OpenJDK is completely free and can be used in accordance with GPL v2 license.To get a commercial Oracle JDK license, we need to contact Oracle sales directly. There is no official information on how much an Oracle commercial JDK license costs.

So now we have only the merged HotSpot JVM available.

JRockit was the Oracle’s JVM and from Java SE 7, HotSpot and JRockit merged into a single JVM.

Oracle JDK’s commercial components are bundled along with freely downloadable Oracle JDK and to enable that we need to run them with explicit flags.

OpenJDK Font Renderer and Oracle JDK Flight Recorder are the noticeable major difference between Oracle JDK and OpenJDK.

Also includes third party closed source and open source components like graphics rasterizer and Rhino respectively.

Apart from the base code, Oracle JDK includes, Oracle’s implementation of Java Plugin and Java WebStart.

So there is no major technical difference between Oracle JDK and OpenJDK.

Actually, Oracle JDK’s build process builds from OpenJDK source code.

OpenJDK is released under license GPL v2 wherein Oracle JDK is licensed under Oracle Binary Code License Agreement.

OpenJDK is the official reference implementation for Java Standard Edition from Java SE 7.

OpenJDK is an open source implementation of the Java Standard Edition platform with contribution from Oracle and open Java community.

After the takeover it was named as Oracle JDK and Oracle’s team maintains the JDK. Earlier, it was the official proprietary implementation of the Java language.

Oracle JDK was previously called SUN JDK and that was before the takeover by Oracle.

JRE as a stand-alone does not contain compilers and debugging tools. JRE consists of libraries, Java Virtual Machine (JVM), Java Pluging and Java Web Start to run Java applications. Java Development Kit (JDK) consists of Java Runtime Environment (JRE) along with tools to compile and debug Java code for developing Java applications. Before going into detail let us recap on what is JDK? What is JDK? This article is to discuss about the difference between Oracle JDK and OpenJDK, then followed by a highlight on the JDK development process. Last modified on December 15th, 2014 by Joe.

Open jdk source code