Eclipse Foundation Sees Over 12 Million Monthly Downloads of Temurin Java SE Binaries
Move over, Oracle Java. Downloads of the Eclipse Foundation’s Temurin Java SE binaries have more than doubled year over year, reaching over 12 million downloads per month, according to a statement from Eclipse on March 14.
In February alone, Eclipse delivered more than 12.3 million downloads of its standard Java binaries. This surge in downloads has been consistent over the past three to four months, according to Eclipse Executive Director Mike Milinkovich. Temurin, managed by the Eclipse Adoptium working group, has become the default Java option for the GitHub Actions CI/CD platform and several cloud container images. Eclipse is confident that its Java distribution is widely adopted in enterprises.
While Temurin’s growing popularity predates Oracle’s licensing change—which now charges for Java based on the number of employees rather than actual users—Milinkovich believes Oracle’s shift has further accelerated the adoption of Temurin. “The downloads, I think, are indicative of people becoming more and more interested in a free version of Java,” Milinkovich commented.
Users are increasingly looking for a version of Java that offers quality, scalability, and security, and is backed by a vendor-neutral community rather than a single vendor. The Eclipse Adoptium project, which includes contributions from vendors like Azul, Google, Microsoft, and Red Hat, provides Java distributions based on OpenJDK source code. Adoptium binaries are widely used by Java developers across various platforms, including desktops, traditional servers, cloud platforms, mainframes, and embedded systems.
Temurin, which can be downloaded from adoptium.net, is available in Java SE versions 8, 11, 16, 17, 18, and 19, with Java 20 soon to be released. Eclipse offers support that includes security vulnerability fixes. Also part of the Eclipse Adoptium Project is the AQavit quality verification test suite for Java implementations, ensuring that Java is tested for specification conformance, quality, and security. The Adoptium Marketplace features Java runtimes from Alibaba Cloud, Azul, Eclipse, Huawei, IBM, Microsoft, and Red Hat.
In summary, the Eclipse Foundation’s Temurin Java SE binaries are gaining significant traction, offering a compelling alternative to Oracle Java, especially in light of recent licensing changes. This shift underscores the increasing preference for a free, high-quality Java distribution supported by a diverse, vendor-neutral community.