Apache resigns from the Java Community Process executive committee

If you believe, patent encumbered software is non-free then you would call ffmpeg non-free as well even though it under a GPL license but that is a incomplete and rather misleading perspective since organizations like FSF would point out that patents are not universal and when we have talk about free software licenses, we are usually referring to the copyright licensing and not patent status since in many cases, this is unknown. I think it makes sense to clearly separate encumbrances in copyright, patents and trademarks and not lump them together since they all have very different implications.

To summarize, OpenJDK is free software. Harmony is also free software. The former has a patent grant (being TCK compliant) as well as a patent license due to the GPL license. Harmony has neither. That doesn't make it non-free and a GPL'ed implementation can't protect you. It won't get the patent grant since Apache disagrees with the TCK terms and won't be able to carry the Java trademark however.