That's a good point and you're justified in saying that it could have been better if the TCK was GPL'd too. But in reality the TCK is not part of the language,

That's a good point and you're justified in saying that it could have been better if the TCK was GPL'd too. But in reality the TCK is not part of the language, the virtual machine, or anything else that most hackers use. And we actually have a free JVM implementation that passes the TCK and always will as long as that is important, and I would argue that having 2 is much less important than having 1. And if its really that important... we could make our own TCK and force Oracle to become bug for bug compatible with us I think much more relevant to being 'partially free' would be the example of Android... if they had released the whole platform as GPL the wouldn't be facing a billion dollar lawsuit that threatens the very possibility of building compatible APIs altogether... instead they chose to be as proprietary and control freakish as they could get away with while still pretending to be a community project... you can at least compile and run OpenJDK on almost any platform... while Android is notorious for being technically open source but in practice nearly impossible to run without proprietary components