Alexander
Belokrylov.

Belokrylov is the kind of executive who walks into a room and starts talking about commits. Not headcount. Not ARR. Commits to OpenJDK, the year they took fifth place, the patch they shipped last Thursday.

That tells you almost everything. BellSoft, the San Jose company he co-founded in 2017, is a downstream OpenJDK distribution with a quiet ambition: be the Java runtime nobody has to think about. Liberica JDK ships under Spring's recommendation, hits millions of servers, and runs on a Linux distribution - Alpaquita - that was originally just an optimization project for Java workloads, until the team noticed it was good at everything else too.

He didn't start there. He started reading textbooks in radio physics at Southern Federal University, the same school that used to be called Rostov State. Then in 2005, Sun Microsystems hired him as an Academic Developer and Program Manager for EMEA. He was 25-ish, the JDK was still numbered like a hobbyist project, and the company that wrote it would not exist in five years.

A boring decade. (The good kind.)

Oracle bought Sun in 2010. Belokrylov stayed. He moved through Java evangelism - speaking at conferences, building developer community, co-founding JUG.ru, the Russian-speaking Java user group that became one of the largest in the region. Then product management. Then deeper product management: Java ME Embedded, then a piece of Oracle's Internet of Things Cloud Service.

For thirteen years he watched how a runtime gets owned by a vendor, and how that ownership shapes what developers can and cannot do. He learned what Oracle did well. He learned what it didn't. In 2017, with a group of engineers who'd been around the JDK for a decade or more, he left and started BellSoft.

The first product, Liberica JDK, was not the most ambitious thing in the world. It was a build of OpenJDK with the rough edges sanded down. The bet was that the rough edges mattered more than people thought.

They were right. By 2018, Spring Boot's documentation pointed at it. By 2025, BellSoft's recap was reporting a 4x year-over-year jump in container pulls and 100% customer retention - two numbers that, taken together, describe a company nobody is leaving.

The Alpaquita accident

Around 2021, the team had a problem worth solving: Java in containers is fine, but the Linux underneath the JVM is doing a thousand small things that nobody asked for. Background daemons. Memory layouts tuned for desktop workstations. Package managers full of dependencies the Java app will never call.

They started building a stripped, Alpine-style distribution tuned around the way Java actually uses a machine. They called it Alpaquita. Then, in Belokrylov's words, they noticed something:

"Originally, our idea was to optimize Linux to run Java workloads, but it appeared that Linux optimized for Java workloads, optimized pretty much for everything."

This is the kind of thing engineers find funny and marketers find irritating. The "Java OS" is now an "OS." The team didn't change the name.