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Oracle JDK8 Now Requires a Login

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25 pointsslackwill7 comments

Why bother? Move to newer JDK.. the 8 is a dead train now and Jigsaw is since more than a year out.

People had enough time to adapt and experiment

Ubuntu LTS users have had the option to install Java 11 for exactly 24 days today. The maintainers' choice to package Java 10 as "openjdk-11" and leave it that way for as long as they did was a mess, to be sure, but let's not pretend like this is the fault of people clinging to old software out of stubbornness. Staying on Java 8 has not been an uncommon position, especially after it became completely clear that while Oracle would no longer support it, plenty of large, reputable organizations would for at least a couple years to come.

For someone out of the loop what is the relation of OpenJDK 10 vs OpenJDK 11 being available in relation to Oracle JDK 8?

Java 9 and 10 were the first limited-support "intermediate" releases. 10 was released late March 2018 and received its last update mid-July 2018. Because those versions only had 6 months of support planned, very few people moved old projects to them, and few if any Linux distributions packaged them as part of their LTS releases.

This left Ubuntu in an awkward position with their 18.04 LTS release. Java 8 was at that point 4 years old and heading towards EOL, Java 10 had just been released but would only have 6 months of support, and Java 11 wasn't to be released until September. The compromise they came up with was to ship a package called "openjdk-11" which actually contained Java 10, with plans to update it to Java 11 when that was released, in the hopes that the two would be relatively similar. It ended up taking around 6 months to finish testing 11 after its release, so it ended up being March 2019, nearly a year after the release of 18.04, that they finally put Java 11 in their Java 11 package.

I'm not sure this answers your question, but that was the recent Java release timeline and how Ubuntu chose to deal with it.

What do you do with 1.8 JAR files which don't run in either OpenJDK or Java 9+?

Oracle JDK 8 is EOL (without support subscription, just like Windows XP) and has been for some time. If you need Java 8 (which you shouldn't, just like you shouldn't need Windows XP) grab an AdoptOpenJDK version of Java 8 which is still supported. But seriously...get off Java 8....

It's really nothing at all like the XP situation was in the Vista days. XP stuck around for years after its LTS replacement was being distributed. Java 11, on the other hand, only made it to Ubuntu 18.04 less than a month ago[1]. Java 8 is also still receiving support from a number of organizations, including Red Hat, AdoptOpenJDK (as you mention), and Canonical, I believe, until Ubuntu 20.04.

I'm all for staying current, within reason, but if I'm running Ubuntu in production, I'm gonna want to get my software as part of that distribution. As recently as March 25th, that meant my options were Java 8 or Java 10.

1: http://changelogs.ubuntu.com/changelogs/pool/main/o/openjdk-...

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