News

Microsoft Formally Signs Up for OpenJDK Project

• By John K. Waters
• November 6, 2019

Microsoft signed the Oracle Contributor Agreement last week, which means Redmond has officially joined the OpenJDK project.

Bruno Borges, product manager for Java in Microsoft's Developer Division (and a former Oracle developer), announced that Oracle "promptly welcomed" Microsoft to the project in a message posted on the OpenJDK mailing list.

"On behalf of the Microsoft Java Engineering Team, I'd like to say that we are thrilled to officially join the OpenJDK project and be ready to work with you," Borges wrote.

Borges went on to explain that Microsoft and its subsidiaries are heavily dependent on Java in many instances, and also offers Java runtimes in its Microsoft Azure cloud offering.

"Microsoft recognizes the immense value that Oracle's successful and effective stewardship of the OpenJDK project has bought Java and the wider software ecosystem," Borges wrote, "and we look forward to playing our part in contributing back!"

The Microsoft team will be working on smaller bug fixes and backports initially, as it "leans how to be good citizens within OpenJDK."

"For example, we already understand that discussing changes first before posting patches is preferred and I'm sure there's more for us to learn as well," Borges wrote.

Microsoft's Java engineering team, which is led by long-time Java Community Process contributor and current Executive Committee member Martijn Verburg is engaged with other Microsoft groups and its subsidiaries currently using Java, as well as its partners in the Java ecosystem, such as Azul Systems, Oracle, Pivotal, Red Hat, Intel, SAP, and others. "The overall team will be joining the many OpenJDK mailing lists to start conversations and participating," Borges added.

Verburg joined Microsoft in August with the acquisition of jClarity, a UK-based provider of software performance and analytics solutions and a leading contributor to the AdoptOpenJDK project, which he co-founded. That acquisition added muscle to Microsoft's continued contributions to open source and drive to increase performance for Java workloads on Azure, the company said at the time.

Microsoft has been upping its Java game over the past few years, with a free Java driver for SQL, a plugin for the IntelliJ Java IDE, a Java SDK to provide app metrics to developers, and promoting Java for cross-platform mobile app development. 

"At Microsoft, we strongly believe that we can do more for our customers by working alongside the Java community," said John Montgomery, corporate VP of program management for Microsoft's developer tools and services group in a blog post.