You are right, if they want they can use it with this license but still it's a source of problems. we have plenty of different licenses out there, MIT, BSD, GPL ... and some more license we surely be created in the futur, mixing them is not always fun. All of them are not fully compatible. Legal problems are something really dirty when you encounter them, noone working on open-source projects want to have such problems.

The apache license is ~more or less~ fine today (everyone has it's own preference), but might become a problem later. To avoid those problems the change can only be done now while the PMC is still here.

Setting it in public domain can also make it revive, forks can start much more easely from it. Several JVM have ~dyed~ (or are in lawsuit like google dalvik, android) in the last year. Having a few more vm out there would be for the best, specialy if they are already reliable alternatives like harmony.