide Long Term Support (LTS) releases. The Java 11 builds will continue for 4 years, one year after the next major release. Amazon, IBM, Microsoft, New Relic, Pivotal and Red Hat are vendors contributing to the project. Commercial support can be purchased if required.
Amazon Corretto is a no-cost, multiplatform, production-ready distribution of OpenJDK. Corretto comes with long-term support that will include performance enhancements and security fixes.
Amazon Corretto is certified to meet the Java SE standard and can be used as a drop-in replacement for many Java SE distributions. Amazon provides quarterly updates that include performance enhancements and security fixes critical for enterprise application development. There are no additional paid features or restrictions.
Azul Zulu is a branded build of OpenJDK without restrictions. Azul offer commercial support and with Zulu Community you get access to selected new OpenJDK features up to 6 months faster than other builds. Azul also maintains an archive of Zulu Community builds of OpenJDK that goes back to 2014.
The Microsoft Build of OpenJDK provides a no-cost distribution of OpenJDK that is open source and available for free as a drop-in replacement for any other OpenJDK distribution. It includes Long-Term Support (LTS) binaries for Java 11 and Java 17 on x64 server and desktop environments on macOS, Linux, and Windows, AArch64/ARM64 on Linux and Windows.
Container images for the Microsoft Build of OpenJDK are available at https://learn.microsoft.com/en-gb/java/openjdk/containers
OpenJDK is an open-source JDK considered safe for commercial use however there are strings attached. Builds from Oracle for a specific Java version are only available for the first six months after a release and to continue using the OpenJDK you must move to the next version of Java no more than one month after it is released.