- 1995; Sun Microsystems created Java
- 2006; Sun released Java under the GPL
- 2010; Oracle Corporation acquired Java with the purchase of Sun
- 2019; Oracle stopped releasing security updates for LTS releases under a permissive license
OpenJDK is the upstream for all Java builds but does not release builds itself, so there are now many java distributions, some with additional patches. In addition to the Linux distributions (Debian/Ubuntu, Fedora/RedHat, Arch, openSUSE, etc) building off OpenJDK for their package managers the following are available;
| Build | Permissive | Pure | Commercial Support |
| Adoptium (AdoptOpenJDK) / IBM | Yes | Optional | Yes |
| Microsoft (JClarity) | Yes | No | No |
| Azul Zulu | Yes | No | Yes |
| Amazon Corretto | Yes | No | Yes |
| SAP | Yes | No | Yes |
| Liberica | Yes | No | Yes |
| RedHat for Windows | Yes | No | Yes |
| ojdkbuild | Yes | Yes | No |
| Oracle | No | No | Yes |
Windows users can subscribe to releases on github until the windows store catches up with Linux repositories since the year 1998