Red Hat is taking over the stewardship of OpenJDK 8 and OpenJDK 11 from Oracle. This means Red Hat will look after aspects such as security patches and bug fixes for the two OpenJDK releases. Updates may still come from Oracle, Red Hat, or other providers.

OpenJDK 8 and 11 are the current most important versions of the free open source implementation of Java Platform, Standard Edition (Java SE). Java 11 is the first long-term support version of Java under Oracle's new licensing scheme, whereby Oracle does not provide any updates other than to customers with paid subscriptions, Java 8, also an LTS and with free updates until the end of this year, remains the most widely used version.

JDK 12, the current version of standard Java, was released last month, and JDK 13 is expected in September, on the new bi-annual release cadence.

Until recently, Oracle essentially controlled Java, but over recent months it has moved away from that position, starting with the handing over of support and maintenance of Java Platform, Enterprise Edition to the Eclipse Foundation. Oracle kept the Java name, meaning the Enterprise Edition is now called Jakarta EE. Going further back in time, Red Hat took the lead in the OpenJDK 6 and OpenJDK 7 projects.

Red Hat’s long-time Java technical lead, Andrew Haley, was appointed as project lead for OpenJDK 8 and OpenJDK 11 in February. Alongside the takeover of responsibility for the free open source version of OpenJDK, Red Hat announced commercial support for OpenJDK on Windows back in December. Open JDK11 is important because other suppliers of open source Java, such as AWS and SAP, use OpenJDK 11 as the basis of their own releases.

Red Hat plans to launch OpenJDK in a Microsoft installer in the coming weeks and distribute IcedTea-Web, the free software implementation of Java Web Start, as part of the Windows OpenJDK distribution.

More Information

JDK 11 On OpenJDK

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