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Comment by jmgao | Hacker News Reader

It could be worse, it could be Java 2 Standard Edition 5.0 1.5.0 release 22!

I still don't understand Java versioning. Apparently the latest JRE is still 8u371? Is that Java 8? How does that relate to the SDK I use which is 17 or 20?

Bonus questions: why do I seemingly need to have both Java 8 and Java 11 installed on my work machine? But specifically some $RandomCompanyName Java, because Oracle Java and OpenJDK seem to be disallowed by corporate policies, and there are scanning tools running like hunter-killer drones, ready to snuff out any traces of openjdk and nuke it from orbit? And all I need it for is to run some PKI software that looks like it was written in the 90s?

I've lost track of what's going on with Java ecosystem, at least on the enterprise side.

Your corporate security crew are keenly aware that Oracle's licensing is just a wedge to help an army of lawyers invade your office. OpenJDK must be seen as guilty by association. There is no good reason to play around the legal nuclear pit that is maintained by Larry's minions.

As for jdk8 vs jdk11, backward compatibility was broken when J2EE javax.* classes were rightfully removed from the standard lib after Java 8. But Oracle (again) disallowed usage of the javax namespace in external libs and everybody now has to update to the poorly named jakarta replacement.

Thanks, this explanation actually makes perfect sense!

Oracle no longer releases JRE post Java 8. Users are not supposed to install it as Applets and WebStart are no longer supported. Post 8 only JDK is released which has bundled runtime environment.

I don't know if upstream ships it but I think JRE still exists as a build target. Debian stable at least has packages like openjdk-17-jre, and unstable has newer.

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