Maybe if businesses are willing to pay Oracle for JDK 8 support, they may pay for Jetty LTS support.
Probably also unpopular but I'm going to add my vote of support for such an idea.
Once Java 8 reaches its first end of life phase in January, 2019 it technically becomes more effort to support, and anybody who can't move forwards should expect to pay for continued support of an end of life configuration.
This allows people to choose which is more important... Staying on the old release and paying for extended support, or moving forwards and still being able to have a no license cost option available.
The optics of this might be bad enough that you might want to only announce this now, and enact it by next year or 2020 whenever Java 8 is no longer available to end users without a contract, but the idea of aligning the free (but still patched publicly) Jetty option with the free (but still patched publicly) Java options makes sense to me.
with Jetty 9.2.x series minimum requirement of JDK 7, and Jetty 9.3.x
and 9.4.x series minimum requirement of JDK 8, we are thinking of
making JDK 11 the minimum requirement for Jetty 10.x.
My understanding is that JDK 8 and JDK 11 are "Long Term Support" releases. JDK 9 and JDK 10 are more like previews for what JDK 11 would become. In the case of JDK 8, I also believe it has reduced support in January, 2019 in that business are expected to either pay for JDK 8 support (if they aren't already), or they will lose access to updates, which means that Oracle is pushing all Java users up to JDK 11 aggressively.
I think targeting JDK 8 as minimum for currently active releases, and targeting JDK 11 for minimum for the next release makes perfect sense. I expect you will hit resistance from people unwilling to move forwards, however.
