Red Hat joins the Eclipse Adoptium Working Group

Red Hat is proud to be a founding strategic member of the Adoptium Working Group as AdoptOpenJDK transitions to its new home at the Eclipse Foundation.

It started as a simple mission. In 2017 the AdoptOpenJDK project began delivering high-quality, open source Java binaries based on OpenJDK technology. After several years and impressive success, AdoptOpenJDK is joining the Eclipse Foundation as Eclipse Adoptium, and Red Hat is proud to be part of this effort.

The new name combines the "Adopt" from AdoptOpenJDK and the Latin suffix "-ium" (used to coin element names) to form "Adoptium." As the name suggests, the goal is to help the wider industry adopt open Java tools and runtimes by providing enterprise grade builds that organizations can depend on.

Eclipse provides an established set of governance, licensing, and development practices that have proven successful for Jakarta EE and MicroProfile platforms and other key software running in hybrid and multi-cloud environments. We believe that Eclipse Adoptium will be equally successful.

Red Hat history of Java innovation and delivery

Open Java technology powers a substantial number of Red Hat enterprise open source products and components critical for developing and maintaining mission critical cloud-native applications. Therefore, we are excited to be a founding member of the Eclipse Adoptium Working Group, chartered to advance the production and promotion of high-quality runtimes and associated technology for use within the Java ecosystem.

Red Hat has a long history of innovation and contributions to core OpenJDK projects, open source middleware, lightweight runtimes and frameworks like Quarkus used for highly-distributed cloud architectures, and application development, delivery, integration, and automation software.

Our leadership in the Eclipse Adoptium Working Group is a continuation of the work we have achieved at AdoptOpenJDK to build on OpenJDK and provide rigorous build, test, and release processes for high quality production-ready binaries. That mission has been very successful, with more than 245 million downloads of the AdoptOpenJDK binaries, and AdoptOpenJDK now being trusted in a number of business-critical settings.

Just as importantly, the software-defined build and test infrastructure that is used to build AdoptOpenJDK binaries is being reused by a number of  vendors who produce their own OpenJDK-based binaries using the project’s technology.

AdoptOpenJDK is being restructured as it moves to Eclipse. The new Adoptium Working Group provides vendor-neutral governance of the Adoptium Project’s technical subprojects, comprising of:

• Eclipse Temurin that implements the build infrastructure and coordination of releases.
• Eclipse AQAvit which curates a large set of quality tests covering function, security, performance, and durability and defines the quality criteria for enterprise-grade runtime deployments.
• Eclipse Temurin-Compliance ensures that Eclipse Temurin binaries are compatible with the Java SE specification.

Red Hat brings it’s proven skills in each of these areas to contribute to the community effort.

Red Hat OpenJDK

In addition to our participation in Eclipse Adoptium, Red Hat continues to provide customer support for OpenJDK in development and production usage as part of Red Hat Runtimes, and directly through Red Hat OpenJDK.

Our enterprise customers deliver innovations that affect their lines of business, organizations, industries, and the global community every day. By using open source technologies to create change, these organizations are proof that when we work in the open, extraordinary things can happen.

Interested in getting involved? Join the conversation in the Slack community.