JSR-000313 Java Platform, Enterprise Edition 6 Specification - Withdrawn

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A couple of days ago I got this email on the JCP interest list:

• The following proposal:
  JSR-000313 Java Platform, Enterprise Edition 6 Specification
  was withdrawn at the request of the submitter.
  http://jcp.org/en/jsr/detail?id=313

This JSR seems to have had attracted some positive interest not least, I suspect, because the stated goals included:

• "the Java EE platform has fostered a vibrant community and marketplace for additional technologies, frameworks, and applications that work with the platform. Some of these provide facilities that are missing from the platform. Others provide alternatives to platform facilities. A major theme for this release is to embrace and support those technologies as part of the overall Java EE landscape, while also continuing to simplify the platform to better target a wider range of developers. To that end we propose two goals for this release - extensibility and profiles"

This seemed to indicate that JEE was about to mature into something which could accept some competition, allow more freedom for architects to build things they way they want to within JEE, and simultaneously resolve the obsolescence and bloat which was becoming apparent by providing alternative distributions based on the needs of targeted application types, e.g

• "... the first version of a Java EE Web Profile - a subset of the Java EE platform targeted at web application development.".

It seems from the vote comments that this has been a victim of concerns over IP, For example SAP said:

• "We will need to get more clarification for the new proposed license terms which seem to require a license fee per Java EE profile. If this means a fundamental change in the Java EE licensing model, SAP may decide to vote "NO" on this JSR based on the proposed license terms. "

and it seems in part to have been fuelled by the ASF's position on the Java SE TCK, Red Hat said:

• "The spec lead of the EE6 specification has confirmed that the EE6 TCK would contain no "field of use restrictions", as originally raised by Apache with regard to another JSR (i.e. the SE TCK licensing). That is a good thing.
  
  However, in the absence of an explicit JSPA rule that would forbid such field-of-use restrictions, we will remain worried that a similar issue might resurface anytime, for any JSR."

We all know that there's a big gap between intention and execution, and JEE 6 might not have been the universal panacea it hoped to be, but take a second to join me and lets cross our fingers and hope that the value of the changes proposed in this JSR are not lost just because we're having another IP turf war.

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