Eclipse Foundation Launches Adoptium Working Group for Multi-Vendor Delivery of Java Runtimes for Enterprises 

BRUSSELS, March 23, 2021 -- The Eclipse Foundation, one of the world’s largest open source software foundations, today announced the formal establishment of the Adoptium Working Group in collaboration with the AdoptOpenJDK Technical Steering Committee. With this announcement, the Eclipse Foundation is bringing its proven vendor-neutral governance framework in support of the Eclipse Adoptium top-level project, which is based on the work previously done under the AdoptOpenJDK organization. Adoptium is founded by multiple participants, including many Java developers and vendors such as Alibaba Cloud, Huawei, IBM, iJUG, Karakun AG, Microsoft, New Relic, and Red Hat. The Adoptium Working Group will provide the Java ecosystem with fully compatible, high-quality distributions of Java runtimes based on OpenJDK source code.

“With the establishment of the Adoptium Working Group, the Eclipse Foundation has cemented its role as the vendor-neutral center of gravity for the open source Java community,” said Mike Milinkovich, executive director of the Eclipse Foundation. “We are already successfully hosting the Jakarta EE and MicroProfile specification communities and leading Java open source projects such as Eclipse GlassFish, Eclipse Jetty, and Eclipse Vert.x. Adoptium will add the delivery of compatible Java runtimes to that portfolio of key Java technologies for hybrid and multi-cloud enterprise development.” 

Thousands of enterprises and millions of developers that run Java need a reliable source of high-quality Java runtimes under open source licenses that come with timely patches and updates for the mission-critical Java applications. With more than 240 million downloads to date, AdoptOpenJDK provides enterprises with a proven set of open source, high-quality Java runtimes. The Eclipse Adoptium project is the continuation of the original AdoptOpenJDK mission, which was established in 2017 to address the general lack of an open, community-based, and reproducible build and test system for OpenJDK across multiple platforms. Eclipse Adoptium will become a leading provider of high-quality OpenJDK-based binaries used by Java developers in embedded systems, desktops, traditional servers, modern cloud platforms, and mainframes. 

The Adoptium Working Group (WG) complements the Eclipse Adoptium project, which provides a trusted location where developers and enterprises can download compatible binaries of OpenJDK builds. The goal of the Adoptium WG is to provide the infrastructure, marketing, community building, and developer advocacy work needed to continue to ensure timely releases to the community and further the adoption of Eclipse Adoptium.

This new open source working group was only possible through the successful negotiation of the OpenJDK Community TCK License Agreement (OCTLA) with Oracle, the steward of OpenJDK, the Java Community Process, and the Java compatibility brand. Under the terms of this agreement, Adoptium will run compatibility tests to ensure conformance to the Java specification. 

If your organization is interested in participating in the Adoptium WG, you can view the Charter and Participation Agreement, or email us at membership@eclipse.org. 

Quotes from Founding Organizations

Alibaba Cloud

“As a founding member of the Adoptium Working Group,  we are committed to creating an open, vendor-neutral environment to enable the growth of Java Runtime on our global cloud platform,” said Sanhong Li, director of Compiler & Runtime, Alibaba Cloud Intelligence. “We value the contribution of developers, and we hope to provide the right technology and resources to build a conducive ecosystem for better and more community collaborations.”

IBM

“IBM is very pleased to announce that we will be joining the Eclipse Adoptium working group as a founding member. We were also one of the founding members of the AdoptOpenJDK community with a long history of contributions and support,” said Samir M. Kamerkar, program director, Runtime Technologies at IBM. “As the AdoptOpenJDK project moves into the Eclipse Foundation as Adoptium, we look forward to continuing to collaborate with that same vendor-neutral open source Java community to share knowledge and efforts around building JDKs and to help expand and advance the quality bar for all JDK releases that leverage the Adoptium infrastructure.”

About the Eclipse Foundation

The Eclipse Foundation provides our global community of individuals and organizations with a mature, scalable, and business-friendly environment for open source software collaboration and innovation. The Foundation is home to the Eclipse IDE, Jakarta EE, and over 375 open source projects, including runtimes, tools, and frameworks for cloud and edge applications, IoT, AI, automotive, systems engineering, distributed ledger technologies, open processor designs, and many others. The Eclipse Foundation is a rapidly growing international non-profit association supported by over 300 members, including more than 90 new members added in 2020 alone. These members represent a diverse collection of industry leaders that value open source technology as a key enabler for their business strategies. To learn more, visit eclipse.org.

Source: Eclipse Foundation