IBM is pleased to announce that we are joining the Eclipse Adoptium working group as an enterprise member. IBM is a founding and active member of the AdoptOpenJDK community, which is moving under the stewardship of the Eclipse Foundation to form the Adoptium working group.
In news this week, Adoptium announced that they will market and promote a wide variety of JDK releases that are produced by its working group members. These releases are certified by the Java SE TCK test suite and meet its own AQAvit quality criteria. Adoptium also announced they will build their own binary called Eclipse Temurin which meets those same criteria.
As part of IBM’s continuing commitment to Eclipse Adoptium and the Eclipse OpenJ9 Java Virtual Machine, IBM will build and publish Java SE TCK-certified JDK binaries with OpenJ9 at no cost.
IBM’s commitment to the AdoptOpenJDK community
In the AdoptOpenJDK community, IBM developers contribute scripts, tests, and other testing infrastructure. Our contributors also help manage the release and triage process that produces all of AdoptOpenJDK’s free and open JDK binaries across a wide variety of platforms. IBM believes in this open-source community so deeply that we are one of the few companies that provides commercial support for the JDK binaries produced by the AdoptOpenJDK community.
As the AdoptOpenJDK community project moves under the stewardship of the Eclipse Foundation to form the Adoptium working group, we look forward to continuing to collaborate with that same community to build JDKs and to help advance the quality for all JDK releases that use the Adoptium infrastructure.
IBM has already contributed a huge number of our own release tests to the AdoptOpenJDK project, and we are excited by the opportunity to work with others to continue raising the quality of Java release binaries, including the Adoptium project’s new OpenJDK binary called Eclipse Temurin.
Creating a JDK binary marketplace
When IBM contributed its J9 Java Virtual Machine technology to the Eclipse Foundation as the Eclipse OMR and OpenJ9 projects, we wanted to make it more accessible to Java developers everywhere to be able to run their Java applications with fast startup and less memory cost. With the help of our community of users and contributors, OpenJ9 has continued to improve dramatically in the 3 years since its creation. This collaboration was only possible because of the open access to OpenJ9 based JDKs provided by the AdoptOpenJDK community across a wide range of platforms.
To preserve the Java community’s access to OpenJ9 based JDK binaries, IBM will provide to the public, at no cost, TCK-certified OpenJ9 based JDK binaries built with the OpenJDK class libraries. Although Adoptium is still in its early stages, we look forward to working with the Eclipse Foundation and the working group to form a JDK binary marketplace, where we expect that any Adoptium working group member company will be able to publish certified JDK binaries that meet the AQAvit quality criteria under open source or commercial license to the Java community.
Contributing our success back to the community
At IBM, we believe that your access to Java innovations like OpenJ9 shared classes, dynamic AOT and remote JIT compiler servers as well as regular bug fixes and security updates, should be free, even if you’re working with mature releases like Java 8. We believe it so strongly that, starting in 2016, we contributed millions of lines of IBM J9 code to the Eclipse Foundation, code that we had spent two decades honing for our own product and customer use. We continue to employ dozens of developers that work directly and openly in the Eclipse OMR and Eclipse OpenJ9 projects at GitHub. IBM doesn’t produce a separate enterprise version of OpenJ9; we don’t hold back any of the innovation in our runtime. It’s all there in the open project, and working with Eclipse Adoptium, IBM will continue to provide access to OpenJ9 based JDK binaries at no cost so everyone who wants to can continue to use OpenJ9.
IBM is committed to the Eclipse Adoptium goal to provide everyone, everywhere with a choice of high quality free JDK binaries. We look forward to continuing to work with our amazingly talented colleagues at Eclipse Adoptium and to hear all the incredible things you’re doing with freely available Eclipse OpenJ9 based JDKs.