I was really thinking long and hard whether to respond further. I do think there is something substantive to add.
From a purely personal standpoint, I agree consumers and beneficiaries of a technology need to give back. Indeed that is the basic principle under which I personally have operated with regards to Java EE for more than a decade now.
The reality is far from that simple.
From my company standpoint, my management has made it amply clear my first priority is paying clients, not the advancement of any given technology. They have been willing to go so far as to look the other way on how I spend my free time (aka not asking why I am not putting in 60-70 billable hours) and not making me take vacation when I speak at conferences as long as I figure out my own travel expenses. That is more than they do to support any of the hundreds of other technologies my company benefits from. I suspect these accommodations are made only because they know if they do not make these compromises I will be easily able to find someone else that will. This last point has deeper practical implications.
The reality is that technology is competitive. There are lots of companies that depend on technologies like Java SE, Scala, Spring, Akka, Play, etc. The companies that firmly stand behind these technologies do not expect consumers to pay anything back directly. Java EE is no different in their eyes. It is an almost laughably impractical idea for me to go to even my most committed Java EE clients and tell them they should contribute back time, money and resources to Java EE. They will straight up tell me I should find another more supportive client and they are moving to Spring themselves. Pivotal won't ask them to contribute anything back and neither will their favorite Spring consultant...
I do hope these are competitive realities the principal stakeholders of EE4J take well to heart. There are lots of people in the community that have and will continue to contribute plenty to Java EE. If we now expect these people to suddenly do exponentially more, this is an effort that is no doubt destined for failure, even in the short term. Java EE vendors do need to figure out shortly how they plan to effectively fill the gap that Sun/Oracle will now leave behind (or hopefully even exceed it).