"The key point is that Sun's tactics here were quite
deliberate. They knew exactly what they were doing by offering a
testing kit with a restrictive license. They wanted to ensure that
Apache Harmony couldn't be certified as complete. Sun was going out
of its way to ensure that there was no competition to its own JDK.
"In the meantime, Sun played the OpenJDK card. It announced the
release of the JDK under the GPL license. Lots in the community
(notably those from a GPL background) suddenly became best friends
with Sun. Some joined Sun, some now work closely with Sun. Many of
these people now believe that there is no danger around Java, and
that Richard Stallman's Java trap is over. I think this shows a
gross lack of perspective - the code may now be GPL open source,
but the specification is now no longer open. Which is more
important? If you can't freely implement a specification*, then I'd
argue its not worth the paper its written on"