Leadership of OpenJDK 8 and OpenJDK 11 Transitions to Red Hat

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April 17, 2019
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Red Hat, Inc. (NYSE: RHT), the world’s leading provider of open source solutions, today announced that it will serve as the steward of the OpenJDK 8 and OpenJDK 11 projects following a transition of leadership from Oracle. With the transition, Red Hat is affirming its support of the Java community and following a similar path that led to its leadership of both the OpenJDK 6 and OpenJDK 7 projects.

My guess is we can expect more news on the transition of Java stewardship over the next few years and I believe Red Hat is a safe pair of hands to take on that role. It’s also a better fit with Java being open source and Red Hat being a leader in the open source software community.

Michael Azoffdistinguished analyst, Ovum Research

OpenJDK is an open source implementation of Java, one of the most widely-used programming languages for building enterprise-grade applications. In its role as steward of OpenJDK 8 and OpenJDK 11 update releases, Red Hat will work with the community to enable continued innovation in Java.

Red Hat has been a member of the OpenJDK community since 2007 and is one of the largest contributors to the project. Red Hat’s long-time Java technical lead, Andrew Haley, was appointed as project lead for OpenJDK 8 and OpenJDK 11 in February 2019. He has been an active member of the OpenJDK governing board for seven years and, in this capacity, helps to guide the future direction of Java and OpenJDK.

In addition to its work within individual OpenJDK communities, Red Hat leads the upstream development of Shenandoah, a high-performance garbage collector that is now part of OpenJDK 12.

In December 2018, Red Hat announced commercial support for OpenJDK on Microsoft Windows. 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. JDK Mission Control is available as part of Red Hat Software Collections and for Windows through the Red Hat Customer Portal, enabling developers and administrators to collect and analyze data from Java applications running locally or deployed in production environments.

Supporting Quotes
Mike Piech, vice president and general manager, Middleware, Red Hat
“Java is in a renaissance moment. It continues to evolve and be a key component of new, emerging architectures. There is a developer hunger to bring Java into the next generation of development, and Red Hat is a leader in this movement through our involvement in the OpenJDK project. We are helping to lead the way in our efforts to enable users of JDK to have support and innovation in their existing environments. Red Hat remains committed to Java and is excited to have the opportunity to help steward the OpenJDK community.”

Michael Azoff, distinguished analyst, Infrastructure Solutions, Ovum
“The future leadership and control of Java is carefully being managed by current Java SE owner Oracle; this care reflects the importance of Java as an enterprise programming language and platform. Clearly, Oracle wants change, and while it owns Java SE it has handed Java EE to the Eclipse foundation, which has renamed it Jakarta EE. Red Hat, a significant contributor to the OpenJDK, has stepped up and is stewarding both OpenJDK 8 and OpenJDK 11, which will converge with the Oracle JDK. My guess is we can expect more news on the transition of Java stewardship over the next few years and I believe Red Hat is a safe pair of hands to take on that role. It’s also a better fit with Java being open source and Red Hat being a leader in the open source software community.”

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