36% of developers switched from Oracle JDK to an alternate OpenJDK distribution, over the last year

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Which Java vendor’s JDK do you currently use in production for your main application?

With Oracle changing the licensing on their JDK versions, we kickoff this report with the answer to an important question — which JDK are developers using for their main application?

According to the respondents, although Oracle JDK is still dominant with 34%, there is a huge shift towards other OpenJDK providers. 1 in
4 developers chooses the Adopt OpenJDK distribution. It’s also interesting to note that, the Oracle JDK still uses the OpenJDK under the covers, despite carrying a commercial license.

Comparing this to the results from last year, where Oracle JDK accounted for 70% and OpenJDK for 21% of the preferred JDK distribution, we notice a major shift, with a 72% swing from Oracle JDK to alternate OpenJDK providers.

Are you currently paying a vendor for JDK support?

When we look at the responses to this question, the shift we saw earlier, from Oracle JDK to OpenJDK, makes more sense since the large majority of the participants (86%) do not wish to pay for JDK support. In fact, only 9% currently pay for support.

Who do you pay? When developers do choose to pay for JDK

When developers do choose to pay for JDK support, Oracle is still the clear winner while the other three vendors share the remainder of the market rather equally. In retrospect, this means that, if only 9% of developers pay for JDK support (as seen in question 2), the total population of developers that pay Oracle, is 5% – or 1 in 20 developers.

Did the support and release cadence changes, since JDK 9, affect your decision to pay for support?

Starting with JDK 9, a new Java version is being released every March and September, which is
a major change to the JDK release cadence. This impacts the update strategy for many users as this 6-month release cadence affects the support cycle as well. Moreover, this change has an impact on security too, with security patches not being backported to older versions.

According to our survey, for more than a third of the developers, the new cadence influenced their decision to pay for support. At least 41% of the respondents claim that the changes made to the release cadence and support played some role in that decision.

Will you consider paying for JDK support in the future, based on the latest release cadence changes?

The majority of the developers who participated in this survey, don’t believe they will change their minds about paying JDK support in the future. As the community involvement is bound to grow in future JDK releases, it is possible that, in a year from now, we see a decrease in the number of developers who consider paying for JDK support. Although only 7% of the respondents are willing to pay for support in the future, a significant 19% is still considering the possibility.

There’s more to this report! Which section do you want to read next? 

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