SapMachine

SapMachine is SAP's downstream build of OpenJDK, developed and released in the open on GitHub, providing an alternative distribution for customers and partners running SAP products and for anyone else who wants it.

Developing entirely in public on GitHub is the distinguishing characteristic and it is more meaningful than it sounds for a corporate distribution. The build scripts, the patches applied on top of OpenJDK and the release process are all inspectable, which lets a security team verify what differs from upstream rather than trusting a vendor statement.

The reason SAP maintains it is the same as Microsoft's and Amazon's: SAP runs very large Java estates in its own products and cloud services, so the build exists to serve those first and is published as a by-product. That makes it dependable for the workloads SAP cares about and worth checking version coverage against for anything else.

SapMachine is most obviously the right choice for organisations running SAP products, where using the vendor's own tested runtime removes a variable from any support conversation. For everyone else it is a competent build worth checking version coverage against, since SAP publishes the versions its own products need rather than the widest possible range. It is free and open source under the same licence as OpenJDK, with releases, issues and documentation all kept in public.