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Comment by jryan49 | Hacker News Reader

The amazon build of OpenJDK 11, Corretto [1], seems to be back porting some version 12 fixes as well. This could be the start of fragmenting the ecosystem all over again.

1: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/corretto/latest/corretto-11-ug/p...

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That seems unwarranted... they’re security / os syscall patches, and they don’t blur the lines between the JDK versions.

Even the article seems a little more FUDdy. As much as I dislike / don’t care for oracle, their JDK versioning approach reasonable. Commercial licensing for the special JDK, expensive support for the old versions, and open support for current openJDK version.

I don’t think even Go or Rails support major version minus 1 or 2.

> This could be the start of fragmenting the ecosystem all over again.

Absolutely not. The OpenJDK is the official reference implementation, and Oracle has open sourced everything important.

The only question is how quickly the various OpenJDK packagers will provide security updates. The Red Hat option looks very practical if you're a Red Hat user.

So various packagers making different choices about which updates get backported, and when, is absolutely not fragmentation?

I'm curious how each packager is going to decide what version numbers they use for backported builds.

Do you believe that the Linux Kernel is fragmented? That's exactly what different distros do to the kernel.

It's definitely has created distro hell. I feel like a huge reason Linux can't get more desktop share is because we don't combine our effort and a lot of duplicate work is done between the distros. It's inefficient. There are things like flatpak now though...

I think your comment has little to do with the fragmentation of the Linux kernel (which the GP was referring to), and more with the ecosystem around it.

Yes, it's fragmented, especially in the mobile and dev board spaces. That feels different than not knowing if two Java 11.1.2.3.4 builds are the same thing.

> Do you believe that the Linux Kernel is fragmented?

I do.

Fragmentation of this sort has always been a major goal of Java.

I just got some of our apps moved to corretto yesterday. Smooth so far on corretto 11, hopefully 8 goes the same way. I think Oracle really shot themselves in the foot with this model, they are going to lose control.

I believe Oracle is maintaining Coretto for AWS. It's all about sustainable (from a financial PoV) development.

From an Amazon job posting. Seems to imply at least some of the Corretto maintenance would be in-house, at Amazon:

"sharing your findings with the rest of the engineering community, hardening your patches in Amazon's production systems, releasing them as part of Corretto, and contributing improvements back to OpenJDK."