Report: Proportion of Oracle JDK distributions in Java ecosystem drops considerably

Oracle could be the stewards of the Java programming language, however their market share in Java Growth Equipment (JDK) distributions has considerably dropped over the previous two years.

That is based on New Relic’s 2022 State of the Java Ecosystem report, which pulls knowledge from functions reporting to New Relic. 

In line with the survey, Oracle is chargeable for 34.48% of the JDK distributions which might be presently in use at this time. Again in 2020, Oracle had roughly 75% of the share of the market, so this can be a large change.

As Oracle’s market share has gone down, Amazon’s has gone up. In 2020, solely 2.18% of the JDK distributions have been offered by Amazon, however now they supply 22.04% of JDK distributions. 

“The true fascinating merchandise is the rise of Amazon as a significant supplier and I’d speculate that that is associated to using containers,” Steve Poole, developer advocate at Sonatype, advised SD Instances. “When selecting any software program for manufacturing the necessity for help is a significant affect. Holding the variety of help distributors to a minimal is all the time clever too, so I speculate that the rise of Amazon Java is as a result of it’s thought of the most secure possibility for deploying Java in containers to AWS.”

Oracle had switched to a extra restrictive licensing of its JDF distribution for Java 11, which can be an element. It has since opened up its license coverage to be much less restrictive for Java 17; nevertheless, Java 11 is presently probably the most used Lengthy-Time period Assist (LTS) model of the language. 

Forty-eight % of Java customers are utilizing Java 11 whereas lower than 1% use Java 17. The second most-used LTS model is Java 8, with 46.45% of Java customers on it. 

In relation to non-LTS variations, Java 14 is the most well-liked, with 0.95% of use. Adoption of non-LTS variations of Java is extraordinarily low, with solely 2.7% of functions utilizing one. That is seemingly as a result of most distributors don’t ship patches for these variations. 

“The expectation has been that Java 8 would proceed to be extremely widespread for a while and that it might develop slightly as these on earlier releases moved as much as 8 however no additional. Once more, the adoption of 11 as the primary selection for many who have moved on from 8 is unsurprising. The Java runtime is an important aspect and staying on the LTS presents stability and help when wanted. Utilizing different non-LTS releases is perhaps engaging often however most won’t wish to take the danger in manufacturing,” stated Poole.