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I have been trying to get down to the bottom of something that interests me about the Java Development Kit (JDK). Currently, there are two versions that are both maintained by Oracle. They are JDK and OpenJDK. From what I found out, JDK is derived from OpenJDK. In the history of things, OpenJDK came after JDK. What makes this even more of a spaghetti story for me is that the initial development of both JDK and OpenJDK is attributed to Sun. So, did they work on two different implementations? Or, was Oracle JDK forked from the original JDK (for Oracle's commercial licensing ambitions), which then became OpenJDK?

wsdevuid798
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  • I think I had already answered this one before in [Difference between JDK and Hotspot](https://stackoverflow.com/a/16568659/697630). You may want to check that one. – Edwin Dalorzo Feb 08 '20 at 14:49
  • @EdwinDalorzo in your answer on that page you define the JVM, HotSpot and OpenJDK. I am interested in knowing whether Sun worked on two versions of the JDK: (1) the original JDK and (2) OpenJDK. I've found a partial answer to my questions in another response below yours on that page. So Sun gave a version of the JDK to the OpenJDK Community and the original became Oracle JDK (after Sun was acquired by Oracle). But a question that remains for me is how come Oracle JDK is based on OpenJDK if the former preceeds the latter? – wsdevuid798 Feb 08 '20 at 15:42
  • Simply, OpenJDK was derived from the Sun JDK, so it shares a lot of code, and Oracle now contributed missing parts back to OpenJDK or removed them from their own JDK, and now uses OpenJDK as the starting point and then possibly adds some commercial features back in. – Mark Rotteveel Feb 09 '20 at 11:06

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