Good Bye Oracle Java

Recently I got a new laptop from my office, so was preparing it for my day to day work and wanted to have Java installed as it’s my primary weapon as a Java developer.

I was using Linux Mint as my operating system and it had open-jdk pre installed. I didn’t have a good impression on it and basically had no idea of open-jdk. So I quickly uninstalled it and was in process of installing real Java jdk ie Oracle jdk.

As we all do, I opened a blog where gave instructions on how to install with few steps. Added the mentioned ppa repository and tried to install Java. It ended up with a error ... unfortunately!. Tried few times … removed the repository and stated again … no luck. And finally got to know that from 2019 April oracle has removed Oracle Java through that ppa repository.

Further analysis told that oracle is charging for future releases and java isn’t free now!

So how do i do run my applications? all are based on Java! Some suggested to use paid version and some for open-jdk.

How can we use a different version of Java while we have studied and practised Oracle Java? will the new Java 11 features be available in open-jdk as well? those were few questions instantly came to my mind. As I had no option of paying for oracle, wanted study what are differences between oracle and open jdk.

Then I found a article saying both open and oracle Java is built on same Java code base. Wow it brought little bit of smile to my face. Further readings described that Oracle supports both versions and all the updates were done through this open source repo. And they do release both oracle and open jdk at the same time from the same code base. So both should have the same software right? what a good news it was!

So next question I had to find answer was what are the differences between them? as software developers know that we can’t develop software without bugs. So same principle applies here as well. Once they do a release on both open and as paid they will do some fixes for the identified bugs. These bug fixes are released to Oracle jdk version only, under subscription model and they will get paid for the work. So here is the difference, Open-jdk guys will have to wait till next release get those bugs fixed.

So the conclusion is we may have to live with few known bugs if we are using open jdk of java. Else we can go to Oracle jdk for fully supported version.

happy coding!