Red Hat has announced that it has taken over stewardship for OpenJDK 7, which was released in July 2011 and is part of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL). Oracle release JDK 8 in March 2015 and announced in April that it would no longer update Java Standard Edition 7. Red Hat is stepping in to continue producing bug fixes for organizations that are using the older technology.
“Most application developers, if they build an application based on a particular version [of Java] and they’re going to put an application in production for a long period of time, it could be five, six, seven years, and they’re running on a certain JDK, they want to make sure that there’s somebody behind that,” Craig Muzilla, a senior vice president at Red Hat, said. “That’s the role that we’re playing in the community, and that’s the role that we’re playing at Red Hat.”