14 DAY TRIAL // Ubuntu developers have been discussing the opportunity of shipping the next iteration of their operating system without Java support, and now a conclusion has been reached.
Maintaining the OpenJDK 7 packages is draining some of the resources that could be put to better use somewhere else. With the exception of Tomcat7, most of the Java-intensive apps could have been built with gcj.
“Thanks to everyone who responded to this post both on and off list; as I expected, quite a few users depend on a well supported OpenJDK in Ubuntu in preference to using binary downloads from Oracle. Ubuntu 14.04 will ship with both OpenJDK 7 and Tomcat 7 in Ubuntu main,” said Ubuntu developer James Page.
This is actually good news for everyone who thought that Ubuntu 14.04 LTS might ship without OpenJDK 7, but it also means that it will happen sometime in the near future.