Amazon Web Services Inc. is taking a little stab at rival Oracle Corp. with the introduction today of Amazon Corretto, which ensures that Java is freely accessible to all of its users for the foreseeable future.

Amazon Corretto is a free multiplatform and production-ready distribution of the Open Java Development Kit, which is used by thousands of developers to manage their Java-based applications. Java is one of the world’s most popular programming languages and is used in many enterprise applications, but the future of OpenJDK has been in question since Oracle said it would end support for the free version in January.

Java has been under the stewardship of Oracle ever since the database company bought out its original developer, Sun Microsystems Inc., back in 2009. However, over the years, Oracle has increasingly treated Java as more of a corporate asset instead of the community development tool its creators had envisaged.

Its decision to end support for the free version — the commercial version will still be supported — sent the developer community and businesses into panic. But Amazon’s decision to join Microsoft Corp. and Red Hat Inc. in supporting those users means they can relax somewhat.

“Java is one of the most popular languages in use by AWS customers, and we are committed to supporting Java and keeping it free,” Arun Gupta, principal open-source technologist at Amazon, wrote in a blog post announcing Corretto. “Many of our customers have become concerned that they would have to pay for a long-term supported version of Java to run their workloads. As a first step, we recently re-affirmed long-term support for Java in Amazon Linux. However, our customers and the broader Java community run Java on a variety of platforms, both on and off of AWS.”

Amazon Corretto will be made available on several other Linux distributions, including Ubuntu and Red Hat, once it hits general availability in the first quarter of next year, Gupta said.

The move might be considered somewhat unusual for Amazon, which often gets criticized for its limited contributions to the open source community. But the public cloud computing giant appears to be trying to address that, having hired James Gosling, one of the original developers of Java, in an unspecified capacity last year.

It seems that Gosling was likely to have been heavily involved in the creation of Amazon Corretto, as he was quick to share the news on Twitter:

Just announced #amazon #Corretto at #devoxx. It is our distribution of OpenJDK. https://t.co/09cuPEqnex

— James Gosling (@errcraft) November 14, 2018

Gupta said Amazon Corretto is being made available with long-term support. The company will continue to push out performance upgrades and security fixes on a quarterly basis, he added.

The latest version, Corretto 8, is currently available in preview with features that correspond to those in OpenJDK 8. Gupta said Amazon will run a technology compatibility kit for each future release to ensure it works with Java SE.

“Making developers more productive is always a good true north,” said Holger Mueller, principal analyst and vice president of Constellation Research Inc. “With Corretto, Amazon is achieving exactly that and CxOs will take notice, as building applications faster is key in the digitally transformed economy. Now uptake will be the critical aspect to watch, and with AWS re:Invent 2018 around the corner, timing is good and likely of no coincidence.”

Amazon Corretto 8 will be supported until the end of June 2023 and possibly beyond, Gupta said. Amazon is also working on Corretto 11, which will be supported until August 2024.

Image: Amazon