Hacker News Reader

Comment by pron | Hacker News Reader

Adoptium is not "community driven" (it's made by IBM), and there is only one OpenJDK implementation, the one led and primarily developed by Oracle, with contributions from other companies. What Amazon or IBM do is build the source and distribute the binaries (look at the licence).

View on HN

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28821316

"...Eclipse Adoptium, built by IBM, which is the only distribution built by a team that isn't involved with the OpenJDK project, isn't very familiar with it, and isn't a member of the OpenJDK Vulnerability team, and so get security patches only after the other vendors have delivered their builds. "

That's written by the person you're replying to.

My understanding is that ties between the Eclipse Foundation and IBM are loose enough by now to not call this project an IBM thing. Eclipse did originate at IBM, but that was close to 20 years ago.

That may be so, but >90% of the work on this particular Eclipse project is done by IBM. Just as many companies contribute to OpenJDK but it is primarily an Oracle project, and Oracle does most of the work, Adoptium is an IBM project. That, in itself is not good or bad (although it is somewhat bad because, unlike other JDK distributors, IBM is barely involved with OpenJDK and the IBM team that makes the Adoptium builds is not particularly familiar with OpenJDK), but it is certainly not a "community led" distribution -- it is, de facto, an IBM-led one. It did not start out this way, but it has been this way for several years now (they did the same with https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apache_Harmony).

Are we talking about the (Open)J9 flavor here? It was featured more prominently on the AdoptOpenJDK page, but has now all but disappeared on the Adoptium site. J9 is something that I can definitely associate with IBM, what I'm having a hard time with is connecting the work on HotSpot builds to the company.

Last I checked that was because of some licensing issues when moving to Eclipse. The OpenJ9+OpenJDK builds are still available as IBM branded "Semeru" runtimes: https://developer.ibm.com/languages/java/semeru-runtimes/

I'm talking about the Adoptium (née AdoptOpenJDK) builds, which are made by IBM. IBM aren't involved much with OpenJDK, but they can still run `make` on server farms. Although Eclipse OpenJ9 is yet another IBM project.

See Adoptium.net/members.html for participating groups and vendors. More than just IBM.

Yeah, they did the same thing with Apache Harmony. Ostensibly, "more than just IBM;" de facto, pretty much IBM. Some of the very same people, too.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com