The Apache Software Foundation Resigns From the JCP Executive Committee
The Apache Software Foundation has resigned its seat on the Java SE/EE Executive Committee. Apache has served on the EC for the past 10 years, winning the JCP “Member of the Year” award 4 times, and recently was ratified for another term with support from 95% of the voting community. Further, the project communities of the ASF, home to Apache Tomcat, Ant, Xerces, Geronimo, Velocity and nearly a 100 mainstay java components have implemented countless JSRs and serve on and contribute to many of the JCPs technical expert groups.
We’d like to provide some explanation to the community as to why we’re taking this significant step.
The recent Java SE 7 vote was the last chance for the JCP EC to demonstrate that the EC has any intent to defend the JCP as an open specification process, and demonstrate that the letter and spirit of the law matter.   To sum up the issues at stake in the vote, we believe that while continuing to fail to uphold their responsibilities under the JSPA, Oracle provided the EC with a Java SE 7 specification request and license that are self-contradictory, severely restrict distribution of independent implementations of the spec, and most importantly, prohibit the distribution of independent open source implementations of the spec. Oracle has refused to answer any reasonable and responsible questions from the EC regarding these problems.
In the phrase “fail to uphold their responsibilities under the JSPA”, we are referring to Oracle’s refusal to provide the ASF’s Harmony project with a TCK license for Java SE that complies with Oracle’s obligations under the JSPA as well as public promises made to the Java community by officers of Sun Microsystems (recently acquired by Oracle.) This breach of the JSPA was begun by Sun Microsystems in August of 2006 and is a policy that Oracle explicitly continues today. For more information on this dispute, see our open letter to Sun Microsystems.
Further read at blogs.apache.com