What's the enterprise-level feature differentiation he's referring to? Surely the point of Java having a reference implementation is that any JAR will run on any JVM?
monitoring, perhaps interesting memory reclamation issues, GC tweaking, yadda yadda. there are lots of features that have absolutely nothing to do with formal language semantics.
Exactly: Diagnosability and serviceability features (especially when deeply integrated with the underlying OS), code generation algorithms optimized for specific hardware, GC algorithms tuned to specific memory hierarchies, etc.
The oracle patents are on VM implementation, not class library -- and IBM has a license for those patents, and is going to continue to develop their VM while collaborating on the class library.
