Great news, the final approval ballot for J2EE 6 (sorry, Java EE 6) has closed. Technical details about Java EE are available on the net, but what seems to be much more interesting is the political play that corporations are performing. SAP regret expressed in its comment with its Abstain vote is a good part of it: On 2009-11-30 SAP AG voted Abstain with the following comment: SAP had welcomed the changes made to the Java Community Process where “Spec Leads must provide complete copies of the licenses that they intend to use, not simply a summary of some of the terms” (quote from the JCP Process document https://www.jcp.org/en/procedures/jcp2). This change to the process had promised to create transparency about the licensing of Java in order to prevent that Java is used for unfair business advantage against any particular party in the marketplace. However, we are disappointed that Sun Microsystems as the Spec Lead of the Java EE 6 specification has not managed to produce the promised “full license terms” of the Java EE 6 TCK until the begin of the two week voting window for Java EE 6. Given the complexity of this license, we are unfortunately not in a position to complete a thorough legal review. At a minimum, we would expect that the TCK is not used to prevent access to the Java marketplace, including open source implementations. This JSR has been filed in July 2007; we believe there would have been ample time to share and discuss the proposed full license terms with the community. Regrettable, we will therefore have to abstain from the Java EE 6 vote. This is not a statement about the technical merits of the underlying JSRs on which we have voted separately, but rather a reflection on the transparency and efficiency of the licensing process managed by Sun as the owner of the Java Community Process related to intellectual property critical for today’s IT landscapes. Technology Industry