They killed OpenSSO, they killed Open Office, the killed Open Solaris, They where contractually bound to not kill MySQL so they just raised the price through the roof to send the message. Pretty much they killed anything that you did not have to pay for. The worst part is they did not just withdraw paid positions from working on it. They alienated the volunteer members of the community until they resigned in protest.

Sun agreed to license the TCK to Apache under non-discriminatory terms an Agreement that Oracle is not, has not and will not living up to, because they don't want JDKs to exist that did not pay Oracle or more importantly they want them to licence it under the restrictive provising that they require e.g no use on servers and no use on Mobile. How many more items do they have to destroy until people start seeing the serial and systematic behavior that is going on.

do you not find it funny that Apple gave the JVM back to Oracle and Oracle is doing everything in it's power to keep non-sanctioned VM's off of Mobile devices. That is what the Apache dispute is really about, Oracle does not want a non-oracle JVM in the mobile world and I can bet you dime to dollar that it has to do with a back room deal between Oracle and Apple. Why do they want to keep the non-sanctioned JVM's off of Mobile devices, well because a closed ecosystem is more lucrative for Apple and Oracle than one in which Apache and Google are giving stuff away for free.

There is a fundamental difference in world views between Apple / Oracle and Google / Apache. Apple and Oracle are vertical stack providers they want to provide the whole stack soup to nuts and don't want anyone playing in their ecosystem, it just so happens that Apple wants the consumer market and Oracle wants the Enterprise market so they make good bed fellows. They are about the only two tech companies left that are not at war with each other.

Google and Apache represent a threat to their world vision and they have declared war to stop them. Oracle is all about every piece of their vertical being a piece that is monetized you can rest assured that Java is no exception.

Like it or not Java and the JVM are pawns in a big game of who is going to own the mobile market. It is the future market and winner takes all, if Oracle backs Apple in wining the market, then Apple can ensure that Oracle is position to be the Enterprise infrastructure for the new Mobile market. Like it or not, Java is a sacrificial pawn in a bigger game now.

The developer in me does not care, quite honestly the return to verticals means the return to easy money for writing software for verticals but the consumer in me shudders at the though of the verticals winning. You think Apples platform is restrictive, now wait until they own 90% of the market. They will make the early 90's Microsoft look like a benevolent democracy and well Oracle will just become a technical tax to anyone wanting to do business.

Really? How, where, when?

"IBM and Apple are both supporting OpenJDK -- Oracle is not the sole custodian of Java" Whilst technically correct, they appear to be holding the TCK and patents as viable weapons in the battle for control.

If Oracle is in breach of an agreement, can Apache take them to court of force them to comply?

Alternately, are there any legal obstacles preventing Apache from writing their own TCK and saying in future they'll develop against that?

Apache doesn't have enough money to do that, and if they did their members would probably consider such a lawsuit a waste of said money.

Alternately, are there any legal obstacles preventing Apache from writing their own TCK and saying in future they'll develop against that?

Patents that are owned by Oracle.

No, but if they can convince telcos and phone manufacturers they can win, I am sure they could direct some of the money provisioned for J2ME licencing and Android-related patent-licensing into that.

And you know the beauty of it? Then can't kill neither Open Office nor MySQL. When the time comes, I just have to move to a fork. LibreOffice is on RC-stage now and I am curious about Drizzle and the other forks of MySQL.

> because they don't want JDKs to exist that did not pay Oracle

Probably. What they would really hate would be not to get some money out of every feature phone out there. Their thing is with mobile and J2ME licensing means a lot of money.

> They will make the early 90's Microsoft look like a benevolent democracy

Don't get me started on that...