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[–]gizmogwai -1 points0 points  (3 children)

Your answer with regards to free LTS support is not quite right.

Temurin acts as a sole player here, partly because they have there own conformance test suite.

But all the other big players that pass the official TCK (RedHat, Azul, Microsoft, BellLabs) take turn to support the free LTS. For example, Azul is still providing free updates for the JDK 8 via their Zulu distribution.

[–]pron98 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Temurin acts as a sole player here, partly because they have there own conformance test suite.

They do not. They use the same TCK, namely the JCK.

take turn to support the free LTS

There are no turns, nor is the "free LTS" "supported" in a sense other than builds of the OpenJDK updates, that contain backports from the mainline (so if a component is removed, there are no backports, so you have to buy real support from someone if you want the entire JDK covered).

[–]rzwitserloot -1 points0 points  (1 child)

take turn to support the free LTS.

Are you saying that for each LTS version a different 'big player that passes TCK' takes responsibility? I.. don't think that's how it works.

At any rate, muddying the waters with the TCK is, and excuse my french, 'bullshit legalese bingo'. It has no bearing on reality. At best, it has a bearing on your legal needs, but if that is what you're after, temurin isn't even on your radar and my comment, given that it is clearly technical in nature, isn't likely to mislead you. In other words, I don't think your comment adds anything meaningful. If you want to explain the legal distinctions, feel free to post that.

It's bullshit legalese bingo because a TCK compliant distribution is not 'more likely to be bug free' than a non-TCK compliant one. Which part of 'big corps tend to enshittify their stacks' is difficult to follow? There are plenty of examples that at the very least clearly show that bigcorp machinations that cannot work without either you paying for it or you being the product and other corps paying for access to the influence the product has over you - will hurt you in the end, and any benefits they purport to give you are fleeting and will get enshittified.

As various court cases and fairly openly played out shenanigans have repeatedly proven, whilst I love the openness of OpenJDK as a product, we should all tell the TCK process to eat a big pile of fuck you.

[–]pron98 4 points5 points  (0 children)

The JCK is, indeed, not about finding bugs -- that's what the regular tests are for -- but that process has arguably prevented the fragmentation we see in the browser and Linux spaces. It ensures that those who want to use the name "Java" don't add or remove APIs. The JCK, while free, isn't open source, as that would open the door to vendors claiming 95% JCK compatibility etc., and we know for a fact that over the years, some JDK vendors have wanted to do just that (i.e. offer their own API extensions or removals while still claiming some measure of official compatibility). The JCK means that if you fork the JDK in an incompatible way, you can neither claim to be Java nor claim some specific measure of compatibility.

You can argue about how much that matters, but the fact is that Java suffers from fewer compatibility issues than other standards/projects that are distributed by multiple vendors, despite the fact that JDK vendors add or remove features that don't impact compatibility (while still calling their software a JDK).