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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

#21

Post by jbob2000 »

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…

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#.

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

#22

Post by stephen »

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 "Java is free", so they didn't have a way for covering that cost from the majority of enterprise developers who were getting a free lunch, and instead relied on the J2ME licensing almost by accident/happenstance IMO.

So now, companies like Google are not "paying for hundreds of Oracle/Sun engineers to develop a platform/language/ecosystem", but instead "paying hundreds of internal engineers to develop (multiple) platforms/languages/ecosystems".

Which they can do, and still provide v8/Go/Dart/etc. "for free" because they have the luxury of paying for everything with ads, which Oracle/Sun didn't, which forced Oracle/Sun to commit the sin of asking for money.

Granted, don't want to be an Oracle/Sun apologist b/c they messed up in a lot of ways (stagnated the language/etc., don't have a great reputation, etc.) and the competition/iteration of the next-gen languages like Kotlin/TypeScript/Go/etc. is working out great.

Just interesting to think of the economic trade-off, e.g. if Oracle had been a little less controlling, and Google a little more willing to pay licensing/something, if the net effect would have been Java today being in a demonstrably stronger market position than it is.

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.

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

#23

Post by Yetanfou »

readhn wrote: post #4

Does oracle have a case or not? If you were Oracle, would you be ok not taking this to court?

In this field "having a case" depends not so much on objective truth but on subjective narrative, having enough money to pay more lawyers for a longer time than the opponent, finding the right judge, making sure the jury is stuffed according to plan and more of such skullduggery. If it were about objective facts the case would have been over and done with in a month with a definite conclusion, either it being OK to use API's without licensing or it being a violation to do so. If the outcome were the latter there would have been some bickering over how much to pay for said violation, add another month for that.

Alas, this is not about objective truth and "having a case". It is the result of a free but regulated market being infected by a parasitic organism which has turned the regulator's defence mechanisms to its own purpose, the which being the extraction of as much value as feasible while keeping the host alive.

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

#24

Post by haZard_OS »

DarkCrusader2 wrote: post #2

> The case was remanded to a federal court in California to determine how much the Alphabet Inc. unit should pay. No Google is not going to pay billion dollars, not yet. Very clickbaity title.

How is the title click-bait? It doesn't say that Google will pay billions. It says it is a billion-dollar case...and it is (at least potentially).

  If this meets your definition of "very clickbaity" then where could you go to avoid click-bait?!

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

#27

Post by [deleted] »

vijaybritto wrote: post #11
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…

They made billions of people access and use technology. Java was just a tool to help them achieve it. Sorry, your complaint is not really making sense here

[deleted]

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

#28

Post by redm »

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 possibly getting into.

[1] https://www.computerworld.com/article/2509401/technology-law...

[2] https://www.cnet.com/news/why-oracle-not-sun-sued-google-ove...

EDIT: Added the second reference and cleaned up thoughts. Included note regarded license as well as pay.

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

#30

Post by Retric »

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…

That licence would have more restrictions in both the short and long term than just the upfront cost.
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