Hi everyone,

I saw a post about Oracle Java audits. I figured that I'd share this for those bot yet aware.

Oracle still maintains OpenJDK and OpenJRE. Keep in mind that I used that word "maintain" pretty loosely here. The release cycle is less of a cycle and probably driven by some unwanted obligation. This is particularly difficult if you need to run Java on Windows because the Microsoft builds generally don't include older versions, and there aren't handy repositories with historical builds available like on Linux.

Anyway, the alternative to this is Adoptium. They have portable zip file builds as well as MSI packages with options to even add the Oracle-specific environmental variables during installation. To be clear, these are vanilla OpenJRE builds, as far as I'm aware, which are what's used as the Java reference build, and what Oracle uses to build their version. The offer both Windows and Linux builds of it, too. So you can probably get the most recent build of the super old version you need for that obscure software you're forced to support, regardless of platform. And it's all free.

We have a few things running using it. I recommend everyone check it out. The only snag I've seen with it is the lack of automatic updating, so it might not be suitable for environments requiring it on client devices, but for servers where updates are likely to be much more tightly controlled, it's definitely worth exploring.

https://adoptium.net/