i_gumby

This is a story that's concerning from FOSS point of view; it outlines how an open source foundation can become the means by which for-profit companies can exert influence and pressure to squash competition.

It begins with IBM open sourcing their J9 VM as Eclipse OpenJ9 [1]. Eclipse OpenJ9 is a source only project; AdoptOpenJDK was the means by which users could download both nightly and release builds [2]. At some point, Oracle revoked AdoptOpenJDK's TCK license for OpenJ9 [3][4]; this resulted in AdoptOpenJDK not running the TCK for any builds (even though they could technically run it for the Hotspot builds).

A few months ago, AdoptOpenJDK decided to join the Eclipse foundation [3]; however, the agreement that Eclipse made with Oracle was that Eclipse would only host binaries that are TCK compliant [5]. What this means is that Eclipse OpenJ9 binaries cannot be published on Eclipse unless either the project pays for the TCK license, or some other entity uses their TCK license to certify the Eclipse OpenJ9 binary; in either case though, Eclipse OpenJ9 was forced to figure out how to generate builds. As can be seen in the mailing list archive [7], Eclipse OpenJ9, which amusingly enough is an existing Eclipse project, is now stranded in some sense.

[1] https://projects.eclipse.org/projects/technology.openj9/reviews/creation-review [2] https://adoptopenjdk.net/ [3] https://twitter.com/volker_simonis/status/1052610654669074432?lang=en [4] https://adoptopenjdk.net/quality.html#jck [5] https://blog.adoptopenjdk.net/2020/06/adoptopenjdk-to-join-the-eclipse-foundation/ [6] https://projects.eclipse.org/projects/adoptium/charter [7] https://www.eclipse.org/lists/openj9-dev/msg00086.html