> Painting that as normal is disingenuous, and rightfully led to a very public Oracle JDK exodus. It's not "painting it as normal." This is the actual normal.

> Painting that as normal is disingenuous, and rightfully led to a very public Oracle JDK exodus. It's not "painting it as normal." This is the actual normal. It's just that there has always been an update. It is also not true that you cannot continue an updated version past the end of update period. > Azul seems to disagree. They have a JRE7[1] and JRE8[2] offering. They really don't. They have an offering of something they call a JRE, but isn't. Try to run Applets or Web Start on it. > Old Legacy Java5 Applets aren't going to run on Java9+ without other significant changes anyway. Most Java 1.0 applications run on Java unchanged, and the JRE is to run Applet's and Web Start. Now there are custom Java runtimes created with jlink. > If I go to Oracle's website, it's difficult to find where to download any version of Java JRE or JDK without being bombarded with a plethora of "Subscribe and protect your Java investment!" Nope. Here's the official JDK from Oracle for non-support customers. You'll get bombarded with nothing: http://jdk.java.net/ http://jdk.java.net/ > Nothing is wrong with Oracle wanting to charge people to use their binaries But we don't. You're looking at the support subscription. The website clearly links to the 100% free JDK for people who aren't interested in support: http://jdk.java.net/ http://jdk.java.net/ > but I do not believe the distinction of contributing more code matters for the point I am raising. Oracle is to OpenJDK what Google is to Chromium. It is the main developer of OpenJDK (by a huge margin), and the steward of Java. That it's changed how it funds its investment in OpenJDK didn't change any of that. This is easy to see if you follow OpenJDK's development. > the Java8 thing was quite a fiasco What fiasco? You mean that some people insisted on using unmaintained libraries, ignored warnings about undocumented APIs for years, and then, when Oracle upped the investment and things started changing some ill-maintained dependencies broke? You realise that this hadn't happened before because they platform wasn't changing much because of a decline in investment in Sun's dying years? > They're OpenJDK source compiled and offered in a binary for free without any strings attached That's great, just like Oracle's binaries, which, again, are here: http://jdk.java.net/ http://jdk.java.net/