> For many years, Sun refused to provide the TCK to certify Apache Harmony as an official Java (donated to Apache by Sun's erstwhile foe, IBM[1]). Are you impl

> For many years, Sun refused to provide the TCK to certify Apache Harmony as an official Java (donated to Apache by Sun's erstwhile foe, IBM[1]). Are you implying that GCJ was any more certified than Harmony? Because I would be surprised if it was, quite sure the TCK license was only opened up a bit when it became necessary to allow verification of OpenJDK derived implementations. > had limited options for open-source Java compilers As in none. They didn't have any options. So they fell back to GCJ, which could have been viable with significant time and effort. Instead it was still missing significant functionality even after OpenJDK was released, at which point it was too late. I just realized how short the time between GCJ being able to run eclipse (2004) and being obsoleted by OpenJDK (2007) was, I somehow managed to set up enough new systems in that time frame to remember starting eclipse and realizing it was running on top of gcj as significant annoyance.