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Oracle Wins Revival of Billion-Dollar Case Against Google

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

#161

Post by cromwellian »

cromwellian wrote: post #7
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…

So you want Swing apps on Android?

Someone flagged the comment before I could post my response, but here it was (re: Google didn't save Java on the client):

Java on the server was not in decline, but Java on the desktop was declining, had declined. Applets were dead, very few success stories around Java Web Start. And the main three 'consumer' success stories for Java on the frontend were Limewire, Minecraft, and IntelliJ/Eclipse. As a consumer facing technology, Java was a complete failure. No sane person wanting to ship a commercial, consumer app to end users would consider Java as a first choice. I have been a Java developer from the day HotSpot Alpha was released, I say this as someone who loves the platform.

Personal Java failed. I worked for years on J2ME apps, Java on high end Nokia Phones, Java on Palm devices (Ghost VM), etc. All these platforms amounted to nada. Flash was far more widely used for front end user facing apps than Java. Ditto for Visual Basic.

The relevance of the Swing comment is the people complaining about the fragmentation of Java's write-once-run-anywhere promise, which was always more of a promise than a reality. If you want to make a viable mobile Java, you had to remove Swing, Java2D, CORBA, JMX, and a ton of other JDK libraries, which is exactly what Sun did with the various profiles as well. But once you do that, you have "fragmentation"

If Google had not produced Android, I can bet the leading platform today for mobile development that is not from Apple, would either be Xamarin based C#, or some scripting language like Lua or Python on top of a Linux widget toolkit. Java would not be in the mix at all. Or perhaps it would FlashMX sitting on top of Linux (ugh)

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

#162

Post by dec0dedab0de »

I'm conflicted on this.

A. I don't like that APIs are copywrite-able.

B. I wish Google complied with the GPL anyway. I hate this anti-GPL sentiment that has been going around the last 10 years or so.

C. The android play store would probably go through a renaissance if all the apps had to be rewritten.

D. I don't trust Google, but I really really really don't like Oracle.

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

#163

Post by protomyth »

alex_young wrote: post #151
treis wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't get why it's a scary issue or even controversial why an API would be subject copyright. An API, in my mind, is similar to design drawings or blueprints. Independently figuring out how to implement those drawings doesn't change the fact that you copied the design.

If you apply this view to all APIs, the computer revolution would never have happened. The PC was a clone of IBMs API. They fought this battle and lost and now we can argue about it on little handheld clones all day long.

In fact, IBM was so sure that the BIOS API could not be copyrighted they basically made their source public (in the manuals but NOT open source) so anyone reading the manuals to understand the BIOS was tainted and couldn't write a competitor. Compaq did a clean room setup to get around this.

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

#164

Post by cgmg »

BoorishBears wrote: post #6
bitcharmer wrote: post #3

It's a shame that there was no one like judge Alsup in the appeals court. Now it's about legal phrases and licensing terms instead of common sense all over again.

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 bastardized Java

> 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

Your feelings are not a legal basis for punishment.

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

#165

Post by Coding_Cat »

pjmlp wrote: post #155
djsumdog wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But the thing is Google didn't use the Oracle Java engine. They implemented their own runtime environment that's mostly API compatible with Java (and getting further from that as the years go on). This gets into really critical concerns around APIs. If commercial product A sucks and I'm in a shop where we made our own drop in replacement that implement's A's APIs .. then we open source that drop-in replacement and pu…

Most third party commercial Java vendors, selling JDKs for embedded development also have their own VMs and AOT compilers, with variations better suited for their hardware. Aicas, PTG, IBM, MicroEJ, .... Big difference with Google? They play by the rules.

The rules as Oracle (and this ruling) sees them. Google and others disagree with Oracle about what the rules are or should be.

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

#166

Post by dlanouette »

dagw wrote: post #100
dlanouette wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Java on mobile was (virtually) dead before Android. Now it's thriving and relevant again.

Java on mobile was (virtually) dead before Android. Now it's thriving and relevant again. Perhaps, but is that a good thing if you're Oracle? Especially considering the fact that it's Google Java that's thriving and not Oracle Java.

It seems to me that it's a good thing for Oracle. Oracle/Sun was never going to make any headway in the mobile space. It just wasn't going to happen. So, it wasn't a loss to them, because they had already lost that market.

But, with Android, Java got a boost that bled over to the server, and to a lesser extent, the desktop. It can be argued what the size of that boost was, and if it had any real impact (I would argue that it was not significant), but it was still a boost that they never would have had.

Anyway, that's the opinion of some random guy on the internet.

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

#167

Post by s73v3r_ »

nimbius wrote: post #49

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…

"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."

Because wanting to be paid for one's work is "rent-seeking" now?

And no, Google really couldn't. There's a huge library of Android applications that are using Java technologies to make them. Google can't replace Java with go/rust/dart without throwing all that away. They would have to continue to provide support, which would continue to put them in violation.

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

#169

Post by vanderZwan »

adamrezich wrote: post #92
gsnedders wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And V8 was first released in 2008. Java applets were pretty much completely gone from the web by this point. The only competition on the web, from plugins, at that point was Flash (okay, Silverlight deserves a footnote, but little more).

V8 is ten years old?! How time flies...

I have the opposite response: only a decade old? Same with YouTube actually, I can't really remember what the Web was like without video streaming

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

#170

Post by hasahmed »

dec0dedab0de wrote: post #162

I'm conflicted on this. A. I don't like that APIs are copywrite-able. B. I wish Google complied with the GPL anyway. I hate this anti-GPL sentiment that has been going around the last 10 years or so. C. The android play store would probably go through a renaissance if all the apps had to be rewritten. D. I don't trust Google, but I really really really don't like Oracle.

Taking sides of definitely a question of the lesser of two evils on this one.
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