Eclipse Java downloads skyrocket | InfoWorld

Move over, Oracle Java. Downloads of the Eclipse Foundation’s Temurin Java SE binaries have more than doubled year-over-year, to more than 12 million downloads per month, Eclipse said March 14.

Eclipse delivered more than 12.3 million downloads of its standard Java binaries in February, the foundation reported. This volume of downloads has actually been going on for three to four months, Eclipse CEO Mike Milinkovich said. Under the jurisdiction of the Eclipse Adoptium working group, Temurin has become the default Java choice for the GitHub Actions CI/CD platform and multiple cloud container images, Eclipse said. And Eclipse is sure that its Java distribution is being used in enterprises.

While Temurin’s push predates a change to Oracle’s Java licenses, which charges for Java based on the number of employees rather than actual users, Milinkovich believes Oracle’s change has accelerated Temurin adoption. “I think the downloads are indicative that people are becoming more interested in a free version of Java,” Milinkovich said.

Milinkovich added that users want a version of Java that offers quality, scalability and security, and is supported by a vendor-agnostic community rather than a single vendor. The Eclipse Adoptium project, which includes vendors such as Azul, Google, Microsoft, and Red Hat, provides Java distributions based on the OpenJDK source code. Java developers use the Adoptium binaries on desktops, traditional servers, cloud platforms, mainframes and embedded systems, Eclipse said.

OpenJDK-based Temurin, which can be downloaded from adoptium.net, is available in Java SE versions 8, 11, 16, 17, 18, and 19, with Java 20 on the way. Eclipse provides support that includes fixes for security vulnerabilities. Also part of the Eclipse Adoptium Project is the AQavit quality verification test suite for Java implementations. Java is tested for conformance to specifications, as well as for quality and security. The Adoptium Marketplace provides Java runtimes from Alibaba Cloud, Azul, Eclipse, Huawei, IBM, Microsoft, and Red Hat.