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sleepybrett

This and the Corretto announcement. Those are some shots over the bow.

https://aws.amazon.com/fr/corretto/

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Note also that James Gosling works at AWS[1].

[1] https://www.geekwire.com/2017/legendary-computer-scientist-j...

I'm not sure I understand how Amazon can offer something like this. IANAL, clearly, but isn't anything one or two degrees away from "java" something that Google just fought a long court battle over? Is Corretto different because it is running inside Amazon's data centers? Was the Google blunder that they supposedly used actually Oracle (acquired from Sun) JDK code inside their Android/Dalvik?

I believe this is just long-term support of the open jdk in formally managed releases. They are not modifying the JDK for anything outside of its original intended purposes and APIs.

Since oracle changed the release schedule to be a thinly veiled "pay us money or upgrade your JDK every couple months" model, there is a lot of uncertainty in javaland.

If you think that corporations would just stay up to date... well, then you clearly don't know how slow corporations are to adopt new JDKs.

This is fine. Amazon is just redistributing OpenJDK according to the terms of its license, which is indisputably legal.

The problem with Android was that it was using, Harmony, a clean-room implementation of JDK whose license is incompatible with OpenJDK. It was believed at the time that APIs were not copyrightable, and thus that clean-room implementations were not derivative works. The courts disagreed. Now Google just uses OpenJDK for Android and they are back in the clear again.

Google could have done that as well.

But they didn't

Google touched the Java fire with Android and got burned.

They have golang and dart to stand behind, they have no "need" to push Java.

When Android started, they could have? J2ME and state of Java/JDKs was far different than their AOT and Harmony classlib, especially with licensing/freedom. If anything, being divorced from Sun/Oracle stewardship/runtime over the years helped them more than hurt them.

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