Earlier this week, the only independent member of the Java Community Process Executive Committee, Tim Peierls, resigned. Now the Apache Software Foundation has walked away.
According to the announcement, “In short, the EC and the Java Community Process are neither.”
The ASF said that Oracle has failed to “uphold their responsibilities under the JSPA.”
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.
So now the question bouncing around the community is whether the ASF will fork Java.
“If the opposition would team up and create a fork of Java,” one commenter to the ASF post said, “I have ZERO doubt the entire Java community would follow.”
