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Noteworthy, the oracle JDK license has apparently changed so you can't legally use their distribution for much of anything except for the development of inhouse java applications? So I guess you can't even use it just for its JRE to run, say, eclipse for PHP development, or to host a servlet web server? Anyways looks like the OpenJDK is now on feature parity and is GPL licensed. https://blog.joda.org/2018/08/java-is-still-available-at-zer...

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With Java 11, there are supposedly no differences between Oracle and OpenJDK so time to go OpenJDK

There are a lot of enterprise users on Java 7 at the moment and they are not going to move to Java 11. I just moved a company to Java 8 and it was a big thing. Not sure which one is the next "LTS" release, that will be the next target for our migrations. The biggest "feature" is G1GC in "new" Java for a lot of users based on my experience.

Java 11 is an LTS.

And Oracle now provides OpenJDK binaries: http://jdk.java.net/ for Windows, MacOS and Linux on x86-64.

Azul's Zulu fork is compatible with Oracle's but with a better concurrent, parallel, pauseless GC. I can't see a reason not to use theirs because their support is excellent (have tried) and any enterprise problems can be delegated to them with a support contract. IOW it works for indie devs and enterprise alike. It sounds like I'm pitching them, because they're a compelling alternative.

Nope. The different GC (and JIT) is Zing. Zulu is literally just OpenJDK which is the same code base as Oracle JDK with Java 11.

One huge difference for enterprise users is release cadence.

OpenJDK will be updated much more rarely, on a quarterly cadence only, including for security patches. So if you go the OpenJDK route, be ready to do some JDK-level patching yourself if you want to mitigate any zero-days that surface.

Fixes will also only be applied to the latest versions, so you'll need to be prepared to live on the bleeding edge and accept all the risks that come with that.

The slower release cadence of openjdk makes it a good fit for enterprise users as they tend to also have a slower release cadence. Is anyone even using Java 9 or later?

Linux distributions will presumably do timely & backported patches.

Good to know. I am amazed by the history of openjdk and how it's slowly become the mainline of what people use. Does OpenJDK come with all that mission control (I think that might have a new name?) stuff or is that the primary reason people buy Java from Oracle at this point?

OpenJDK 11 does contain FlightRecorder and it‘s free.

Oracle has open sourced just about everything from Java now, putting it to OpenJDK etc.

I imagine the main target customer are the large enterprises and the like that want full support contracts for everything.

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