It gives maintainers legal protections and prospective users some idea/promises of the project governance. In the past, it gave you infrastructure too, but that is not so relevant anymore.
When Java 7 was released in 2011, there was already a 2-year old WebSphere Commerce release supporting Java 6. I don't think you
can pin those years you were on a superceded 5-7 year old stack on IBM.