GoDaddy, the well-known domain name registrar company, recently announced sponsorship of the AdoptOpenJDK community. As stated in the news release:
As part of this sponsorship, GoDaddy will become AdoptOpenJDK’s key technology provider, delivering in-kind hosting and infrastructure services. GoDaddy will also move its products to OpenJDK, an open-source version of Java.
The AdoptOpenJDK community includes Java developers, user group members, and vendors who advocate the OpenJDK initiative, a free and open-source reference implementation of Java SE.
Sun Microsystems, having already open-sourced projects such as OpenOffice, NetBeans and Solaris OS, introduced an initiative to open-source Java at JavaOne 2006 by then president and CEO, Jonathan Schwartz. As part of a live Java open-source event at Sun in November 2006, Rich Green, then executive vice president of software at Sun, formally announced that Java SE, Java ME and Java EE would be open-sourced thus forming the basis of the OpenJDK community. A video of the November 2006 event can be found here.
AdoptOpenJDK provides prebuilt OpenJDK binaries for OpenJDK versions 8 and 11 (both long-term releases) along with a choice of available VMs, HotSpot and OpenJ9. The OpenJDK source code and relevant build scripts are also available to the Java community.
Other companies supporting OpenJDK initiative include Amazon, IBM, Microsoft, and Slack.
Charles Beadnall, CTO at GoDaddy, spoke to InfoQ about this new sponsorship.
InfoQ: What was the inspiration to sponsor AdoptOpenJDK?
Charles Beadnall: GoDaddy wants to ensure robust open-source distributions for Java. We have made significant investments supporting open-source projects because it’s good business for our company and customers. Additionally, with so many other large organizations sponsoring AdoptOpenJDK, it makes them a leading option for LTS builds right now.
InfoQ: What kind of infrastructure services will GoDaddy provide the OpenJDK Java community?
Beadnall: GoDaddy is providing its broad suite of small business services to the community to support its online presence. AdoptOpenJDK will run most of its infrastructure on GoDaddy, including a Managed WordPress site, TLS encryption, and Search Engine Optimization.
InfoQ: How will your customers benefit from moving your products over to AdoptOpenJDK?
Beadnall: GoDaddy supports an open access Internet because our 18 million customers depend on the open and equal nature of the Internet to compete with enterprises and corporations with more resources. With this sponsorship, we’re proud to provide further support for open-source software and our community of entrepreneur customers.
InfoQ: Are there plans to support the enterprise side of the Java community, namely Jakarta EE and MicroProfile?
Beadnall: Java Enterprise Edition support doesn’t currently fit with our plans or the needs of most of our small business customers.
InfoQ: What are your current responsibilities, that is, what do you do on a day-to-day basis?
Beadnall: Aside from providing infrastructure services to AdoptOpenJDK, GoDaddy also sits on AdoptOpenJDK’s steering committee providing security expertise.
We are all focused on getting our entrepreneurial customers online as quickly as possible and are leveraging several technologies — from neural networks to the public cloud– to do this intelligently.
Martijn Verburg, co-founder and CEO at jClarity, co-founder of AdoptOpenJDK and leader of the London Java Community, also spoke to InfoQ about this new sponsorship.
InfoQ: What can the OpenJDK community expect to see with this new sponsorship from GoDaddy?
Martijn Verburg: The AdoptOpenJDK community will see a large increase in the number of build and test hosts which will allow us to produce well-tested binaries more often across a full range of platforms. It will also allow us to act as a patch test system before folks push their change to the upstream OpenJDK project. OpenJDK already has one patch submit system hosted by Oracle and the AdoptOpenJDK system will be able to supplement that facility, especially for the jdk8u (Java 8) and jdk11u (Java 11) streams. Engineers will be able to submit a patch and have it built and tested on a very wide range of OS and platform combinations, drastically reducing the risk of introducing a bug.
Testing, overall, will increase in quality and speed. It’s a really significant contribution!
InfoQ: How will the build farm workflow change, if at all, with support from GoDaddy?
Verburg: The existing workflow to produce AdoptOpenJDK (and soon AWS Corretto) binaries won’t change, the pipelines are well established and the new GoDaddy hosts simply give us more capacity.
A new workflow will be considered for patch submissions (which is a separate use case) and a portion of GoDaddy hosts will help support this new workflow.
InfoQ: Will this new sponsorship with GoDaddy set AdoptOpenJDK apart from the other OpenJDK vendors?
Verburg: Absolutely! Along with all of the other significant sponsors that we have (Red Hat, IBM, Microsoft, Pivotal, Azul, Amazon, jClarity and many many more), it’s become pretty clear that AdoptOpenJDK is the place for Java vendors and users alike to collaborate. It’s a step change from a single vendor release model for OpenJDK and we think that this aids in its longevity and ensures that the distribution is suitable for the broad church that is our user base.
InfoQ: What are your current responsibilities, that is, what do you do on a day-to-day basis?
Verburg: I hold the director role of the Technical Steering Committee (TSC). The director provides the link between the London Jamocha Community non-profit legal entity that backs AdoptOpenJDK and the TSC. I’m also one of the chief cat herders, ensuring that our volunteers working on 60+ repos are happy and have their blockers removed so that we can regularly produce high-quality binaries!
On any given day, I’m reviewing code, discussing security concerns, triaging issues, suggesting priorities for the teams (build, infrastructure, test, security, website, API, Docker, homebrew and so forth) so we continue to fulfill our roadmap, writing documentation, answering questions from the user base and/or tech media and, when I’m lucky, some actual coding!