I actually think that is the best long-term approach for all of the parties involved:
In the past OpenJDK was missing critical features so that companies often used the commercial closed-source Oracle JDK. At the same time even then Oracle JDK was somewhat of a trap when it comes to licensing, as it included features not covered by the free licence that might be accidentally used by developers.
With Java 11 there is finally feature parity: Oracle contributed missing features to OpenJDK. Features that couldn't be contributed (due to licensing issues) were removed from the commercial Oracle JDK. So starting with Java 11 those two versions of the JDK are pretty much equal.
With Java 11 there's no reason to use the commercial Oracle JDK. Most of the companies that used the Oracle JDK before are better served by using one of the open-source OpenJDK builds: Either Oracle's OpenJDK build (which is only going to provide support for 6 months after each release), or one of the third-party builds that most likely are also going to track LTS releases such as Azul's Zulu or AdoptOpenJDK.
Oracle is very upfront about those changes: When you try to download Java 11+ from Oracle's website there's a huge yellow box with a warning about the license changes. In addition, that box also links to the GPL-licensed OpenJDK version.
As a Java developer I'm very happy about that new approach: With the feature parity between OpenJDK and the commercial release it's finally possible to develop and run Java applications on a 100% open-source stack, which is something that was much harder to do with earlier OpenJDK releases.
In the past OpenJDK was missing critical features so that companies often used the commercial closed-source Oracle JDK. At the same time even then Oracle JDK was somewhat of a trap when it comes to licensing, as it included features not covered by the free licence that might be accidentally used by developers.
With Java 11 there is finally feature parity: Oracle contributed missing features to OpenJDK. Features that couldn't be contributed (due to licensing issues) were removed from the commercial Oracle JDK. So starting with Java 11 those two versions of the JDK are pretty much equal.
With Java 11 there's no reason to use the commercial Oracle JDK. Most of the companies that used the Oracle JDK before are better served by using one of the open-source OpenJDK builds: Either Oracle's OpenJDK build (which is only going to provide support for 6 months after each release), or one of the third-party builds that most likely are also going to track LTS releases such as Azul's Zulu or AdoptOpenJDK.
Oracle is very upfront about those changes: When you try to download Java 11+ from Oracle's website there's a huge yellow box with a warning about the license changes. In addition, that box also links to the GPL-licensed OpenJDK version.
As a Java developer I'm very happy about that new approach: With the feature parity between OpenJDK and the commercial release it's finally possible to develop and run Java applications on a 100% open-source stack, which is something that was much harder to do with earlier OpenJDK releases.