No one offers free LTS (or, rather, what you call "free LTS" is very different from a real LTS service, which is always paid, and you might not be getting what you think you are). The "LTS release" you get for free are builds of OpenJDK Updates. Try to open an issue on, say, Nashorn against a "free" LTS 11 and see if it gets addressed. It won't be -- unless you actually pay for a real LTS -- because Nashorn has been removed from the mainline and there's nothing to backport. Same for CMS or any other package or component that's been removed.

If you're using one of those "free LTS" distributions you should know that you're using a JDK that's not fully maintained. The only JDK version that's fully maintained completely free is the current version. To be fully safe and run maintained software you can either use the current version for free or use an old version and pay someone for LTS.

Maintaining a JDK is a lot of work. There are a couple of hundred full-time developers working on OpenJDK tip and maintaining the current release; there are ~10 full-time engineers (probably less) from all companies combined maintaining both OpenJDK 8u and 11u. For real support for an old version you must pay.

(I work on OpenJDK at Oracle)

9 was the last major release ever, and it was a big one at that (bigger than 8). And since most people skipped both 9 and 10, there was even more work. If you use the current version, all that will never ever be necessary again. If you don't, this will happen over and over, and worse: because OpenJDK's development ignores vendor's LTS services, things can disappear between one of the versions with LTS and another without warning. Because your customers don't educate themselves they're condemning themselves to an eternity of pain (paid support, higher upgrade effort, more hardware) when salvation is already here (free support [1], lower overall upgrade effort than ever in Java's history, plus always enjoying the hardware savings).

I admit that doing away with major releases, giving the feature releases new version names, and the last ever major release was too much all at the same time and is confusing. But the payoff in learning what actually happened is big, as is the loss in not. Your customers might be losing both time-to-market and serious money for a lack of a day's worth of education. They can start here: https://blogs.oracle.com/java-platform-group/update-and-faq-...

[1]: The only version for which you get free support from anyone is the current version. No one offers free LTS for old versions. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24487298