Clarify Differences between JDK Options

[bowbahdoe]

The JDK Downloader Screen is immensely confusing.

I am considering using the Oracle VSCode plugin for my course material - what in the world is the difference between "Oracle Java SE JDK" and "Oracle OpenJDK?"

Regardless of what the difference is, why are they being presented in such an "Xbox Series X" sort of way?

If one of these is a legal nightmare footgun please just don't have it on the "downloader for beginners" page; that would be great.

[physcrowley]

This is much better than manually downloading and adding a JDK on Windows (especially if you are adding it to the Path).

Have students explore what the differences are by digging a bit. Various useful and transferable skills can be taught here, depending on what you want to do:

• close reading (noticing small, important differences in text)
• licences (commercial versus open source)
• what is a JDK? (included software and features depending on who built the kit, eg. Azul ZuluFX comes with JavaFX included and can be installed instead)

[bowbahdoe]

@physcrowley If there was a scrutable difference between the two you might hypothetically be right. The difference between these two distributions is deep, deep, deep in legalese.

[sid-srini]

Thank you @bowbahdoe for your suggestion and @physcrowley for additional insights.

In an upcoming release, we have simplified the label for the "Oracle JDK" to help a little bit in this respect.

On the other hand, OpenJDK builds are vendor specific. As you have mentioned, certain aspects are related to legal/conceptual requirements. However, we are reworking the layout etc. so that it is easier and quicker for users to navigate this page, in a future release.

Thank you.