8 ms·

OpenJDK is now on GitHub

164 points by carimura 6y ago

gravitas 6y ago
Title clarification: OpenJDK specifically, there are many name-branded JDKs in circulation.
- Alupis 6y ago
  Most of which take the OpenJDK source, sprinkle in some "secret sauce" and then compile the entire thing for convenience of users. It's not a trivial undertaking to compile OpenJDK from sources. There are not very many JDK implementations that don't have OpenJDK sources at their core. OpenJDK is also treated as the reference implementation, and is where JEP's and things are worked out. Effectively, OpenJDK is "upstream" Java.
  - Hello71 6y ago
    > It's not a trivial undertaking to compile OpenJDK from sources. uh? assuming you already have a working C toolchain and JDK installed, you just hg^Wgit clone; bash configure; make. edit: you may have more trouble compiling it on windows, but compiling anything on windows is a pain unless it uses the entire proprietary non-portable microsoft-specific project management tools.
    - swiley 6y ago
      RE: compiling on windows Apple is honestly giving Microsoft a run for their money here. Many FOSS apps seem to have given up on OSX and few ever tried with iOS.
      - TheDong 6y ago
        IMO it's harder to compile for macOS than for windows. I don't have a macbook. I can legally run a trial copy of windows in virtualbox to test out cross-compiling stuff, or spin up a windows EC2 instance for a few hours, or even use circleci or other CI system's windows workers to build stuff. For macOS, I can't legally run a VM on my hardware, ec2 doesn't support it so I can't spin up a VM, and most CI platforms don't support it (probably because many of them just resell fleets of ec2 instances). Many FOSS developers are just hacking away on 3 year old laptops or desktops for fun, and can't afford a $2k investment just to support one more operating system for their little project.
    - jgneff 6y ago
      I agree. Among all the open-source projects I've built, the OpenJDK is one of the easiest and most straight-forward I've encountered — even when cross-compiling for 32-bit ARM. They did a great job rewriting the build system a few years back.
    - Slartie 6y ago
      Even on Windows it just takes a few hours of setting up a build VM machine from scratch, installing a few tools, to first full build. It is more inconvenient than Linux (as is all Windows building, indeed) but far from being hard to do. I did that regularly some years ago for the company I work for, because we needed OpenJDK Windows binaries, and there wasn't such a convenient thing as AdoptOpenJDK. So in order to not get caught in stupid licensing debacles with Oracle it came down to just compile the Windows binaries by yourself.
  - fnord123 6y ago
    > Most of which take the OpenJDK source, sprinkle in some "secret sauce" and then compile the entire thing for convenience of users. Got some links to these GPL licensed OpenJDK forks?
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
    - Rebelgecko 6y ago
      https://github.com/corretto/corretto-8 https://github.com/corretto/corretto-8 https://www.eclipse.org/openj9/ https://www.eclipse.org/openj9/ https://github.com/SAP/SapMachine https://github.com/SAP/SapMachine
      - xeeeeeeeeeeenu 6y ago
        also: https://adoptopenjdk.net/ https://adoptopenjdk.net/ https://github.com/alibaba/dragonwell11 https://github.com/alibaba/dragonwell11 https://github.com/alibaba/dragonwell8 https://github.com/alibaba/dragonwell8 https://developers.redhat.com/products/openjdk/overview https://developers.redhat.com/products/openjdk/overview https://www.azul.com/downloads/zulu-community/ https://www.azul.com/downloads/zulu-community/ https://bell-sw.com https://bell-sw.com
        fnord123 6y ago
        Great list! Thanks!
      - vips7L 6y ago
        Sap and corretto are mostly friendly forks that just backport bug fixes from newer versions of OpenJDK for their customers. OpenJ9 uses a whole different JVM even though they use the OpenJDK standard library.
      - fnord123 6y ago
        Awesome! Thanks!
    - deleted 6y ago
  - kodablah 6y ago
    > There are not very many JDK implementations that don't have OpenJDK sources at their core. Well yeah, especially not open source, as you can't get a TCK for non-OpenJDK open source implementations of the standard library. Oracle forbids it.
  - mhh__ 6y ago
    > Most of which take the OpenJDK source, sprinkle in some "secret sauce" and then compile the entire thing for convenience of users. As in GPL violations? (I've never had the pleasure(?) to use java properly, so I'm not familiar)
    - Rebelgecko 6y ago
      Dunno what previous poster is referring to, but none that I know of. For example Amazon Corretto is on GitHub, and Amazon gives a pretty good breakdown of the patches that make it different from the equivalent OpenJDK version (funnily enough, most of the changes are actually just backporting bug fixes from OpenJDK11 into Amazon's equivalent of OpenJDK8) There's the Oracle JDK which has some onerous licensing, but IIRC the actual JDK is the same, they just include some extra binaries in the distribution
    - singlow 6y ago
      Not literally secret. They are just the changes that are particular to an environment or specific use case. They are just not things that are likely to get upstreamed so they are maintained as a fork.
  - gravitas 6y ago
    Fun trivia: it all started with the Blackdown JDK. I vaguely recall it taking up until 1.2 to stabilize but that's a fuzzy memory from a younger me. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blackdown_Java https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blackdown_Java
pron 6y ago
https://github.com/openjdk/jdk https://github.com/openjdk/jdk
- ocdtrekkie 6y ago
  It's really weird a choice in the email to provide links that looked like they weren't on GitHub to redirect to the GitHub URLs... For a moment, I was wondering if they had like a self-hosted GitHub Enterprise setup or something, until I noticed the URL redirected anyways.
  - pron 6y ago
    That's intentional. Links will contain the redirecting address on our domain so that when we move off of GH (some day; nothing lasts forever), links will continue to work.
    - ocdtrekkie 6y ago
      ...I can't argue with that unassailable logic. Particularly since I use the same when I insist on using my own domain for my email address now, regardless of what provider I use behind it, after the difficulty of handing out my replacement address to everyone who used to have my old Gmail account...
    - s3cur3 6y ago
      This strategy has saved our bacon at work more than a handful of times. All the URLs we ship in our apps point to a "lookup" server (just Nginx with a huge list of redirect rules), such that if the URL we were using in the app disappears, we can change it on the server side rather than requiring a client update.
- KajMagnus 6y ago
  https://github.com/openjdk/jdk/graphs/contributors https://github.com/openjdk/jdk/graphs/contributors How interesting, more and more activity? year by year
tw04 6y ago
I apologize as it's slightly off-topic, but for anyone that is stuck working on old gear that still uses a java interface/JNLP and doesn't want to run JAVA 6 - here's an open source project that's keeping JNLPs alive and as secure as they can: https://openwebstart.com/ https://openwebstart.com/ https://github.com/karakun/OpenWebStart https://github.com/karakun/OpenWebStart Been a life saver for me (and I am in no way affiliated). When I switched to OpenJDK I was dead in the water for JNLPs until I found it.
- chrisseaton 6y ago
  > JAVA 6 Why do you capitalise it like this? It's not an abbreviation.
  - thangalin 6y ago
    Nor an acronym.
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
  - fomine3 6y ago
    I think capital JAVA is enterprise notation
- nix23 6y ago
  Thanks for the tip...have a application still running on 1.4.21 ;(
- hyperdimension 6y ago
  Do you happen to know if it completely rolls back all the old SSL-related policy? Asking because I've never gotten Dell DRAC Remote Console over Java working (5 and 6/i), and the alternative is, well, ActiveX... Neither work though. It's been a while, but I don't even think I could get an XP VM to access it.
  - 6y ago
geogra4 6y ago
Is anyone else worried about the mass centralization of Open Source projects at one central point of failure on github? especially since it's owned by an American company and I assume hosted within the United States
- cel1ne 6y ago
  Not really, since everybody who cloned a repo has a full copy of everything. Reminds me of the saying that writing git was just a backup strategy for Linus Torvalds: FTP-mirrors were the first step to ensure that the kernel was never lost, git was needed to mirror the source-history as well.
  - zdw 6y ago
    Except all the proprietary lock-in tools they add to Git like the issue tracker, PR's, discussion, wiki, released binaries, container registry, access control settings, etc.
    - pb82 6y ago
      I think you mean Github, those features are not part of git.
      - chrisseaton 6y ago
        That's what they said - 'add to Git'. > proprietary lock-in tools they add to Git Git + their other stuff = GitHub.
      - alessivs 6y ago
        Of course the immediate parent meant GitHub. It is the grand-parent comment that conflated the two: > one central point of failure on github? >> Not really, since everybody who cloned a repo has a full copy of everything. (everything != Git repo)
- andrewla 6y ago
  Not me. The fact that it's in git makes it easy to mirror and export, so I don't consider github to be a central point of failure. Issue tracking and PR handling lives in the github UI, but the significant change here is a change from Mercurial to Git, which I hold as a positive development. Fundamentally git is a data storage format that is very well-defined, with a standard command-line interface which is fine, not great. Mercurial has an arguably better command-line interface, but a data structure that is not well-defined or documented, and the main interface to hg is through python-based plugins, which is just awful.
Hello71 6y ago
Unfortunately, similar to a number of other Enterprise Open Source projects, despite being on GitHub, potential contributors still cannot open any tracked bugs, and need to print and scan a CLA before submitting any code.

164 points by carimura 6y ago

gravitas 6y ago

Title clarification: OpenJDK specifically, there are many name-branded JDKs in circulation.

Alupis 6y ago
Most of which take the OpenJDK source, sprinkle in some "secret sauce" and then compile the entire thing for convenience of users. It's not a trivial undertaking to compile OpenJDK from sources. There are not very many JDK implementations that don't have OpenJDK sources at their core. OpenJDK is also treated as the reference implementation, and is where JEP's and things are worked out. Effectively, OpenJDK is "upstream" Java.
- Hello71 6y ago
  > It's not a trivial undertaking to compile OpenJDK from sources. uh? assuming you already have a working C toolchain and JDK installed, you just hg^Wgit clone; bash configure; make. edit: you may have more trouble compiling it on windows, but compiling anything on windows is a pain unless it uses the entire proprietary non-portable microsoft-specific project management tools.
  - swiley 6y ago
    RE: compiling on windows Apple is honestly giving Microsoft a run for their money here. Many FOSS apps seem to have given up on OSX and few ever tried with iOS.
    - TheDong 6y ago
      IMO it's harder to compile for macOS than for windows. I don't have a macbook. I can legally run a trial copy of windows in virtualbox to test out cross-compiling stuff, or spin up a windows EC2 instance for a few hours, or even use circleci or other CI system's windows workers to build stuff. For macOS, I can't legally run a VM on my hardware, ec2 doesn't support it so I can't spin up a VM, and most CI platforms don't support it (probably because many of them just resell fleets of ec2 instances). Many FOSS developers are just hacking away on 3 year old laptops or desktops for fun, and can't afford a $2k investment just to support one more operating system for their little project.
  - jgneff 6y ago
    I agree. Among all the open-source projects I've built, the OpenJDK is one of the easiest and most straight-forward I've encountered — even when cross-compiling for 32-bit ARM. They did a great job rewriting the build system a few years back.
  - Slartie 6y ago
    Even on Windows it just takes a few hours of setting up a build VM machine from scratch, installing a few tools, to first full build. It is more inconvenient than Linux (as is all Windows building, indeed) but far from being hard to do. I did that regularly some years ago for the company I work for, because we needed OpenJDK Windows binaries, and there wasn't such a convenient thing as AdoptOpenJDK. So in order to not get caught in stupid licensing debacles with Oracle it came down to just compile the Windows binaries by yourself.
- fnord123 6y ago
  > Most of which take the OpenJDK source, sprinkle in some "secret sauce" and then compile the entire thing for convenience of users. Got some links to these GPL licensed OpenJDK forks?
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - Rebelgecko 6y ago
    https://github.com/corretto/corretto-8 https://github.com/corretto/corretto-8 https://www.eclipse.org/openj9/ https://www.eclipse.org/openj9/ https://github.com/SAP/SapMachine https://github.com/SAP/SapMachine
    - xeeeeeeeeeeenu 6y ago
      also: https://adoptopenjdk.net/ https://adoptopenjdk.net/ https://github.com/alibaba/dragonwell11 https://github.com/alibaba/dragonwell11 https://github.com/alibaba/dragonwell8 https://github.com/alibaba/dragonwell8 https://developers.redhat.com/products/openjdk/overview https://developers.redhat.com/products/openjdk/overview https://www.azul.com/downloads/zulu-community/ https://www.azul.com/downloads/zulu-community/ https://bell-sw.com https://bell-sw.com
      - fnord123 6y ago
        Great list! Thanks!
    - vips7L 6y ago
      Sap and corretto are mostly friendly forks that just backport bug fixes from newer versions of OpenJDK for their customers. OpenJ9 uses a whole different JVM even though they use the OpenJDK standard library.
    - fnord123 6y ago
      Awesome! Thanks!
  - deleted 6y ago
- kodablah 6y ago
  > There are not very many JDK implementations that don't have OpenJDK sources at their core. Well yeah, especially not open source, as you can't get a TCK for non-OpenJDK open source implementations of the standard library. Oracle forbids it.
- mhh__ 6y ago
  > Most of which take the OpenJDK source, sprinkle in some "secret sauce" and then compile the entire thing for convenience of users. As in GPL violations? (I've never had the pleasure(?) to use java properly, so I'm not familiar)
  - Rebelgecko 6y ago
    Dunno what previous poster is referring to, but none that I know of. For example Amazon Corretto is on GitHub, and Amazon gives a pretty good breakdown of the patches that make it different from the equivalent OpenJDK version (funnily enough, most of the changes are actually just backporting bug fixes from OpenJDK11 into Amazon's equivalent of OpenJDK8) There's the Oracle JDK which has some onerous licensing, but IIRC the actual JDK is the same, they just include some extra binaries in the distribution
  - singlow 6y ago
    Not literally secret. They are just the changes that are particular to an environment or specific use case. They are just not things that are likely to get upstreamed so they are maintained as a fork.
- gravitas 6y ago
  Fun trivia: it all started with the Blackdown JDK. I vaguely recall it taking up until 1.2 to stabilize but that's a fuzzy memory from a younger me. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blackdown_Java https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blackdown_Java

pron 6y ago

https://github.com/openjdk/jdk https://github.com/openjdk/jdk

ocdtrekkie 6y ago
It's really weird a choice in the email to provide links that looked like they weren't on GitHub to redirect to the GitHub URLs... For a moment, I was wondering if they had like a self-hosted GitHub Enterprise setup or something, until I noticed the URL redirected anyways.
- pron 6y ago
  That's intentional. Links will contain the redirecting address on our domain so that when we move off of GH (some day; nothing lasts forever), links will continue to work.
  - ocdtrekkie 6y ago
    ...I can't argue with that unassailable logic. Particularly since I use the same when I insist on using my own domain for my email address now, regardless of what provider I use behind it, after the difficulty of handing out my replacement address to everyone who used to have my old Gmail account...
  - s3cur3 6y ago
    This strategy has saved our bacon at work more than a handful of times. All the URLs we ship in our apps point to a "lookup" server (just Nginx with a huge list of redirect rules), such that if the URL we were using in the app disappears, we can change it on the server side rather than requiring a client update.
KajMagnus 6y ago
https://github.com/openjdk/jdk/graphs/contributors https://github.com/openjdk/jdk/graphs/contributors How interesting, more and more activity? year by year

tw04 6y ago

I apologize as it's slightly off-topic, but for anyone that is stuck working on old gear that still uses a java interface/JNLP and doesn't want to run JAVA 6 - here's an open source project that's keeping JNLPs alive and as secure as they can: https://openwebstart.com/ https://openwebstart.com/ https://github.com/karakun/OpenWebStart https://github.com/karakun/OpenWebStart Been a life saver for me (and I am in no way affiliated). When I switched to OpenJDK I was dead in the water for JNLPs until I found it.

chrisseaton 6y ago
> JAVA 6 Why do you capitalise it like this? It's not an abbreviation.
- thangalin 6y ago
  Nor an acronym.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
- fomine3 6y ago
  I think capital JAVA is enterprise notation
nix23 6y ago
Thanks for the tip...have a application still running on 1.4.21 ;(
hyperdimension 6y ago
Do you happen to know if it completely rolls back all the old SSL-related policy? Asking because I've never gotten Dell DRAC Remote Console over Java working (5 and 6/i), and the alternative is, well, ActiveX... Neither work though. It's been a while, but I don't even think I could get an XP VM to access it.
- 6y ago

geogra4 6y ago

Is anyone else worried about the mass centralization of Open Source projects at one central point of failure on github? especially since it's owned by an American company and I assume hosted within the United States

cel1ne 6y ago
Not really, since everybody who cloned a repo has a full copy of everything. Reminds me of the saying that writing git was just a backup strategy for Linus Torvalds: FTP-mirrors were the first step to ensure that the kernel was never lost, git was needed to mirror the source-history as well.
- zdw 6y ago
  Except all the proprietary lock-in tools they add to Git like the issue tracker, PR's, discussion, wiki, released binaries, container registry, access control settings, etc.
  - pb82 6y ago
    I think you mean Github, those features are not part of git.
    - chrisseaton 6y ago
      That's what they said - 'add to Git'. > proprietary lock-in tools they add to Git Git + their other stuff = GitHub.
    - alessivs 6y ago
      Of course the immediate parent meant GitHub. It is the grand-parent comment that conflated the two: > one central point of failure on github? >> Not really, since everybody who cloned a repo has a full copy of everything. (everything != Git repo)
andrewla 6y ago
Not me. The fact that it's in git makes it easy to mirror and export, so I don't consider github to be a central point of failure. Issue tracking and PR handling lives in the github UI, but the significant change here is a change from Mercurial to Git, which I hold as a positive development. Fundamentally git is a data storage format that is very well-defined, with a standard command-line interface which is fine, not great. Mercurial has an arguably better command-line interface, but a data structure that is not well-defined or documented, and the main interface to hg is through python-based plugins, which is just awful.

Hello71 6y ago

Unfortunately, similar to a number of other Enterprise Open Source projects, despite being on GitHub, potential contributors still cannot open any tracked bugs, and need to print and scan a CLA before submitting any code.