Since Oracle changed the licensing for Java in January 2023, there has been growing demand from customers looking to switch away due to extra costs being imposed. Last summer Azul conducted a study of Oracle Java customers with 86% saying they are migrating all or some of their use and 47% expressed a desire to use an open-source distribution like OpenJDK. 

Despite this appetite for change there are still somewhat cliched perceptions about moving to an open source-based JDK, even though the OpenJDK is based on the same source code as Oracle Java.

There are some concerns about “better the devil you know” and a preconception that migration is difficult, but as the study showed 75% completed their migration to the OpenJDK within 12 months. To learn more about this I spoke to Scott Sellers, co-founder and CEO of Azul.

Scott talks about his background, what Azul does, Azul’s benchmarking tests, Azul’s new Java Performance Engineering Lab and more. 

More about Scott Sellers:

With more than 30 years of successful leadership in building high technology companies and delivering advanced products to market, Scott provides the overall strategic leadership and visionary direction for Azul Systems. 

Scott has a consistent proven track record of vision, leadership, and success in enterprise, consumer and scientific markets. Prior to co-founding Azul Systems, Scott founded 3dfx Interactive, a graphics processor company that pioneered the 3D graphics market for personal computers and game consoles.

Scott served at 3dfx as Vice President of Engineering, CTO and as a member of the board of directors and delivered 7 award-winning products and developed 14 different graphics processors. After a successful initial public offering, 3dfx was later acquired by NVIDIA Corporation. 

Prior to 3dfx, Scott was a CPU systems architect at Pellucid, later acquired by MediaVision. Before Pellucid, Scott was a member of the technical staff at Silicon Graphics where he designed high-performance workstations.

Scott graduated from Princeton University with a bachelor of science, earning magna cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa honors. Scott has been granted 8 patents in high performance graphics and computing and is a regularly invited keynote speaker at industry conferences.