Java 17 LTS released

 Oracle released Java 17 today.

While there are some technical goodies, the most important news is that Oracle stops the licensing nonsense it entered in with the previous LTS release (Java 11).

Updates will remain available from Oracle for three years, which is one year after the next LTS (Java 23).

Oracle Java is again free for production use as well.

It remains to be seen if this will lure back devs from the AdoptOpenJdk/Adoptium distributions.

From a technical point of view Sealed classes are introduced, giving a more fine grained (if cumbersome) control over which classes may inherit from a class/interface.

Some deprectations for removal of some old friends as well: Security Manager and the applet API, stars of the original Java buzz.