OpenJDK, Oracle JDK and JCP

Question

As I understand, Oracle is moving its Oracle JDK to a feature release every 6 months and a Oracle JDK LTS every 3 years or so. Oracle JDK will no longer be free after January 2019. It seems that OpenJDK is also moving to a 6 months release cycle.

My questions are:

• How is Oracle JDK and OpenJDK keeping up with the Java Specifications if feature releases are released so often?
• Will OpenJDK also adopt the LTS as a reference implementation to match the Java Specifications? [Answer, yes. See here : "Oracle and the OpenJDK community are moving to a Long Term Support (LTS) release model plus a new class of “Feature” releases."

Thanks!

Answer 1

First, let's address some misconceptions in the question.

Oracle JDK will no longer be free after January 2019.

From what I've read , only the LTS version will require a paid license. The public version will remain free but will only be supported for as long as there's not a new version out. I surmised as much from Oracle's own roadmap in which they list 18.3 as being supported until September 2018.

Now to the main question: Oracle hasn't changed the specs of the JVM just because they've moved to a 6-month release cycle. What has changed is what features land in a specific version at any given time. Instead of the typical (and oddly familiar) glacial pace of features, we get releases if they're ready within a six-month window.

The only thing that's really changed there is the pace of release and what potentially lands in a release, not the specs.

(Also, OpenJDK and Oracle JDK will become one and the same Soon™. They're working on this.)