Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

CEO Larry Page defends Google on the stand: “Declaring code is not code”

arstechnica.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

181–189 of 189 posts

Re: CEO Larry Page defends Google on the stand: “Declaring code is not code”

#181

Post by Sharlin »

allemagne wrote: post #129
mseebach wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You mean, like Objective-C was disastrous for the iPhone?

Apple had the luxury of being the first to sell smartphones, they could do it in whatever language they wanted. Android could never have tried to do the same thing.

Nokia's smartphone line was already several generations old when Apple introduced the first iPhone... The Symbian OS had a 67% market share in smartphones in 2006. The first version of the Communicator with 3rd party software ecosystem, the 9210, was released in 2001!

Re: CEO Larry Page defends Google on the stand: “Declaring code is not code”

#182

Post by seunosewa »

ccvannorman wrote: post #170
alecbaldwinlol wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, I completely agree with the above. Litigation is handled poorly, taxation handled poorly (federal and state), identity handled poorly (Social Security Admin), legislation, elections, law enforcement, and these are just the things I can think of... At every step of the way, something or someone outside of your business can topple your personal life and your company's life just for trying to do business in the USA…

LOL, kind of like the 18th century witch hunts where the witches cry, "If you must burn me at the stake, at least put me to trial by jury of OTHER WITCHES!" Imagine how that would have gone over :P

Bad analogy. Nobody is being punished for being software engineers.

Re: CEO Larry Page defends Google on the stand: “Declaring code is not code”

#183

Post by monocasa »

mikekchar wrote: post #110
Udo wrote: post #108

What's most striking to me is how easily this could have been avoided, everybody knew what liabilities would arise from betting your entire mobile platform on the goodwill of a competitor. With the massively overqualified talent pool Google hoards, they could absolutely have implemented a completely new language, compiler, and VM themselves. I'm sure this alternative must have been at least on the table. Does anyone…

I'm not an insider, but I think the decision making is pretty clear: they bought Android (the company). They could have started something from scratch, but they felt they could get to the market faster buying up a company that was already part of the way there. Android could easily have been built on the GPLed version of Java. But again the reasoning behind the decision of building your own JVM is pretty clear: Andro…

Also, the GPL version of Java wasn't available when Google bought Android.

Re: CEO Larry Page defends Google on the stand: “Declaring code is not code”

#184

Post by bluesilver07 »

aries1980 wrote: post #136
Manishearth wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Into this went their irrational fear of GPL (describing it as 'viral' or 'infectious'). Why irrational? If they used the GPL, a lot more of Android would need to be open source today, yes? Including proprietary hardware things that can't be open sourced?

This is not true. You could link the libraries as normal while maintaining your proprietary code. The GPL only asks you to release the code if a) you mix your proprietary code without separation from the GPL code b) you distribute the software to 3rd party. b) rarely happens if you sell the device as a closed/embedded system. Also, they could use BSD code as well that comes with a more permissive MIT licence.

This is not true. Only the LGPL allows you to link to an open source library. That is why OpenJDK has a classpath exception (http://programmers.stackexchange.com/questions/119436/what-d...).

GPL requires you to release the source code to the customer of your software upon request. The person who buys the phone is the customer.

Re: CEO Larry Page defends Google on the stand: “Declaring code is not code”

#185

Post by scholia »

e40 wrote: post #163
scholia wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I really don't get the anger toward Google. I don't think they did anything wrong here. If you check the internal email records, I suspect you'll find that Google thought that it was doing something wrong.... http://www.fosspatents.com/2016/05/heres-mountain-of-willful...

Just because people inside Google thought it was wrong doesn't make it so.

True. But the fact that Google staff felt guilty about ignoring copyright notices and spent years removing evidence from their code is a pretty good indication that they knew they were doing something wrong, even if technically they weren't...

Re: CEO Larry Page defends Google on the stand: “Declaring code is not code”

#186

Post by dpark »

cmdkeen wrote: post #132
dpark wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> more and more information becomes encoded in the declarations I don't see how this is true at all. We've moved continually toward higher-level APIs. There's a lot more "magic" in String.split than strtok. If your API is so specific that the implementation is entirely implied by the declaration, then all that means is that the implementation itself is trivial, in which case I don't think your API implementation shou…

But it isn't a single function definition it is the whole API. Deciding that you want to pitch your API at a specific level of abstraction and ensuring that level is consistently maintained across a whole language is hard work. The recent criticisms of ASP.Net Core's API changes or PHP's "interesting" APIs over the years surely demonstrate that writing language APIs is hard.

Sure. Coming up with a good recipe is also hard, but recipes are not copyrightable. Difficult does not always imply copyrightable.

Re: CEO Larry Page defends Google on the stand: “Declaring code is not code”

#187

Post by whamlastxmas »

dragonwriter wrote: post #174
coldcode wrote: post #127

One basic travesty not covered in these comments is that a jury of people who have zero clue what software is or how they work are being asked to judge an entire industry on a topic they can't possibly understand. Sadly in civil cases the concept of a jury of your peers is not a right. In reality a jury of software engineers and the like would make more sense since they at least understand how software is put togethe…

> One basic travesty not covered in these comments is that a jury of people who have zero clue what software is or how they work are being asked to judge an entire industry on a topic they can't possibly understand. No, they aren't being asked to "judge an entire industry on a topic they can't possibly understand". They are being asked to answer fairly narrow questions of fact about specific actions of specific firms…

>They are being asked to answer fairly narrow questions of fact about specific actions of specific firms.

They are incapable of having the knowledge needed to know when something is bullshit, however, meaning jury nullification is no longer a realistic option.

Re: CEO Larry Page defends Google on the stand: “Declaring code is not code”

#188

Post by aries1980 »

bluesilver07 wrote: post #184
aries1980 wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is not true. You could link the libraries as normal while maintaining your proprietary code. The GPL only asks you to release the code if a) you mix your proprietary code without separation from the GPL code b) you distribute the software to 3rd party. b) rarely happens if you sell the device as a closed/embedded system. Also, they could use BSD code as well that comes with a more permissive MIT licence.

This is not true. Only the LGPL allows you to link to an open source library. That is why OpenJDK has a classpath exception ( http://programmers.stackexchange.com/questions/119436/what-d... ). GPL requires you to release the source code to the customer of your software upon request. The person who buys the phone is the customer.

Correct in some way. Given the source code, e.g. Drupal (GPL v2), if you develop a proprietary module that can be shipped independently but relies on the Drupal Core or other GPL module, you still not violate GPL. It doesn't matter you need to compile it or not, at the end, most scripting language is compiled to bytecode in some for of JIT.

I mentioned GPL in general, not dissecting to the various version, because the parent reply was about Google's fear of GPL (in general).

Re: CEO Larry Page defends Google on the stand: “Declaring code is not code”

#189

Post by alecbaldwinlol »

ccvannorman wrote: post #170
alecbaldwinlol wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, I completely agree with the above. Litigation is handled poorly, taxation handled poorly (federal and state), identity handled poorly (Social Security Admin), legislation, elections, law enforcement, and these are just the things I can think of... At every step of the way, something or someone outside of your business can topple your personal life and your company's life just for trying to do business in the USA…

LOL, kind of like the 18th century witch hunts where the witches cry, "If you must burn me at the stake, at least put me to trial by jury of OTHER WITCHES!" Imagine how that would have gone over :P

But isn't this an ironic example, because the witches weren't actually witches, it's just that the normal observer could be convinced they were?
Post reply on HN