> Technically, the OpenJDK project is independent of Oracle, even though they do sponsor and presently lead it. That source is no more Oracle's than the linux k

> Technically, the OpenJDK project is independent of Oracle, even though they do sponsor and presently lead it. That source is no more Oracle's than the linux kernel is Red Hat's (in both cases, a large contributor with their own copyrights, contributing to an open project with open license). That's not true. Oracle owns the OpenJDK project much like Google owns Chromium. To contribute to OpenJDK you need to sign a Contributor Agreement granting Oracle shared ownership over your contribution (i.e. you maintain copyright, but Oracle also has copyright); this is standard practice for such open-source projects (like Chromium). On the other hand, while Linux is developed by various for-profit companies, the code is owned by the Linux Foundation. As of now, there is no separate legal entity for OpenJDK. I'm not sure it makes a difference in practice, but if you wanted to be technically correct then that's the situation. > The Oracle build of the JDK has not always been isomorphic to those produced based on the OpenJDK code, No. We offer two builds of the OpenJDK JDK, under two different licenses. The open-source one is here: https://jdk.java.net https://jdk.java.net It is an official Oracle build. The other official Oracle build (called by various names, including Oracle JDK) has a different license, but only diverges from OpenJDK some time after a feature release due to different bugfix backports. > The strictly-GPLv2-with-classpath-exception-sourced vendor distributions of OpenJDK Just pointing out that Oracle also distributes the JDK under that very same license (https://jdk.java.net https://jdk.java.net), but we also offer our software through other vendors. It's up to you which website you choose to download our software from.