I am not on a support contract (rather the opposite: small team). But I am just being careful to get caught having to spend time upgrading code that I would otherwise not have touched, just because my non-LTS JVM runs out of support. Support is not just a support contract, but also security patches being released. In my understanding, for non-LTS versions that ceases quickly when the next version is out. Particularly for non-LTS versions there may be experimental features that are not going to be compatible with subsequent versions, increasing my risk that a migration to the next version is occasionally not quickly.
pron> Assuming you've already made the last ever major upgrade past 8 (which was a relatively tough one), the reason people pay for LTS isn't because upgrades are overall cheaper -- they're costlier, actually -- but because they're willing to pay to not get new features. We've designed the LTS model mostly for legacy applications that don't see much maintenance, and want their dependencies, the JDK included, to change as little as possible.
pron> People who want a new feature to land in LTS still misunderstand what LTS is. People who upgrade from LTS to LTS every three years also misunderstand LTS, and probably get the worst of both worlds.
Personally, I only found Java 9 to be anything like a stumbling block, and that's solely because the module system (Jigsaw) threw all the tooling for a loop. You can easily avoid Jigsaw and never worry about it.
The Java folks try really hard not to break backwards compatibility in general, and modules (+ JDK internals encapsulation) are the only major bugbears to worry about. If you can upgrade, I've found it extremely worthwhile.
> Particularly for non-LTS versions there may be experimental features that are not going to be compatible with subsequent versions, increasing my risk that a migration to the next version is occasionally not quickly.
As for this, the experimental features may as well not exist if you don't enable them. You absolutely should kick the tires with them if you can, but their presence is feature-flagged off by default. I'm on a small team myself, and it's been painless for us ever since jumping to 11.
With the new oracle licensing you can use an LTS until the next LTS comes out and one additional year on top, for free. That one year should be more than enough for testing, isn’t it? Especially that thanks to strong encapsulations java updates are even more of a breeze.
