Did Sun ever make a public statement that anybody is allowed to independently re-implement (subsets of) the JRE class library APIs? I don't recall such a promi

Did Sun ever make a public statement that anybody is allowed to independently re-implement (subsets of) the JRE class library APIs? I don't recall such a promise. Probably it's tied to the notorious TCK certification process that always was entirely at Sun's discretion. Actually many years ago Sun has successfully sued Microsoft over Microsoft's incomplete JRE implementation, but I guess that was more about breach-of-contract and trademarks than it was about copyright. What Sun has done is release (most of) their own JRE implementation with a GPL(+exception) license, which would of course imply a license to the API copyrights that Oracle is now speciously claiming... but Google is not using this implementation (because, as everyone knows, there are obvious legal risks to using GPL'd code); IIRC the class library implementation that Google uses comes mostly from Apache.