They said it'd never happen, but here we are in the year of our Lord 2021 and Microsoft has its own OpenJDK flavour

It may be chilly in the UK this week, but that is nothing compared to the state of Hell as Microsoft continued its support of OpenJDK. A preview of the Microsoft Build of OpenJDK was announced today in Long Term Support guise. The distribution includes binaries for Java 11, based on OpenJDK 11.0.10+9, on x64 server and desktop …

[Andrew Williams]

One wonders what compelling magic they’re burying in their JDK that will make people want it? Especially seeing as it looks like their intent is to not feed whatever it is back into mainstream JDK

[bombastic bob]

Not feeding enhancements back into the mainstream code - isn't that what got them sued by Sun in the first place? A JVM that had windows-related enhancements for Java??? Or are they being super-careful now to avoid them being enhancements to the lingo itself?

[Anonymous Coward]

So...

MS embraced this because they and their subsidiaries are "dependent" on it. Now they are extending it with fixes that may (or may not) make their way back upstream. I forget what the third step is. Something about underwear?

[Blank Reg]

Fixes was never the problem. Where they went wrong the first time was changing or removing public APIs such that anything written for the Microsoft version may not run elsewhere, and anything written for standard Java could fail to run on the Microsoft JVM.

While it is possible that a fix could cause the same sort of problem, it's really not in the same league as deliberately trying to destroy cross platform development

[SecretSonOfHG]

They're not saying that they won't feed changes back to upstream, they're saying that they are not waiting for those changes to be in upstream to have them in their build. Of course, if those changes never reach upstream your sentence will be true.

[martijnverburg]

We *will* be feeding back to Mainstream JDK :-)

Hi all,

Some extra context here. We absolutely intend to upstream everything that we can back to OpenJDK. For Java 8 and 11, as they are deemed to be stable, mature versions the bar for getting changes in is very high (there's rightfully a risk-averse policy in place) and so if we're unable to convince the project leads to take a fix then we'll clearly mark that in our release notes as a differentiator (with a link to the discussion). The MD5 improvement we made is an example of that - we took it to OpenJDK, they liked the fix on the tip, but for Java 11 they took the risk-averse policy of not letting it in. Since it makes a difference for our Azure customers, we kept it in our build of 11 and marked it in the release notes.

For the tip, again we anticipate that just about everything will be upstreamed. However, again it's a case of those changes being accepted (the Java ecosystem is wider than Azure and we get that). We've learned how to be an effective partner in OpenJDK and have landed over 50 patches into OpenJDK now, both big (like the Windows ARM Port) and small :-).

[Anonymous Coward]

Obligatory XKCD reference: <https://xkcd.com/927

[bpfh]

Have we not been here before?

> The company warned that the binaries "may contain backported fixes and enhancements we deem important to our customers and our internal users"

The rotting undead lawsuit riddled corpses of J++ and Microsoft's Java Virtual Machine crawl out of their unmarked tombs from where they were unceremoniously dumped by torch and pitchfork wielding internet users, lawyers and Scott McNealy almost 20 years ago, staggering around and moaning for brains....