
Oracle sinks its claws into Android - fabrice_d
http://andreasgal.com/2016/01/05/oracle-sinks-its-claws-into-android/
======
crazybob
Ugh. Android used Harmony because OpenJDK didn't exist yet. As Android's first
core library lead, I personally integrated Harmony into Android, and I'm
ecstatic to see Android and OpenJDK share the same library code. This will
greatly simplify contributing enhancements.

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lovelearning
"Swing will now sit on every Android phone, using up resources."

The Swing classes were removed in a later commit and are no longer there. The
commit linked in this article was just the initial bulk import of openjdk
source.

[1]:
[https://android.googlesource.com/platform/libcore/+/master/o...](https://android.googlesource.com/platform/libcore/+/master/ojluni/src/main/java/com/sun/)

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dragonwriter
Oracle has no control with this; merging OpenJDK doesn't mean depending on
OpenJDK indefinitely going forward; in E same way that building Chrome on
WebKit didn't give Apple control of Chrome -- Google first became a major
driver of WebKit and then forked it to make blink. Nothing in OpenJDKs
licensing makes that unlikely for OpenJDK. It's a high one-tone transition
cost to forever end the API copyright issue around Android, but once the
transition happens Google is in full control of the roadmap.

Heck, Given the significance of Android and Google's ability to offer its
choice of Java implementation in its cloud services, Google's probably in a
position where, if it code to, it could credibly fork OpenJDK not just got an
Android-specific implementation, but to challenge Oracle's Java more
generally, the way others have done with both MySQL and Open Office.

~~~
merb
I see it like you. The switch to OpenJDK was needed so that the Platform could
be on par with other Java8 Improvements. Also GPL Code means that you aren't
forced to use the vendors versions. Google could fork it easily if Oracle does
dumb things.

The move to OpenJDK was needed and the article is clearly wrong about the
winner. Especially the loser sections. Heck i've never seen proprietary
changes to Dalvik / Harmony based on Android. And there definitely weren't.
Most optimizations are kernel optimizations and other stuff and when I look
how "fast" vendors will publish the kernel after an update...

> The entire middle part of the Android stack will be subject to proprietary
> Oracle control

That statement is so wrong. Especially in the GPL sense.

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Zigurd
I am astounded at how bad some of these "explainers" are. Absolutely mind-
boggling comments about Swing on Android. Never mind it was removed from the
Android SDK, it was never part of Android's base classes, the Zygote, or
anything else in a device.

Android is still Android. The Android base classes will be an evolution of the
current version. Maybe with Java 8 _language_ features in the near future. It
will not be Go (except for NDK code). It will not be Java SE. ART will still
precompile Dalvik bytecode, and be the runtime for Android, and have nothing
at all to do with OpenJDK.

EDIT: This guy was Mozilla's CTO? Holy crap. Maybe I'd be just as big a dope
if I started ranting about JS runtimes, but he really ought to know better.

~~~
on_and_off
yeah, for me the only consequence of that post is that I have lost a lot of
respect for Mozilla.

Why the hell was that clown CTO ?

------
vardump
I doubt this article is right about Google's motivations.

That said, I think it's a good idea to try to avoid anything Oracle related.
It is an aggressive and lawsuit happy company. When Oracle inevitably starts
to decline, they'll use their IP portfolio to sue and inflict a lot of
collateral damage.

~~~
rbell
I totally agree. I am still very sad that Google did not buy Sun at the time
of collapse.

------
bitmapbrother
It's astonishing how a former CTO of Mozilla could get so many things wrong in
his analysis. The number of errors he made is rather embarrassing.

------
martanne
"Writing a standard C library from scratch is crazy. Its one of the most
commoditized pieces of software. Its almost impossible to do it significantly
better than existing implementations [...]"

As the musl developers have shown, this clearly not the case.

Switching from bionic to musl would indeed be interesting.

------
grizzles
At least they built a mobile platform that works. Seriously tho, enough FUD.
The two key premises of the article have been proven false at internet speed.
Most would have withdrawn it already, but the Eich cabal are nothing if not
persistent.

------
espadrine
As crazy at it might have seemed in 2014, it is more and more likely that
Google will deprecate the current Android Java-dependent APIs and offer
[http://flutter.io/](http://flutter.io/) as the way forward.

That move would be strategic not just against Oracle, but also against Apple,
as flutter.io targets iOS.

------
mtgx
I was already quite puzzled about why Google would make the apparently quite
significant change (millions of lines of code will need to be rewritten
according to this post, too) and _still_ stick with Java, instead of going Go
or something else (even if it would be even harder to do it). But this article
made me go _" WTF are you thinking Google?!"_

The only explanation I can come up so far (also in light of the recent
partnership between Google, Oracle and HPE for RISC-V) is that Google kind of
"admitted" that it's not supposed to use Dalvik without paying Oracle, so they
went to Oracle and "reached a deal" \- Google won't have to pay anything to
Oracle, but Oracle gets to control a large portion of Android now, and will
also likely get to be paid by Samsung, LG and all the major OEMs who _will_
pay Oracle for a "custom proprietary license" so they can modify pieces of
Android.

As the article concludes, this seems like a major win for Oracle and a big _FU
Android users!_ from Google. Can we even trust Oracle won't introduce some
"accidental" _goto fail_ -like backdoors in Android code, now? Oracle code is
already full of security bugs, so nobody would even bat an eye - just Oracle
doing Oracley things.

~~~
on_and_off
the whole article is insane and nonsensical. Swing is not part of AOSP, ART is
still the Runtime. Oracle still does not have any influence on the platform.

Google has just switched to a better code base. OpenJdk did not exist yet when
They chose Harmony and OpenJdk will allow them to use Java 8 features.

