Nine months in the making, the Eclipse Foundation has announced that the Adoptium Steering Committee has formally approved the Adoptium Working Group Charter. Formerly known as AdoptOpenJDK, the group changed their name to Eclipse Adoptium after joining the Eclipse Foundation in June 2020. The Adoptium Working Group, stewards of the Adoptium project, will work in collaboration with the former AdoptOpenJDK Technical Steering Committee to provide the Java community with fully compatible, high-quality distributions of Java binaries based on OpenJDK source code.
Founding organizations of the Adoptium Working Group include Alibaba Cloud, Huawei, IBM, iJUG, Karakun AG, Microsoft, New Relic and Red Hat. Two representatives from each organization comprise the Adoptium Steering Committee.
Speaking about this milestone, Sanhong Li, director of Compiler & Runtime, Alibaba Cloud Intelligence at Alibaba Cloud, stated:
As a founding member of the Adoptium Working Group, we are committed to creating an open, vendor-neutral environment to enable the growth of Java Runtime on our global cloud platform. We value the contribution of developers, and we hope to provide the right technology and resources to build a conducive ecosystem for better and more community collaborations.
Alibaba Cloud recently collaborated with AdoptOpenJDK to build, test, and distribute their Dragonwell JDK on AdoptOpenJDK's infrastructure. They joined vendors Amazon (Corretto), Azul (Zulu), BellSoft (Liberica JDK), Oracle (Java) and Red Hat (OpenJDK), to provide a range of free and commercially-supported downstream distributions of OpenJDK.
The transition to Adoptium included a split of AdoptOpenJDK into multiple sub-projects under the Adoptium top level project: Eclipse AQAvit, Eclipse Temurin and Eclipse Temurin Compliance.
AQAvit focuses on unit testing using the AdoptOpenJDK Quality Assurance (AQA) Test Suite. Based on the AQA Manifesto, a curated set of open tests are run against the OpenJDK release builds to ensure the binaries are functionally correct, secure, performant, scalable and durable.
Temurin, an anagram of "runtime," focuses on building and releasing quality JDK binaries that are enterprise-caliber, cross-platform, open-source licensed, and TCK-tested for Java SE. The name Temurin also refers to the molecule, 1,3,7,9-tetramethyluric acid (AKA Theacrine), which is similar to caffeine without the addictive properties.
Temurin Compliance governs access to the materials and resources offered by Oracle's proprietary Java Compatibility Kit (or TCK for Java SE).
AdoptOpenJDK, a community of Java User Groups, Java developers and vendors, was formed in 2017 to address the lack of an open and reproducible build and test system for OpenJDK across multiple platforms. AdoptOpenJDK provided OpenJDK and Eclipse OpenJ9 binaries to the Java community.
Eclipse Working Groups provide a "vendor-neutral governance structure that allow organizations to freely collaborate on new technology development." Currently, there are 19 working groups under the auspices of the Eclipse Foundation. Other recent additions to the Eclipse Working Group family include the MicroProfile Working Group and the OSGi Working Group.
Organizations interested in joining the Adoptium Working Group are encouraged to review the Charter and Participation Agreement.