Re-affirming Long-Term Support for Java in Amazon Linux

https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/compute/re-affirming-long-term-support-for-java-in-amazon-linux/

by pritambarhate • 8 years ago

137 52 8 years ago

aws.amazon.com

> We are collaborating and contributing in the OpenJDK community to provide our customers with a free long-term supported Java runtime.

So hopefully other distros will also be able to support OpenJDK8 for a few years to come.

setquk2• 8 years ago

Microsoft .Net team take note.

teget• 8 years ago

Classic .net deployments are regarded as system components, they will receive security updates as long as the supporting OS is supported(that's at least the sales pitch we received) So 4.6 on Windows 10 will be supported at least till 14th October 2025 and 4.7 on Windows 10 at least until 13th October 2026 (if you are willing to pay Microsoft for that)

sgift• 8 years ago

(if you are willing to pay Microsoft for that)

So ... same as with Oracle. The "if you are willing to pay" part is what people are crying about.

chvid2• 8 years ago

This is great. Seeming that Oracle's policy changes have caused other big player to step in and support Java in a convincing manner. I am not sure if that was Oracle's intent given the company's reputation but I think it actually might be ...

jarym• 8 years ago

No real surprise - a lot of Java underpins AWS and a lot of enterprise customers that Amazon covet are Java shops.

Keeping everyone happy for the sake of profit and market share.

Only loser is Oracle who were a loser before so no change for them.

hunta20972• 8 years ago

With so much hate for Oracle, how long before they crash?

It's not like the hate for Apple, Microsoft or Google (which have enclaves of distrust) - in my experience Oracle seems universally hated.

bayindirh4• 8 years ago

We've bought some of their high end ZFS boxes. While I cannot comment for the hardware and experience (I temporarily left the team after we bought the HW), during the buying process I gained some valuable insight about them.

It looks like, unlike Apple, Microsoft or Google they are motivated solely by the money. Not the monopoly, not the domination, not the technology, just the money.

If they can earn the same amount of money, without doing anything, they will happily do that. Yes, they have very good technologies, but they are just built for the money.

Every corporation is in for the money, but money is generally a byproduct of good services and technologies, however it's backwards for Oracle. Services, products, and technologies are a byproduct of money. Money is not needed for products. Products are needed for money.

This is why Oracle is used also as an acronym for Larry Ellison's character and material wealth.

akadruid1• 8 years ago

They won't crash while they are trusted by the small cohort of decision makers in the "Enterprise" software market.

mhd• 8 years ago

If hate could crash Oracle, the site of its corporate headquarters would’ve been a giant “crack of doom” since the early 90s. The enterprise world runs on a different strata of popularity.

sonnyblarney• 8 years ago

"It's not like the hate for Apple, Microsoft or Google"

This is not about love or hate, it's about how much value they provide and at what cost.

Yes, they spend a lot of money convincing execs that they need Oracle, but they actually do have a good product. And don't discount all the other things like support etc.. In many applications, the cost of a DB is simply not hugely material.

So I don't like them, don't care for them, Ellison is one of the bigger douche bags around. But I'd still buy their product if it made sense to.

jillesvangurp• 8 years ago

Exactly. All they are saying here is that nothing is changing, we continue to provide openjdk builds, we continue to provide fixes for it, just like we do for other packages in our lts releases, just like we've always done. Business as usual. Ubuntu, Red Hat, Azul, and others are doing the exact same. The only thing that changes is that Oracle's jdk builds are no longer a safe option if you want long term support.

So, where people may have wanted the oracle jdk for mostly irrational / non functional reasons in the past, now they'll think twice.

chvid2• 8 years ago

I actually think this is what Oracle intented: Broad support for Java. They will probably be able to extract some service fees from a huge professional market. Much better than have developers fleeing in all directions and being left with a dying platform.

jacques_chester2• 8 years ago

Maybe, but a simpler hypothesis is that what Oracle intends to do is to scare up a few billion dollars with FUD.

pjmlp2• 8 years ago

Except that everyone else in the Java space, including Sun, already charged for support and had their own commercial JDKs.

Also OpenJDK lovers seem to keep handwaving the fact that the majority of its code is written by Oracle employees.

Elite GC and JIT compiler algorithms are not implemented for free during weekends and all nighters.

pron4• 8 years ago

Precisely. OpenJDK is not only one of the most popular software environments around, it is also one of the biggest (in terms of features, size of standard libray etc., and certainly in terms of total continuous R&D investment) Companies like Netflix, Amazon, Apple, Google, Linked in and Twitter are either entirely or significantly built on top of it (some of them even have internal forks), and even Facebook and GitHub increasingly use it, yet contribute little back (SAP and RedHat do make some significant contributions), while Oracle spends tens of millions of dollars every year on the several hundreds of full-time OpenJDK engineers it employs. We must support that somehow by getting more companies to contribute either directly in code or financially through support subscriptions.

As of JDK 11, Oracle open sourced (or discontinued) all of the remaining commercial features in the Oracle JDK and contributed them to OpenJDK.

(I work on OpenJDK at Oracle, but speak only for myself)

kodablah3• 8 years ago

Except that everyone else in the Java space

I think these days, people are comparing to everyone else in the programming space. Lots of comparisons on past work (and existing ecosystem), present work, and future work can be done but we shouldn't rest on history when evaluating. The days of making real money on the language/runtime alone are probably gone.

bradleyjg• 8 years ago

This is good news. Red Hat and IBM had already made similar announcements, but now that’s one company rather than two. Since we are talking about long term maintenance here, this is definitely a more the merrier situation.

InTheArena• 8 years ago

It’s good that Amazon (As well as IBM and Redhat which are supporting OpenJDK, and Microsoft which made a deal with Azul) are supporting Java...

However, the writing is on the wall. Oracle is desperately trying to monetize Java, and they will be successful for a little bit, this also dilutes their control of the ecosystem. That can lead to fragmentation. It also changes the equation about what kind of adoption corporations will be willing to do with java, and not have a lawyer worry about a per-vCPU licensing term.

We’ve started discussions about a long slow gradual transition from Java. I’m very very sure we are not the only one.

stunt• 8 years ago

All of these comments are not necessarily fair about Oracle.

They are moving faster in the last 2-3 years.

topspin• 8 years ago

They are also creating uncertainty. That AWS felt this announcement was necessary is evidence of that. Whatever goodwill Oracle may have created recently is paying off a vast deficit. They don't get the benefit of the doubt.

Re-affirming Long-Term Support for Java in Amazon Linux

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