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

Oracle sues Google over use of Java in Android

marketwatch.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

121–130 of 345 posts

Re: Oracle sues Google over use of Java in Android

#121

Post by pjscott »

Eliezer wrote: post #92

I like this headline because if we sent it back in time 30 years it wouldn't make any sense at all.

Looking over the front page, I wonder what the people thirty years ago would have made of some of the other headlines:

"Making GitHub More Open: Git-backed Wikis"

"Twitter Polling in the Cloud in 30s using PiCloud"

or, my favorite:

"Burning man defeats PayPal"

(I envision something like the Biblical story of Jesus driving money-changers out of a temple, but this time, Jesus lights himself on fire first. It's very intimidating.)

Re: Oracle sues Google over use of Java in Android

#123

Post by icey »

wmf wrote: post #25
seldo wrote: post #6

Excuse the really really obvious question, but how can you sue somebody for intellectual property infringement on open-source software? Didn't you already give anybody the license to do what they wanted with it? If they've violated the license terms in some way, isn't that different from IP infringement?

It's important to understand that Android doesn't use Oracle's open-source OpenJDK. An argument could be made that Oracle licenses the necessary patents only for OpenJDK and not for alternate implementations such as Dalvik. An argument could be made that Oracle licenses patents only for JVMs that are TCK-compliant, which Dalvik isn't. An argument could be made that Oracle licenses patents for GPLed JVMs but not for A…

Thank you for this explanation. Until reading it this way my understanding of the whole affair was somewhat wrong.

Given that Oracle doesn't seem shy about going after a giant like Google makes me wonder what other software Sun owned the rights to that might be even remotely popular. If I were a company using a lot of old Sun IP in even moderately unique ways, I'd be a little concerned right now.

Re: Oracle sues Google over use of Java in Android

#124

Post by cookiecaper »

lkjhgfhjk wrote: post #111
jancona wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The linked article is very unclear about what Oracle is suing about. From this article, it appears that they're claiming patent infringement (not copyright violation): http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/d95fbb12-a671-11df-8767-00144feabd... Sun/Oracle's Java implementation was released under the GPLv2, which doesn't include a patent license. I don't know if they included any patent license with the open source release. Even i…

So take Sun's GPL Java, modify it - by say deleting all the sun code and inserting your own, then release the changes back to Oracle under the GPL!

I don't think that would hold up. The judge would consider it a new work, not a derivative, and therefore not covered by Sun's release of patents for the official JVM.

Re: Oracle sues Google over use of Java in Android

#125

Post by brisance »

patrickaljord wrote: post #31
dangrossman wrote: post #23

Sun released the majority of Java under the GPL. How can you claim that someone you licensed the code to is infringing both its copyright and its patent? I'm looking forward to some more detail when Google publishes a response.

But Google's android does not use Sun's GPLed Java, it uses their own Java called "Dalvik" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dalvik_(software)

Technically incorrect... Dalvik is a VM, and the implementation of it, according to Oracle's claim, is infringing on Sun's patents.

Re: Oracle sues Google over use of Java in Android

#126

Post by recoil »

tzs wrote: post #10

Google should switch to C# and Mono. Besides giving them a better language and VM, it would cause the most amusing set of rants from the anti-Mono crowd. Win/win.

Switch from a VM they implemented themselves (Dalvik) that is not the JVM to somebody else's VM (Mono) that is also not the JVM? What would google gain from this?

This lawsuit is not about google's use of the JVM since they are not, in fact, using the JVM. It is about the fact that the Dalvik VM allegedly infringes on some Oracle-owned patents. It's possible that the Mono VM infringes on the same patents too, so switching VM may not make the slightest difference.

Re: Oracle sues Google over use of Java in Android

#127

Post by nostrademons »

icey wrote: post #123
wmf wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's important to understand that Android doesn't use Oracle's open-source OpenJDK. An argument could be made that Oracle licenses the necessary patents only for OpenJDK and not for alternate implementations such as Dalvik. An argument could be made that Oracle licenses patents only for JVMs that are TCK-compliant, which Dalvik isn't. An argument could be made that Oracle licenses patents for GPLed JVMs but not for A…

Thank you for this explanation. Until reading it this way my understanding of the whole affair was somewhat wrong. Given that Oracle doesn't seem shy about going after a giant like Google makes me wonder what other software Sun owned the rights to that might be even remotely popular. If I were a company using a lot of old Sun IP in even moderately unique ways, I'd be a little concerned right now.

MySQL? BerkeleyDB?

Re: Oracle sues Google over use of Java in Android

#128

Post by cookiecaper »

shadowfox wrote: post #90
jarin wrote: post #54

The headline should read "Oracle sues Google over literally the only thing keeping Java relevant".

I think you might be surprised at the amount of enterprise software in Java these days

Practically everything that is not .NET

Re: Oracle sues Google over use of Java in Android

#129

Post by nostrademons »

WildUtah wrote: post #105
seldo wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks, it naively hadn't occurred to me that Android would be using a non-Sun JVM, and given what you've said it seems that would be a viable route for an IP lawsuit (though it still seems in pretty bad faith).

Dalvik would be better if Google had just licensed Oracle's Sun JVM or used the open source version. As an occasional Android developer I am constantly banging against the limitations and performance of Dalvik. It doesn't do memory management nearly as well as the JVM, and it handles dynamic dispatch and one-off closure hacks (local classes) slowly. It won't easily accept generated bytecodes. It has mysterious perfor…

On the flip side, how do you know you wouldn't run up against those limitations on a phone that used OpenJDK? I don't do much mobile dev, but I've had friends that did JavaME development, and they didn't seem to like it any more than Android. Dalvik was designed specifically because Sun's JVM performed poorly on memory-constrained devices.

In other words, your issues may be caused by mobile development, not by Android development.

Re: Oracle sues Google over use of Java in Android

#130

Post by jbarham »

patrickaljord wrote: post #31
dangrossman wrote: post #23

Sun released the majority of Java under the GPL. How can you claim that someone you licensed the code to is infringing both its copyright and its patent? I'm looking forward to some more detail when Google publishes a response.

But Google's android does not use Sun's GPLed Java, it uses their own Java called "Dalvik" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dalvik_(software)

Note that Dalvik is essentially just an alternate stack-based virtual machine for bytecode that's been converted from the standard stack-based JVM bytecode. You still need a standard Java SDK to develop Android applications in order to compile the Java source code to JVM bytecode.

So far Google has been able to get the best of both worlds by leveraging the vast Java tools ecosystem but then in the final step they convert the standard JVM bytecode to run on their own Dalvik VM which means they don't have to pay license fees for the standard Java runtime. IMO this is what is really annoying Oracle. (To be fair there are also good technical reasons why they created Dalvik.)

I can understand where Oracle is coming from legally, but business-wise I think this lawsuit is bound to backfire. Google has the resources to defend themselves and move away from Java in the long term, but in the meantime Oracle has created serious uncertainty about the openness of the Java platform which will scare technically innovative players away from Java that don't have the financial and legal resources that Google does. So Oracle turns Java into the new COBOL, a technically moribund backwater that is only kept alive for legacy purposes.

Post reply on HN