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Comment by pquerna | Hacker News Reader

Java was not free'ed by the GPL. Its a mirage. You've been deceived.

The specific implementation of the OpenJDK is available under the GPL, but the TCK, which is basically all of the test cases, is essentially proprietary.

Can you imagine Google writing Go, but keeping the Test cases for themselves? Well, they would let you use the test cases, but only if you used Go in way Google wanted you to. If you wanted to compile Go on the Raspberry Pi, or on anything 'like' a Phone, well that was off limits, and you could no longer use the test cases.

It's bizarre. It's evil.

The JVM is a great platform, but it is not "free".

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That's a good point and you're justified in saying that it could have been better if the TCK was GPL'd too.

But in reality the TCK is not part of the language, the virtual machine, or anything else that most hackers use. And we actually have a free JVM implementation that passes the TCK and always will as long as that is important, and I would argue that having 2 is much less important than having 1. And if its really that important... we could make our own TCK and force Oracle to become bug for bug compatible with us

I think much more relevant to being 'partially free' would be the example of Android... if they had released the whole platform as GPL the wouldn't be facing a billion dollar lawsuit that threatens the very possibility of building compatible APIs altogether... instead they chose to be as proprietary and control freakish as they could get away with while still pretending to be a community project... you can at least compile and run OpenJDK on almost any platform... while Android is notorious for being technically open source but in practice nearly impossible to run without proprietary components

> the TCK, which is basically all of the test cases,

What if a new set of compatibility tests were derived from OpenJDK's behavior and all major Java-invested vendors who wouldn't mind poking Larry in the eye (I suppose not too many people would find that objectionable), decided that new test set is the de-facto compatibility reference?

"We", the royal hacker we, non-Oracle companies, tried, it failed:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apache_Harmony

The dynamics of a GPL-based project are somewhat different from an Apache-based one. Maybe that difference could be meaningful here.

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