Java 17 launched with two major announcements from Oracle. First, Mark Reinhold proposed increasing the LTS cadence from every three years (every 6 releases) to every two years (every 4 releases), meaning the next LTS after 17 would be 21 rather than 23. Second, starting with JDK 17, Oracle JDK is now free to use in production under a new permissive license, with the first three years of quarterly updates included at no cost. This resolves the previous awkwardness where Oracle offered free builds only for the six-month cadence but not for LTS versions. The free tier does not include paid perks like 24/7 support hotlines or GraalVM Enterprise.
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