Oracle Corporation

After this great period, Oracle Corporation acquired Sun Microsystems in 2009-2010.

At the beginning of this new era, Oracle declared that it will continue supporting and investing in Java for customers. You can take a look at the declaration on the following site: https://web.archive.org/web/20100131091008/http://www.oracle.com/us/technologies/java/index.html

Despite this declaration; the resignation from Oracle of James Gosling, the father of Java, in 2010; and the lawsuit against Google in 2012 related to the use of Java in the Android SDK; changed the perception of the community about the future of the Java language.

Oracle tried to give new impulse to Java and, after almost five years, released a new Java SE version (JDK 7 - July, 2011) and a new Java Enterprise Release (Java EE 7 - June, 2013). Furthermore, OpenJDK became a reference implementation of Java SE since version 7.

The rapid evolution of business requirements and the slowdown of the Java source life cycle convinced Oracle to change the strategy about the Java platform with a clear bet on the open source model.

OpenJDK binaries are the reference implementation of the JSE platform. OpenJDK is an incubator of the latest new features and has defined time-based releases that will be delivered every year in March and September. The version numbers follow the schema of year-month (YY.M). Unlike the previous release approach, this one will not be delayed to await a major feature to be completed and stabilized—an example was the delay of JDK 8 due to Jigsaw project issues, which was then retargeted into JDK 9.

With the new model, the new features will not be merged all together into a release source control repository until they are complete. If they are not ready to be included in a new release, they will be retargeted for the next release or later. The intention of this model is to avoid problems with a feature that, if not ready, could delay an entire release that could contain other features useful for developers.

Those enterprises and organizations that don't necessarily want or need to upgrade at a rapid pace will be free to choose a vendor to have support for a specific Java version, depending on market reaction. The same choice was also made for Java EE.

During the years, the platform became very big. The need to maintain backward compatibility and the delay of new Java SE releases, on which it depends, have made the platform very difficult to manage, delaying its evolution and making it unattractive for environments, such as cloud and microservices, in continuous evolution.