Interesting that they don't mention Google's vote "no".
The official comments of each party in the JCP on this vote are pretty interesting, even a large number of the "yes" votes clarify that they are voting only on the technical merits and they have deep concerns with the licensing.
The Credit Suisse comments are particularly interesting:
On 2010-12-06 Credit Suisse voted Yes with the following comment:
Credit Suisse's vote is purely on the technical content. We strongly demand open standards and an active community around Java as we selected Java SE & EE as primary pillars for our application development (as many others in the industry do). The current battle around licensing term, however, reveals that Java never actually was an open standard. FOU restrictions clearly discriminate open source implementations and prevent competition, and with that, innovation in that space. While Java had a considerable head start, it lost a lot of momentum over the last years. Fragmentation (or a fork) of the language and its platforms are clearly not desired. But today, customers are already facing competing models for developing enterprise applications (e.g., Spring, OSGi, Java EE). The main problem, in our view, is the lack of modularization, clear delineation of Java IPs owned by Oracle and truly open standard extensions, and the ignorance of developments outside of the JCP (even though OSGi has a JCP blessing). The OpenJDK framework is not sufficient for all aspects of the language. Java must be kept interesting for researchers and universities: researchers not only contribute to the standards (e.g., Doug Lea for concurrency or Michael Ernst for type annotations) but also decide on the languages (and paradigms) that are taught at universities -- and this in the end determines the knowledge and mindset we acquire with our software engineers. While we recognize Oracle’s intellectual properties around Java, we strongly encourage Oracle to re-think its current position around licensing terms. We strongly support open source as a licensing model for contributions in the JCP.
OpenJDK is enough for 99% of people. The remaining objections are philosophical and strategic: To count as a true bona-fide 100% open standard, you should be able to implement Java from scratch (without using any OpenJDK code) using any license you want and get it certified. Also, the ASF is trying to build a completely ASL-licensed stack, either because of NIH or because it benefits IBM and Intel in some way.
I was under the impression it was the TCK that caused the issues. OpenJDK could be certified, but you weren't allowed to then run the "certified" version on a mobile device.
Which is an additional restriction onto of the GPL.
Since Sun distributed OpenJDK under GPLv2, they waived that restriction. GPL'ed software cannot have FOU restrictions. AFAIK, however, OpenJDK does not include J2ME, so, you would be able to run, say, NetBeans on your phone, but not Hexic.
For the same reasons any GPL'd software isn't enough. We could go back and forth forever about whether those reasons are good, but that's not a conversation unique to OpenJDK vs Harmony.
I agree that releasing a GPL'ed derivative of OpenJDK may not make sense for every business plan I can think of, but, from a user point-of-view, would there be any difference?
Like any two implementations of a spec, they probably have different performance and stability characteristics. As for what those differences actually are, or if there are others as well, I'm really not familiar enough with Harmony to say. My completely unsubstantiated guess is that end users will be more interested in OpenJDK, as it's derived from the mature, battle tested jvm Sun's been shipping for years.
The official comments of each party in the JCP on this vote are pretty interesting, even a large number of the "yes" votes clarify that they are voting only on the technical merits and they have deep concerns with the licensing.
http://jcp.org/en/jsr/results?id=5111