[jeroenhd]

OpenJDK is pretty much open and straight from Oracle.

If you don't like Oracle (and I wouldn't blame you), there are alternatives from parties ranging from the Eclipse Foundation to Microsoft and Amazon that will do the same thing.

As for new projects, Java is here to stay. It's longevity is part of why companies are still using Java 8/11; once you write it, it'll run pretty much forever.

The language lags behind in terms of features compared to pretty much any competitor, but it's functional enough to get anything important done.

I'd personally go Kotlin if you were to rely on the JVM (almost entirely because Java still lacks nullable types which means nullpointerexceptions are _everywhere_) or C# if you don't like the Kotlin syntax, but Java is Good Enough.