Clarification on OpenWebStart Versioning Policy

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Masuda
Posts: 6
Joined: 22 Oct 2025, 09:46

Clarification on OpenWebStart Versioning Policy

Post by Masuda »

I would like to confirm the versioning policy applied to OpenWebStart. My understanding is that OpenWebStart follows semantic versioning, and that in the current release 1.13.0 the “13” constitutes the minor version number, indicating that the changes introduced are backward-compatible. Could you please confirm whether this interpretation is correct?

Additionally, do you have any plans to publish a future major release that would introduce breaking changes (for example, a 2.x.x series)? If such a plan exists, could you share the conditions that would trigger a major-version increment?

Janak Mulani
Posts: 1088
Joined: 24 Mar 2020, 13:37

Re: Clarification on OpenWebStart Versioning Policy

Post by Janak Mulani »

Yes, 1.13.0 is backward compatible. It has bug fixes and improvements. We recommend that you upgrade to the latest release.

A major release could include changes that would make OWS compatible with Java 23 and 24 because some of the classes used by OWS have been removed in those versions of Java. Also, bundling of Java 11 instead of Java 8. However, currently there are no concrete plans.

Normally we make two releases in a year - roughly May and Nov.

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