Version-string schemes for the Java SE Platform and the JDK

[David Nebinger]

While this kind of versioning makes sense internally for geeks to understand the date of the release and age of the release, this assumes the only folks using or needing Java will be geeks.

For any non-geeks, this kind of $YY.$M.$AGE will make absolutely no sense.

I can get behind the $YY portion of versioning.  Users would see Java 12, for example, as something really old.  Java 19, though, keeps it new, hip and fresh.

After that, though, I would recommend using incremental version numbers.  18.0.0 and 18.1.0 for your two major releases, and increment the last number for new security releases.

Yes, for support folks we have to continue to maintain tables of versions to release dates - but understanding version differences is a support/developer issue, we should not push this detail out to regular Java users.