[jimmyvanhalen]

Note that IBM dumped Harmony in favor of OpenJDK last year after realizing Harmony will never get a TCK license from Sun/Oracle. The Apache Foundation resigned from the JCP Executive Committee in protest shortly after that and last year an open vote was taken within the Project Management Committee, which resulted in a 20-2 majority to discontinue development."

Here's what the Apache Foundation had to say:

when the Apache Foundation resigned from the JCP Executive Committee in protest, it actually stated on the organization's official blog that the "Java specifications are proprietary technology that must be licensed directly from the spec lead under whatever terms the spec lead chooses."

Source: http://www.fosspatents.com/2012/04/oracle-asks-court-to-clea...

https://blogs.apache.org/foundation/entry/the_asf_resigns_fr...

[mbreese]

I'm fairly certain that Apache was referring to the TCK license when they were talking about Java specifications. They don't use the word API - probably because the idea of copyrighting an API wasn't considered possible (and hopefully still isn't).

Apache wanted to be able to call Harmony "Java", everyone already knew that it was API compatible.