[nickik]

I think that they might just want to profit from all the love going into LLVM. Currenlty hotspot has costum optimization and if you have a product based on it you have to maintain this and improve it. If you manage to creat a fast powerful LLVM based JVM you can profit from the other work going into that space and maybe distance yourself from the orcale standard.

However, currently not that many JIT are LLVM based so it seams that it needs some love to get this to working well. Both for GC and compilation speed. Thats at least my guess.