
User revolt over Java bloatware - maudlinmau5
http://news.techeye.net/software/user-revolt-over-java-bloatware
======
bcantrill
This idea of petitioning Oracle would be comical were it not so pathetic. In
case it needs to be said, Oracle is a corporate sociopath -- it cannot
empathize. One could have a petition with quite literally 6.9 billion
signatures on it; it would change nothing. As I've cautioned before[1], do not
fall into the trap of anthropomorphizing Larry Ellison...

[1]
[http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=-...](http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=-zRN7XLCRhc#t=35m00s)

~~~
batgaijin
That made me laugh on-line.

~~~
mikevm
Is that the new meaning of LOL?

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javajosh
I'm not signing that petition, because fuck Oracle, and fuck Java in the
browser. We don't need it anymore. I hope they keep bloating it until people
simply refuse to install it, and even corporate IT departments start saying
"what the fuck?" and start porting their software to something else.
JavaScript, CSS3, Canvas, even SVG does everything the Java plugin did, but
better. Way better.

EDIT: Wow. Didn't realize I felt that strongly until I wrote this. But client-
side Java, which I spent many years programming, is a tragedy of epic
proportions, and my anger hides a real sadness.

~~~
dxbydt
>fuck Java in the browser.. >client-side Java ... is a tragedy of epic
proportions

client-side Java != browser jvm In fact, all of your client-side Java code
will run perfectly well without a browser on your Mac, Windows & Linux boxes.
I still do a lot of client-side Scala, running on Mac & linux, with no
browsers involved at all. The simplest way for a data scientist to process say
~10 GB of records & display linegraphs & scatterplots is like 20 lines of
straight client-side Scala, no browser, no html, no CSS3, no JS, no canvas.
Throw it in a generalpath & apply an affine transform & you have your
curve.(<http://bit.ly/WWoaKS>). Almost all my work these days is client-side
Scala, and I've never used a browser.

~~~
javajosh
That may be, and I'm glad you found an application that works for you, but in
general it's far harder to write client-side Java GUIs (in the browser or out)
than to write a webapp that does the same thing. Not to mention that it's
easier to hire for webapp skills, these days.

In the time it takes to learn GridBagLayout you could have finished your whole
project, _and_ the web version is going to be far easier to modify, _and_ your
architecture is almost certainly going to make the data easier to access.

When it comes to analyzing big data, I'd do the majority of the crunching
server-side, and only pass viz data out to the client (which is _always_ going
to be orders-of-magnitude smaller than the source data).

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gst
"You can sign the petition here. So far, 6,000 people have done so,"

6000 people? The more appropriate subject here would be "Most users don't care
about Java bloatware".

~~~
unoti
I'm skeptical about whether signing a petition would do any good and whether
it'd be worth the effort. If Oracle gave a crap, it already wouldn't be an
issue. I expect a lot more people care about this issue than signed the
petition. I know I'm one.

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Jayschwa
Having setup a new computer and installed Java on it recently, I found the
inclusion of this bloatware very tacky. It's also frustrating because in the
past, I have told family members to "just answer yes" to Java update prompts.
I'll probably just remove it from their computers now, if given the chance.

~~~
drucken
But why did you install Java on a home desktop computer for non-technical
users?

Devlopers would have their own machines or VMs plus install and control the
update cycle, often manually, by downloading the JDKs directly (which have no
bloatware).

Applets and other front-facing Java services are also almost never used on the
web due to the dominance of Flash, Javascript and other technologies.

In short, there are no common non-development desktop applications or task
profiles that require Java.

~~~
schwap
> In short, there are no common non-development desktop applications or task
> profiles that require Java.

Minecraft.

~~~
leoc
LibreOffice as well.

~~~
chris_wot
They're slowly decoupling it.

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technomancy
I feel for the end users, but developers really ought to know better and get
OpenJDK instead.

~~~
aw3c2
Can you point me to openJDK binaries for Windows? I would love to use that.

~~~
icebraining
[https://github.com/alexkasko/openjdk-unofficial-
builds#openj...](https://github.com/alexkasko/openjdk-unofficial-
builds#openjdk-unofficial-installers-for-windows-linux-and-mac-os-x)

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brianllama
He has to make up for overpaying for a dying company somehow. Squeezing Google
for money didn't work, so I squeezing everyone else that has anything to do
with Java is the answer.

~~~
camus
well i'm sure suing google's ass was in their business model when they bought
sun. But hey , it is their products, someone needs to pay for it. Oracle is
not known to give away freebies like that. Sun did not manage to make money
with Java , Oracle will not.

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lutusp
The present 6,000 / 250,000 ratio of signers versus the signing goal might be
a measure of the remaining idealists among Web netizens. Modern corporations
have turned their back on customers in order to face the stockholders, the
only players that count.

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smsm42
Here's something I don't understand: it can't be that ask.com pays Oracle
_that_ much money for that. How is it worth to Oracle to tarnish their image
and piss off their enterprise clients for that? It's not like they are so
desperate for money they are grasping at straws, are they? What's next, would
they propose Java users to introduce them to a certain Nigerian prince that is
looking for business partners?

~~~
lutusp
> How is it worth to Oracle to tarnish their image and piss off their
> enterprise clients for that?

Well, since Oracle is doing it and accepting the pubic outcry, it must be that
they have no image to tarnish. Also, we don't know how much ask.com is paying
for this deal, but given that the Java downloads are free, any payment deal
with ask.com represents an infinite increase in profitability.

> It's not like they are so desperate for money they are grasping at straws,
> are they?

I see you haven't talked to any stockholders lately. Most only care about
profits and don't ask where they come from.

~~~
smsm42
> but given that the Java downloads are free, any payment deal with ask.com
> represents an infinite increase in profitability.

That would make sense if Oracle was a company whose only business were
providing Java downloads. However I heard they also have some other source of
income, and I suspect compared to those whatever ask.com is paying is rather
minuscule.

~~~
lutusp
> However I heard they also have some other source of income, and I suspect
> compared to those whatever ask.com is paying is rather minuscule.

A modern corporation consists of individual departments, each of which must
strive to justify its existence as though it were a separate entity. No
rational corporate manager is willing to say, "We don't have to turn a profit
-- we're an insignificant, small part of a hugely profitable corporation."

The fact that the second claim is true cannot be used to justify the first
claim.

~~~
smsm42
There are units that aren't meant to turn an immediate profit - such as R&D
labs. And Oracle people very well know that, as any competent corporate
manager does. So yes, a rational corporate manager is very well willing to say
"we don't have to turn a profit because we're part of the whole corporation
and can contribute in other ways than selling our reputation for a handful of
ad dollars". And even for turning a profit, there are better ways than forcing
crapware down users' throats. After all, they have enough sense not to put
porn banners (which probably would pay handsomely) on their download pages -
why wouldn't they not have enough sense to not stuff their product with
unrelated crapware that nobody wants?

------
unabridged
Forget the petition, just stop installing JRE.

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leeoniya
the irony of peddling the Ask Toolbar to users without ever asking them if
they want it.

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Al-Khwarizmi
I have a Java free software project that started back in 2001, and my users
are very unhappy about all this BS from Oracle. I don't have the time or the
willpower to port everything to a different language, so "just tell people to
uninstall Java" is not a good solution in my case.

Some Java bashers should show a little more empathy towards the independent
Java developers that are suffering the consequences of Oracle's decisions.

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jonaphin
Oracle makes tons of money using this scheme. They can milk that cow for about
one more year, with Win XP/Vista/7. Windows 8 is pushing hard to control the
installation process. Oracle knows it is coming to an end.

------
srparish
With the title I was expecting that people were finally fed up with
getters/setters and all the other ceremonial bloat that's associated with
java. Maybe tomorrow.

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shurcooL
Instead of signing a petition, I simply choose not to install Java on my
computer.

Thankfully with my needs I'm really not missing much.

------
eikenberry
> Oracle Corporation decided to sacrifice the integrity of Java

Java having integrity. Good joke.

------
swayvil
so use openjdk?

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begurken
Let Oracle bundle their bloated adware. Don't provide them a free service by
telling them how stupid and self-destructive this practice is; if they're too
dumb to work out that it isn't in their long-term interests, they deserve the
consequences.

Publicly traded corporations are all the same; they're all equally obnoxious,
a-moral, and hostile to customers when it suits their perceived interests.
Oracle's Java adware is just a tiny little symptom of this; the actual problem
is systemic to public corporations.

This kind of obnoxious user-hostility is what made me abandon closed source
software for personal use. Additionally, my company (a private company)
doesn't use any closed-source software in our systems, and never will. For us,
open source software is better, more flexible, more supportable, and the nail
in the coffin is that there simply aren't any vendors that can be trusted by a
small organisation such as us.

Oracle don't care about little people signing a petition anyway. If one of
their large corporate customers told them directly that this was unacceptable,
they would stop it in a minute.

~~~
piokoch
The point is Java is open source...

~~~
bad_user
No, OpenJDK is open source.

------
largesse
Predictable. I really wish Google or IBM had acquired Sun.

We could be seeing a second life for Java rather than this disgusting shuffle
of the undead.

~~~
KMag
Maybe creative destruction is for the best. The JVM platform is much nicer
than Java the language. We've learned a lot since Java and the JVM were
created. The death of Java might be a nice opportunity for some Spring
cleaning.

Off the top of my head:

IntelliJ's @Nullable annotation as a core part of the language (I would
suggest spelling "Nullable" as "*" to avoid freaking out the C++ converts)
would greatly improve static type safety. Let's stop re-inventing Tony Hoare's
Billion Dollar Mistake.

Call me a heretic, but for most real-world uses (particularly financial
calculations) IEEE 754-r decimal floating point is a better default than IEEE
754 binary floating point, plus it's less confusing for inexperienced
programmers. Excel does some ugly ugly tricks to try and hide IEEE 754 binary
artifacts from display, but the artifacts still show up from time to time.
Even experienced programmers often mistake binary floating point artifacts for
software bugs.

UTF-16 also fools many programmers into thinking it's a fixed-width
representation, and Java's APIs force Strings to at least pretend that they're
using UTF-16 internally. Chars should be 32-bit, since 16 bits aren't enough
to represent all Unicode codepoints. Iterator-like String APIs are often more
appropriate than Java's array-like String APIs, and give implementors more
design flexibility.

These days, even a lot of embedded systems are beefy enough that a register-
based or SSA-based bytecode is a better choice. (For small embedded systems,
I'm sure a few companies would spring up with cut down standard libraries and
tools to either generate native code or a stack machine representation from
the standard bytecode.) Bytecodes manipulating NaN-tagged types would make the
VM a better target for dynamically typed languages.

We know that CSP/Actors are a less bug prone concurrency abstraction than
forcing developers to work directly with threads, but Java chose threads to
make C++ programmers feel comfortable.

The use of type erasure in Java's generics was a compromise necessary to
maintain compatibility with old class files. Safety and performance would be
improved by starting out with a system that supports generics.

~~~
GlennS
I'm not familiar with @Nullable (just looking it up now), but have become
quite fond of Guava's Optional<T>. It's a bit wordy, but it seems like a great
example of how to make the type system work for you by finding your mistakes
as early as possible,

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bluedanieru
This article is nonsense full of blatant half-truths, e.g.

"a respected corporation such as Oracle"

Give me a break.

