[easytiger]

There was a limbo period where Sun, circa 2004-2007, had a defacto opposition to any consideration of any Java being open source until OpenJDK came along. I asked the question of senior figures in 2005 and they laughed it off. ONly to then be forced to adapt when Redhat et al wanted an FLOSS java. Thus OpenJDK got a licensing exception.

Ultimately the dev kit for android is a clean room implementation (submitters made legal commitments to that fact). The question pivots on how you feel abut the IP of the java language and the library interfaces being used by someone else.

[pjmlp]

With the caveat that Android is an incomplete implementation of Java libraries and JVM capabilities, thus not only it increased the bleeding on Sun's finances, to this day it is impossible to pick random Maven Central packages and be sure they actually run on Android.

A scenario that is only going to get worse as Java keeps improving.