Red Hat ups ante for OpenJDK on Microsoft Windows

Red Hat has, of course, been busy becoming the new IBM version of Red Hat since the firm’s recent acquisition.

That corporate reality hasn’t stopped the open source platform company still pressing ahead with its wider approach to platforms and tools.

As we closed up last year, the firm announced the availability of long-term commercial support for OpenJDK on Microsoft Windows.

As many readers will know, OpenJDK is OpenJDK is a free and open-source implementation of the Java Platform Standard Edition (SE) and it dates back to early beginnings under Sun Microsystems in 2006.

The addition of Windows to the pile of course comes on the back of existing support for OpenJDK on Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

The wider strategy being that Red Hat is hoping to further is to enable software application development shops to standardise the development and deployment of Java applications throughout with an open alternative to proprietary Java platforms.

Red Hat is also at pains to insist that OpenShift, an enterprise Kubernetes platform, brings commercial support for OpenJDK to all major cloud providers.

Indeed, Red Hat can’t get far without mentioning how its ‘commitment’ to hybrid cloud and multi-cloud solutions.

Red Hat has been an active member of the OpenJDK community since 2007 and has contributed to (and led) various aspects of the project such as the 64-­bit ARMv8 port, AArc­h64 for OpenJDK and development of the Shenandoah garbage collector.

Red Hat has also served in stewardship roles for both OpenJDK 6 and OpenJDK 7.