IBM wants that Sun should participate in the currently running open source Java projects at Apache rather than coming up with new ones. With Sun already having open sourced Java under the GPL you must be thinking that IBM might be feeling joyous considering the fact that it was IBM which had sent an open letter to Sun in 2004 requesting it to open source Java.

Rod Smith says though IBM is in all support of the open source licenses having the approval of OSI but he reinstated the fact that already there were two projects going on open source Java. One is Harmony to which IBM is a party and Motorola has also stated that it would be contributing code for starting a Java ME project at Apache.

This is what IBM states now:

In light of the Apache projects, we have discussed with Sun our strong belief that Sun should contribute their java technologies to Apache rather than starting another open-source Java project, or at least make their contributions available under an 'Apache friendly' license to ensure the open-source Java community isn't fragmented and disenfranchised, instead Sun would be bringing the same benefits of OS (open-source) Java to this significant and growing open-source community.

Sun had gone with the GPL rather than Apache as it wanted to make sure that it was compatible with Linux which is under GPL. Is IBM happy? Doesn't seem so.