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Even with the TCK license, I think the major problem was licensing of the JVM. Google wanted to make Android open source, but the JVM license requires the GPL,

by falling 14y ago

Even with the TCK license, I think the major problem was licensing of the JVM. Google wanted to make Android open source, but the JVM license requires the GPL, which Google and a lot of companies using it now won’t touch with a pole. So they had to use more liberal license, like the one they use in most of their other projects and the only way to do that was to write their own new VM (this probably also allowed them to more easily tailor it for mobile use).

ZeroGravitas 14y ago
I don't think a GPL'd JVM would be a deal-breaker. It's at about the same level as Linux, probably less likely to be tweaked by device builders. Not having the classpath exception on the libraries would be a no go though.
- dedward 14y ago
  the main point of a gpl version, copyrights held by google, is to let people hack away, and if they wantdifferentlicense terms go to google.
- falling 14y ago
  Then why did they build their own C standard library instead of using libc?
wmf 14y ago
Sun probably wouldn't have objected to Google writing a non-GPL JVM as long as it was fully compatible with the crap Java ME or SE APIs.