Oracle Wins Revival of Billion-Dollar Case Against Google • Hacker News Board

Re: Oracle Wins Revival of Billion-Dollar Case Against Google

#41

Post by adventured » Tue, Mar 27, 2018, 2:52 PM UTC

stephen wrote: post #22

I wonder how the $$ Google might pay to Oracle compares to the $$ it is spending to move away from Java by building replacements (v8, Go, Dart, Flutter/Fuschia, etc.) that are all essentially "GC languages with a great runtime VM". E.g. I can understand Oracle/Sun needing some amount of money for stewarding Java, as the teams required to build/maintain/QA/release the JVM were AFAIU in the hundreds, so not cheap. But…

> And, either way, the rest of us are still being spoiled by so many free lunches: amazing tech (languages/libraries/frameworks/ecosystems) built by professional teams that we don't pay a dime for.

Don't those things realistically exist precisely because of a virtuous, continual cycle in the greater tech community of paying that free lunch forward?

Even the strictly free lunch use cases, where someone doesn't contribute time/money/effort back into the system, involve helping to popularize the whole and keeping it going; broadening it, spreading it, bringing more contributors in. Those people end up as popularizers/evangelists, which is a required ingredient for the virtuous cycle to keep going.

Re: Oracle Wins Revival of Billion-Dollar Case Against Google

#42

Post by admax88q » Tue, Mar 27, 2018, 2:53 PM UTC

gsnedders wrote: post #33

stephen wrote: post #22

I wonder how the $$ Google might pay to Oracle compares to the $$ it is spending to move away from Java by building replacements (v8, Go, Dart, Flutter/Fuschia, etc.) that are all essentially "GC languages with a great runtime VM". E.g. I can understand Oracle/Sun needing some amount of money for stewarding Java, as the teams required to build/maintain/QA/release the JVM were AFAIU in the hundreds, so not cheap. But…

V8 has little to do with Oracle, fundamentally. V8 came about because they wanted a higher performance JS VM for their browser; the JVM was never in contention there.

Sure it does. Why did they want a higher performance JS VM for the browser? The language of choice to build interactive applications on the web before JS was really viable was Java.

A high performance JS VM means we don't need to use applets anymore.

Re: Oracle Wins Revival of Billion-Dollar Case Against Google

#43

Post by sqdbps » Tue, Mar 27, 2018, 2:54 PM UTC

This is ridiculous. Google won two jury trials and the CAFC has no business deciding copyright cases.

Re: Oracle Wins Revival of Billion-Dollar Case Against Google

#44

Post by kodablah » Tue, Mar 27, 2018, 2:54 PM UTC

redm wrote: post #28

I think the part that gets lost in all of this is that Sun offered to license Java to Google previously for $100M. [1] Google turned that down and bypassed Sun because they didn't want to pay (or license). At the time, Sun was happy to see Java being used by Google, even without the license. Still, Google knew exactly what they were doing. [2] My point is, they did this to themselves and they knew what they were poss…

Call me naive, but is a company being happy with what you're doing to the tune of them even saying so (or representatives thereof) tantamount to an implicit contract? I know it's been argued in this case, but it strikes me as disingenuous at the least and fraudulent at the most to change your mind. Sure we don't mind Google bearing the brunt of this because they can, but how would we feel were a smaller company subject to this kind of bait and switch based on legalities?

Re: Oracle Wins Revival of Billion-Dollar Case Against Google

#45

Post by saiya-jin » Tue, Mar 27, 2018, 2:55 PM UTC

wstrange wrote: post #17

BoorishBears wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unpopular opinion: I feel Google should be punished for what they did to Java. Maybe the mechanism being used is wrong, but Android bastardized Java and as an Android developer I feel real damage has been done to the health of the Java ecosystem by having billions of devices run fragmented Java-but-not-Java. Google has started to make it right with the switch to openJDK and Desugar, but in a lot of ways it’s too litt…

Android arguably saved Java by making it much more relevant than it otherwise would have been.

Android popularity (or demise) does have 0 impact on server-side Java. We don't share the toolset, we don't run the same JVMs etc. Call it Jiva if you like.

Google should go Kotlin way, it will be better for everybody.

Re: Oracle Wins Revival of Billion-Dollar Case Against Google

#46

Post by Spivak » Tue, Mar 27, 2018, 2:56 PM UTC

wstrange wrote: post #17

BoorishBears wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unpopular opinion: I feel Google should be punished for what they did to Java. Maybe the mechanism being used is wrong, but Android bastardized Java and as an Android developer I feel real damage has been done to the health of the Java ecosystem by having billions of devices run fragmented Java-but-not-Java. Google has started to make it right with the switch to openJDK and Desugar, but in a lot of ways it’s too litt…

Android arguably saved Java by making it much more relevant than it otherwise would have been.

Whaaa? I mean Java is undoubtedly more popular because of Android but it's not like it was hurting before. Sure, there aren't a lot of consumer-facing applications running Java but it's pretty much the standard on the enterprise side of things.

Re: Oracle Wins Revival of Billion-Dollar Case Against Google

#47

Post by bitwize » Tue, Mar 27, 2018, 2:56 PM UTC

cromwellian wrote: post #37

bitwize wrote: post #19

Google shoulda thought twice before stealing Sun/Oracle's IP.

Yeah, “stealing” an API and open source, building a successful mobile UI platform (unlike personal/embedded java and Sun’s own failed attempts at fragmentation) and contributing it free back to open source where it has been used as a base OS for thousands of new products from TVs to drones.

Regardless, the CAFC has ruled -- twice -- that APIs are subject to copyright. The Supremes are likely to deny cert again, so that stands as the law of the land. You steal someone's API, you pay a penalty. Don't like it? Write your Congressman.

Re: Oracle Wins Revival of Billion-Dollar Case Against Google

#48

Post by dmoy » Tue, Mar 27, 2018, 2:56 PM UTC

dagw wrote: post #32

snarf21 wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is beyond sad. Oracle bought Sun exclusively to sue Google for its use of Java in Android. (I know someone involved in the lawsuits.) We really need to fix our patent system on the software side.

We really need to fix our patent system on the software side. While this might be true, it's worth noting that this is a copyright case and not a patent case.

Oracle tried really hard to also make it a patent case, but aslup threw that stuff out.

Re: Oracle Wins Revival of Billion-Dollar Case Against Google

#49

Post by nimbius » Tue, Mar 27, 2018, 2:57 PM UTC

from TFA: "Oracle claims Google was in such a rush in the mid-2000s to create an operating system for mobile devices that the company used key parts of copyrighted Java technology without paying royalties. "

If this is true, it certainly isnt happening again. Google dominates smartphones and could very easily decide to phase out java for go/rust, torpedoing whatever rent-seeking strategy Oracle had originally devised. What oracle is attempting to do is nothing short of what Microsoft tried to do with TomTom's implementation of FAT.

If BTRFS, percona, and maria are any indication its not the work that matters. Plenty of talented engineers are willing to devote their time and effort to avoiding Oracle. Quite frankly the Oracle Database has turned into a manacle for Ellison. Unable to prevent its inevitable loss to open source alternatives through NDA agreements that prohibit public release of independent Oracle performance tests, and unable to convince cloud-bound companies to continue forking out high dollar per-core licenses for it, The software exists as a 90s anachronism to the hubris of dotcom. Oracle Enterprise Linux was, for all its intentions, a flop, and after acquisition and rebranding MySQL is a withered husk compared to its open source counterparts.

Re: Oracle Wins Revival of Billion-Dollar Case Against Google

#50

Post by krzyk » Tue, Mar 27, 2018, 2:57 PM UTC

jbob2000 wrote: post #21

BoorishBears wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unpopular opinion: I feel Google should be punished for what they did to Java. Maybe the mechanism being used is wrong, but Android bastardized Java and as an Android developer I feel real damage has been done to the health of the Java ecosystem by having billions of devices run fragmented Java-but-not-Java. Google has started to make it right with the switch to openJDK and Desugar, but in a lot of ways it’s too litt…

Java was literally dying before Google released Android. It was just something you did if you were in university or working on a legacy system. Everyone was moving to Ruby, JavaScript, and C#.

I don't think so: https://trends.google.pl/trends/explore?date=all&q=%2Fm%2F02...

From that you see that interest in Java is slowly declining since 2004, release of Android didn't even move it up a bit.