First Apple deprecated their Java implementation. Now they’ve released it as open source:

Oracle and Apple today announced the OpenJDK project for Mac OS X. Apple will contribute most of the key components, tools and technology required for a Java SE 7 implementation on Mac OS X, including a 32-bit and 64-bit HotSpot-based Java virtual machine, class libraries, a networking stack and the foundation for a new graphical client. OpenJDK will make Apple’s Java technology available to open source developers so they can access and contribute to the effort.

The question that remains for me is whether Apple will continue to contribute code to OpenJDK. (Hopefully they will.)

This, combined with the fact that Apple is no longer going to ship Flash on OS X, seems to signal that Apple isn’t interested in being responsible for shipping updates for other people’s runtimes any more. You can certainly run Java or Flash on your Mac if you like, but the vendor is responsible for making sure that your runtime is patched and secure.