311–320 of 345 posts
The headline should read "Oracle sues Google over literally the only thing keeping Java relevant".
Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's interesting. I wonder if Google could buy IBM and then have them drop the lawsuit?
I wasn't trying to make a joke. I figured Google would have a very high market valuation compared to IBM. But my point still stands, why can't Google buy a company that owns some patents that Oracle is currently infringing on?
I assume Oracle is angling for a settlement here. I can't imagine they want to make Android apps not be written in Java, they just want a piece.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
"It'll be interesting to see Oracle's stance toward other alternate JVMs such as IBM's." IBM could completely paralyze the entire computer industry with their portfolio. That they don't is a testament to how much money they earn in simply letting others do the "hard" PC stuff while they singularly engulf the big iron market. IBM was the only company that I know of that actually outlasted the US government in antitrus…
Also, as the article j-g-faustus linked pointed, Google did something special to avoid the GPL, so JVMs that followed the usual rules won't be affected. This makes me think that cscotta's point on uncertainty is not so strong. It'll be certainly an unpopular measure among developers, but Oracle can say that the case against Google is similar to the one against Microsoft and use the usual "fragmentation" argument.
All these facts make the (contrary) popular reaction quite interesting from a psychological point of view. Image is everything, after all.
Oracle must be pretty sure of victory, or a positive outcome at least, otherwise why would they go after Google right away? They could have gone after HTC, as Apple did. That would have been a more likely victory, which Oracle could have used as leverage against Google.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I agree with your analysis... another factor I guess is that Google will want to ensure that Oracle cannot repeat this trick whenever Oracle wants in the future (breach of license, not re-infringement). My work has had bad experiences with Oracle license chenanigans. Of course Google probably has better lawyers than my work does!
Oracle would not want to "kill the golden goose" as it were. Assuming Google is infringing, the lawsuit is probably just a tactic to get a greater amount of licensing fees out of them than they would have been willing to pay without compulsion. It does Oracle no good to completely kill off Android, so any fees will certainly not be large enough to make the ecosystem unprofitable for Google.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Oh, but they are in the phone business; every phone that includes Java pays license fees to Oracle... except Android phones aren't paying.
This may be true but it would be amazingly bone headed of them. Android is the best thing to happen to Java in the last 5 years, and the perception (at least) that people using Java have less to worry about as far as patents go is one of the few things really giving it a strong advantage over .NET. This is a remarkably effective way of destroying several of Java's strengths all in one go....
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> doing what's best for the rest of the industry obviously isn't something Google cares about. I am sad that over the last year or so this has gone from a quiet fact of it being a corporation to a in-your-face "Google: do no evil unless you can make money". I guess each generation needs a company to fantasize about being a righteous white knight.
I never bought into the whole "do no evil" bit, but I sure got sick of dealing with the army of people who did.
If enough people stop trusting google, they will no longer be able to do this. Consumer trust is integral to their business. and there will always be tension, as to make money, they need to use at least some of that data to serve us ads, and some of us will take offense to that. I mean, really, there's no way they can run gmail profitably without doing things that I feel violates my privacy.
Now, in the short term, they could earn boatloads of money by violating this trust in a more direct manner... but in the long term, it would kill them. I think that ever since they went public there has been a constant war there, short term profits, vs long-term viability.
My own personal expectation was that this trust of google would not have lasted much past their IPO... it has lasted much longer than that.
Personally, I find it odd that now that this trust is eroding, people seem to be complaining more about net neutrality than about google pushing the limits of what they can do with our private data. Of course, I'm a hosting provider, and thus oppose regulation of my market.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Another interesting tidbit from the article you linked: The trick is that Google doesn’t claim that Android is a Java platform, although it can run some programs written with the Java language and against some derived version of the Java class library. Sun could prevent this if they had a patent on the standard class library, but they don’t and, even if they did, I strongly doubt it would be enforceable since Android…
If by "interesting" you mean "totally misunderstands patent law". What Google claims is irrelevant; either they use Oracle's patented techniques or they don't.
First of all, we should praise Google for making so good decisions, to re-use wast community of Java developers and Eclipse (without which they cannot program ^_^) and avoid bloated and corporative-centered JVM or Java ME, that it resulted in such ridiculous lawsuit about .jar files. ^_^
They also got a lot of buzz and the reputation of not doing evil and even being a victim of a corporate monster and patent trolls.
btw, it looks a lot like an Apples decision about dropping Flash (yet another outdated artificial tumor) just because it simply does not work. Google'd rewrote VM, while Apple invested in LLVM.
So, it is a good news.