IBM signs up to Eclipse Foundation's Adoptium working group to push out free, certified JDK binaries

IBM has joined the Eclipse Adoptium working group as an enterprise member and committed to building and publishing Java SE TCK-certified JDK binaries with OpenJ9 free of charge. The move comes after Microsoft previewed its own OpenJDK flavour last week. IBM was already a noise in the AdoptOpenJDK community. Its developers …

[Anonymous Coward]

Tentative thumbs up?

We shall see how it goes. But based on IBM's statement versus Microsoft's statement, IBM certainly sounds more open and more relevant to developers and companies.

[Michael Wojcik]

Re: Tentative thumbs up?

IBM's made a huge investment in Java since not long after its introduction. The first Websphere product was released in '98; that's also when CICS introduced Java support. OS/2 Warp 4 (1996) came with a JVM and could run Java classes and JARs directly from the command line.

In some ways, IBM was a bigger promoter of Java than Sun was, at least in the "enterprise" market. And a lot of their contributions were always open-sourced.

So it makes sense for them to continue. It's a loss leader for them that supports revenue sources like mainframe software leasing and a competitive dig at Oracle.