Java Licensing Frequently Asked Questions
In 2019, Oracle significantly changed licensing for official Oracle Java releases. You must now purchase a license in order to receive updates to the commercial version of Oracle Java. In response to this change, we officially added support for OpenJDK in Mirth Connect and the Mirth Appliance. OpenJDK receives free updates from Oracle for a period of 6 months following each release. While the Oracle OpenJDK distribution is recommended for use with Mirth Connect, we strive to support third-party OpenJDK distributions as well such as AdoptOpenJDK, Azul Zulu and Amazon Corretto. Third party distributions may receive extended security and stability updates from their respective communities (longer than Oracle's 6 months), but these are not guaranteed.
Does NextGen provide an Oracle Java license with a commercial subscription of Mirth Connect or the Mirth Appliance?
No. If you wish to use Oracle's commercial distribution of Java, you will need to purchase a license with Oracle separately.
No. The Mirth Appliance and Mirth Connect versions 3.7 and later now include support for OpenJDK, which does not require the purchase of an Oracle license.
OpenJDK is the official free and open-source implementation of Java led by Oracle.
Oracle's commercial distribution of Java provides long-term release updates and support from Oracle. OpenJDK releases occur every 6 months and each release only receives security and stability patches for 6 months until the next release. See Oracle's OpenJDK FAQ for more info.
Mirth Appliances with the most recent software updates allow you to choose which Java distribution to use:
Oracle OpenJDK (openjdk11_64) is the recommended OpenJDK distribution to use with Mirth Connect and can be used without the need to purchase a license from Oracle.
You will need to choose and install an OpenJDK distribution. Oracle's OpenJDK distribution is recommended and can be used without the need to purchase a license from Oracle. Other popular OpenJDK distributions include AdoptOpenJDK, Azul Zulu and Amazon Corretto. These distributions may receive extended security and stability updates from their respective communities (longer than Oracle's 6 months), but these are not guaranteed.
You may also want to consider running Mirth Connect using the official Mirth Connect docker images. Docker images are available with varying OpenJDK distributions including Oracle OpenJDK, Azul Zulu and AdoptOpenJDK.
As of version 3.7 of Mirth Connect, Java 8 and above are supported.
NOTICE (UPDATED): After reviewing community feedback, we have decided that starting in Mirth Connect version 4.7.0, we will be switching our minimum supported Java version from Java 8 to Java 17.