Among the many high-level Sun people leaving the merged Oracle-Sun conglomerate is Chief Open Source Officer Simon Phipps, who announced his departure on his blog last week. (Side note: Is Chief X Officer the new Vice President? They sure seem to be proliferating!) It was the sort of expected combo of pride and wistful regrets, and (as is probably the intent) it’s not that easy to tell whether he’s leaving voluntarily or not. Still, the most interesting bit, as one might expect, was one of his regrets, offered in passing: “I’m sad that Apache did not get the TCK license they requested.”In case you haven’t been following this drama, it involves the Apache Foundation being unable to get the testing kit they need to certify their implementation of Java under open source licensing conditions they can accept. If you want to know more about the details, check out my earlier posts here and here (be sure to read the comments too, as they’re quite informative). Phipps’ note seems to indicate that at least someone within Sun was on Apache’s side in this dispute. Of course, now he’s gone. Oracle was on Apache’s side too, back when it didn’t own the rights to the Java trademarks; we’re all still waiting to see how (and if) this develops. Open Source