Eclipse Java downloads skyrocket

Move over, Oracle Java. Downloads of the Eclipse Foundation’s Temurin Java SE binaries have more than doubled year over year, to more than 12 million downloads per month, Eclipse said on March 14.

Eclipse delivered more than 12.3 million downloads of its standard Java binaries in February, the foundation reported. This volume of downloads actually has been going on for three or four months, Eclipse Executive Director Mike Milinkovich said. Under the jurisdiction of the Eclipse Adoptium working group, Temurin has become the default Java option for the GitHub Actions CI/CD platform and multiple cloud container images, Eclipse said. And Eclipse is certain its Java distribution is being used in enterprises.

While Temurin’s momentum predates a change to Oracle Java licensing, which charges for Java based on the number of employees rather than actual users, Milinkovich believes that Oracle’s shift has accelerated the adoption of Temurin. “The downloads, I think, are indicative of people becoming more and more interested in a free version of Java,” Milinkovich said.

Milinkovich added that users want a version of Java that offers quality, scalability, and security, and that is supported by a vendor-neutral community as opposed to being from a single vendor. The Eclipse Adoptium project, which includes vendors such as Azul, Google, Microsoft, and Red Hat, provides Java distributions based on OpenJDK source code. Adoptium binaries are used by Java developers across desktops, traditional servers, cloud platforms, mainframes, and embedded systems, Eclipse said.

Downloadable from adoptium.net, OpenJDK-based Temurin is available in Java SE versions 8, 11, 16, 17, 18, and 19, with Java 20 on the way. Eclipse provides support including fixes for security vulnerabilities. Also part of the Eclipse Adoptium Project is the AQavit quality verification test suite for Java implementations. Java is tested for specification conformance as well as quality and security. The Adoptium Marketplace provides Java runtimes from Alibaba Cloud, Azul, Eclipse, Huawei, IBM, Microsoft, and Red Hat.