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Java Is Still Free

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Re: Java Is Still Free

#61

Post by AstralStorm »

pron wrote: post #51
FactolSarin wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your comment is irrelevant. Besides the fact that other companies like Apple wielded their parents against Android, the big difference is Microsoft's patents weren't open source. The reason Oracle's behavior is so bad, and raises the question of whether Java is really Free Software anymore, is they sued Google over re-implimenting an ostensibly Open Source language. And if you want to talk Microsoft, the most relevan…

> The reason Oracle's behavior is so bad, and raises the question of whether Java is really Free Software anymore, is they sued Google over re-implimenting an ostensibly Open Source language. While OpenJDK is, indeed, very much open source, Android did not use it -- although I think it does now -- as they didn't want to use its open source license. Google, on the other hand, uses OpenJDK extensively, and have even fo…

Android does not use whole OpenJDK, only parts of its library, that are vetted and open.

The compiler is used by Android Studio and Gradle plugin, but the bytecode is rebuilt again with d8 or dex. Google has written their own compiler in the past but decided it was unnecessary.

The critical patented parts are not in Dalvik nor in J2SE library.

Re: Java Is Still Free

#62

Post by curt15 »

pron wrote: post #51
FactolSarin wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your comment is irrelevant. Besides the fact that other companies like Apple wielded their parents against Android, the big difference is Microsoft's patents weren't open source. The reason Oracle's behavior is so bad, and raises the question of whether Java is really Free Software anymore, is they sued Google over re-implimenting an ostensibly Open Source language. And if you want to talk Microsoft, the most relevan…

> The reason Oracle's behavior is so bad, and raises the question of whether Java is really Free Software anymore, is they sued Google over re-implimenting an ostensibly Open Source language. While OpenJDK is, indeed, very much open source, Android did not use it -- although I think it does now -- as they didn't want to use its open source license. Google, on the other hand, uses OpenJDK extensively, and have even fo…

>So no open-source software was the subject of the lawsuit.

But doesn't the lawsuit effectively outlaw Apache Harmony, and more generally the practice of reimplementing APIs?

Re: Java Is Still Free

#63

Post by mabbo »

iuwhagtr wrote: post #52
tannhaeuser wrote: post #9

Hint: if you want to get a discussion going, or, in fact, have your article read in the first place, don't put it on Google docs, nor medium via link shorteners for that matter.

Why not? Google Docs does not show any stupid popovers, ads or anything

On mobile, this is painful. Every one of those blue blocks stays too wide and requires manual scrolling side to side to read each line inside it.

If this were basic HTML, there wouldn't be a problem.

Re: Java Is Still Free

#64

Post by giancarlostoro »

pjmlp wrote: post #55
FactolSarin wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your comment is irrelevant. Besides the fact that other companies like Apple wielded their parents against Android, the big difference is Microsoft's patents weren't open source. The reason Oracle's behavior is so bad, and raises the question of whether Java is really Free Software anymore, is they sued Google over re-implimenting an ostensibly Open Source language. And if you want to talk Microsoft, the most relevan…

Sun and Oracle never sued their partners. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Java_virtual_machines#... Only those that tried to misuse Java by creating partial implementations of it (Microsoft and Google). In fact, Sun only put a show to avoid losing their face, as what they really wanted was to sue Google, but their bank account wasn't any longer like in the Microsoft suit days. Gosling interview on how it all ca…

> Finally Google had the opportunity to buy Sun assets and thus avoid being sued, while having the freedom to steer Java however they would have liked to do.

> Opportunity that they decided wasn't worthwhile to pursue.

Wow, this is incredible, I always wondered if Google even thought about this. I wonder how different things would be had they just bought out Java from under Sun, or at least the rights to use it as they see fit and allowed Sun to maintain it or some sort of deal? Basically the keys to the Java castle in such a way that lets Sun be Sun and not Oracle. There's a lot of elements to the case that shift everyones views. It's sad we're even seeing such a case so many years later, and likely why Google is going towards having Kotlin (and eventually Kotlin Native) as their main language.

Re: Java Is Still Free

#65

Post by int_19h »

guitarbill wrote: post #30
maltalex wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Is original Java still alive? That's the question. Yes. Very much so. It's either the top or one of the top languages in pretty much every benchmark: https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2018#technology https://www.tiobe.com/tiobe-index/ https://githut.info/

there's more to it than that. let's take C#, as i find that interesting and a bit sad. C# had what seemed like huge mindshare around the 2.0 era. great tooling, sane language, great developer experience. of course it helped that Windows was still huge. now? it still exists, but i'm happy to bet it will never become that big again for various reasons (windows only for a long time, still windows-centric, sucky webdev +…

C# is still the sanest default choice for any Windows desktop app. And the web stack has only gotten better since 2.0 days, especially with .NET Core. And all the "enterprise" stuff never went away, either. Never become as big again? It's way bigger than it was back then.

Re: Java Is Still Free

#66

Post by mabbo »

mariusmg wrote: post #10

Why don't the bigwigs like RedHat + IBM just fork it already ? Take OpenJDK , GPL the IBM runtime and slap some stupid coffee inspired nickname on it. People will trust that more than they trust Oracle anyway...

I think the likeliest candidate is Amazon. Gosling got hired a couple years ago. Internally, it's the main language used. Amazon wants to have control of it's destiny as much as possible.

I suspect if Oracle started pushing their usual bullshit too hard, that's what would happen. And it's a situation where Oracle knows it, Amazon knows it, and everyone is playing game theory.

Re: Java Is Still Free

#67

Post by pjmlp »

giancarlostoro wrote: post #64
pjmlp wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sun and Oracle never sued their partners. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Java_virtual_machines#... Only those that tried to misuse Java by creating partial implementations of it (Microsoft and Google). In fact, Sun only put a show to avoid losing their face, as what they really wanted was to sue Google, but their bank account wasn't any longer like in the Microsoft suit days. Gosling interview on how it all ca…

> Finally Google had the opportunity to buy Sun assets and thus avoid being sued, while having the freedom to steer Java however they would have liked to do. > Opportunity that they decided wasn't worthwhile to pursue. Wow, this is incredible, I always wondered if Google even thought about this. I wonder how different things would be had they just bought out Java from under Sun, or at least the rights to use it as th…

Personally I think Google was hoping Sun would go under without a blip.

Re: Java Is Still Free

#68

Post by pron »

curt15 wrote: post #62
pron wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The reason Oracle's behavior is so bad, and raises the question of whether Java is really Free Software anymore, is they sued Google over re-implimenting an ostensibly Open Source language. While OpenJDK is, indeed, very much open source, Android did not use it -- although I think it does now -- as they didn't want to use its open source license. Google, on the other hand, uses OpenJDK extensively, and have even fo…

>So no open-source software was the subject of the lawsuit. But doesn't the lawsuit effectively outlaw Apache Harmony, and more generally the practice of reimplementing APIs?

No, it does not. The ruling was that APIs (at least actual APIs, not web "APIs") fall under copyright, but that does not mean you cannot use copyrighted material even without a license or outside its terms. It was ruled that Google (in particular) did not use the APIs in one of the "fair use" ways (e.g. it did not pursue interoperability). See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oracle_America,_Inc._v._Google...

Re: Java Is Still Free

#69

Post by giancarlostoro »

hazz99 wrote: post #54
iuwhagtr wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why not? Google Docs does not show any stupid popovers, ads or anything

It takes a while to load, and heavy traffic stops some features from working. You're much better off writing in markdown and generating the site with some static site generator, although I'll admit that is more work. It's not a huge deal though - I'm fine with it, just an interesting choice :)

This. The page is under 50KB and it takes longer to render / download (or whatever witchcraft they're doing between the back-end and DOM) an HTML representation of a rich text document than it takes this 113KB+ page on HN.
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