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The German Federal Ministry of Health is considering a bill giving people having tested positive for COVID-19 antibodies a free pass on Corona-related social restrictions.

I’m not going to criticize that. It’s probably inevitable given that the restrictions are quite severe in their impact on fundamental rights and therefore hard to justify keeping up where they are unnecessary.

It does, however, raise the question of how to deal with the potential problem that this might incentivize people to get themselves infected in order to earn their freedom back. In my opinion, it would make a lot of sense to couple the introduction of a law that gives privileges to COVID-positive people with the establishment of Hero Hotels where people can choose to undergo controlled variolation.

Since people in Hero Hotels would then be under quarantine, the dangers for society would be limited. It would also greatly decrease their own risk. And it would help society reach herd immunity in lieu of a vaccine.

Since there has clearly been some confusion about this:

• There is no such thing as an LTS version of OpenJDK. OpenJDK versions 8 and 11 aren’t special in any way.
• Oracle declare certain versions of their commercial Oracle JDK distribution (which is an OpenJDK build) as LTS versions, which they support for an extended period of time for their paying customers. This has no bearing on OpenJDK except that Oracle may or may not continue to upstream bug fixes from Oracle JDK to OpenJDK.
• Other vendors may or may not provide their own sort of long-term support for certain versions of their own OpenJDK distributions. For instance, the AdoptOpenJDK group have been following Oracle in what they declare as LTS versions so far. Azul have been doing the same but also declared certain intermediate versions (13 and 15 so far) as “medium-term support” releases whose end of support is at least 1.5 years after the next LTS is released (which greatly decreases the incentive to use an LTS version that is more than a year old).

Again, there is no such thing as an LTS version of OpenJDK. Likewise, there is no such thing as an LTS version of the Java programming language and standard library. There is also no guarantee that an upgrade from 11 to 17 will be any easier than from, say, 14 to 17 (in fact, the opposite is more likely to be true). Don’t just stick with 8 or 11 because somebody else does so. Choose your vendor wisely and then balance what level of support the vendor provides with your own needs and make an informed decision.