Where production policy belongs: building Eliya in public

Fri, 19 Jun 2026 08:15:28 +0000

This is an argument about where production intent belongs in a managed runtime, and the OpenJDK distribution we built to act on it - Eliya, an opinionated, compliance-conscious OpenJDK distribution. This is the first article in a series. The later parts are engineering: reproducible builds, the glibc floor, release signing, the one source patch we shipped. This part is the thesis they all serve.

Every configurable system has two spaces. The configuration space: every behaviour you can reach by setting the knobs the system already exposes. And there’s the implementation space: behaviour that only exists if someone goes in and changes the internals.

Fahim Farook on foojay.io - Friends Of OpenJDK

Where production policy belongs: building Eliya in public