
Oracle Adds New Android Versions to Copyright Battle with Google - ghosh
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-08-12/oracle-files-new-complaint-against-google-in-android-battle
======
kozukumi
Every time I read about this awful case I am reminded how happy I am to have
left Java behind. Yes as a developer this makes no difference to me in any
practical way but it did put an awkward and uncomfortable cloud over the Java
framework for me. Using a language owned by a company who does this kind of
thing just didn't feel "right" and I disliked knowing I was [indirectly]
supporting Oracle by using Java.

~~~
Someone1234
The most depressing part, to me, is if you asked anyone who "owned" Java back
in the Sun days they would have told you _nobody_. Since it is OSS and aside
from Microsoft's J++ lawsuit, Sun was pretty liberal about how people used
Java (as they mostly profited from value adds, rather than the core language
or libraries).

If Sun were still around, I suspect not only would they not be suing Google,
but they would be actively involved in the Android development scene,
producing tooling and other assists and offering enterprise support.

Oracle are just evil™

~~~
toyg
_> If Sun were still around, I suspect not only would they not be suing
Google, but they would be actively involved in the Android development scene_

That's a big stretch. For one, Sun people weren't particularly happy that
Google blatantly sidestepped them; all the time Sun was a going concern,
backroom discussions with Google were ongoing and not particularly
conciliatory. Sun didn't contribute to Dalvik and would likely never had (why,
when they had OpenJDK?). The fact that they never granted use of the TCK is
quite revealing in itself.

~~~
clumsysmurf
According to this person's recollection, Sun was pretty pissed at Google.

[http://yro.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2348832&cid=36882124](http://yro.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2348832&cid=36882124)

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hippo8
Can someone explain why oracle is doing this? This is not good for their brand
name, this is not good for Java. A large number of people use Java because of
android app development, what is oracle trying to gain out of all this?

~~~
andyjohnson0
Almost anyone who cares about this lawsuit is automatically someone whose
opinions don't matter to Oracle. Oracle only cares about executives at large
orgs with large budgets to spend on Oracle's enterprise software. And those
people don't care about Java or Oracle's reputation among people outside their
community.

To understand Oracle's motivations it is necessary to review what Bryan
Cantrill said about the company:

 _" As you know people, as you learn about things, you realize that these
generalizations we have are, virtually to a generalization, false. Well,
except for this one, as it turns out. What you think of Oracle, is even truer
than you think it is. There has been no entity in human history with less
complexity or nuance to it than Oracle. And I gotta say, as someone who has
seen that complexity for my entire life, it’s very hard to get used to that
idea. It’s like, ‘surely this is more complicated!’ but it’s like: Wow, this
is really simple! This company is very straightforward, in its defense. This
company is about one man, his alter-ego, and what he wants to inflict upon
humanity — that’s it! …Ship mediocrity, inflict misery, lie our asses off,
screw our customers, and make a whole shitload of money. Yeah… you talk to
Oracle, it’s like, ‘no, we don’t fucking make dreams happen — we make money!’
…You need to think of Larry Ellison the way you think of a lawnmower. You
don’t anthropomorphize your lawnmower, the lawnmower just mows the lawn, you
stick your hand in there and it’ll chop it off, the end. You don’t think ‘oh,
the lawnmower hates me’ — lawnmower doesn’t give a shit about you, lawnmower
can’t hate you. Don’t anthropomorphize the lawnmower. Don’t fall into that
trap about Oracle._" [1]

Nothing that Oracle does makes sense without understanding this.

[1]
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-zRN7XLCRhc&t=33m](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-zRN7XLCRhc&t=33m)

~~~
simi_
For me this just puts into perspective how much it sucks to have Java as the
language powering Android. Would a rewrite in (say) Go even be possible? I
guess you could machine translate a lot of boring stuff like support for a
gazillion devices, and the memory footprint savings would be quite
substantial.

~~~
bad_user
Oracle tried their hand with copyright infringement, because copyright is far
stronger than anything else that's IP-related. However, here's the thing:

1\. Oracle is basically arguing about APIs being copyrightable and if APIs are
deemed to be copyrightable, we're fucked as an industry ;-)

2\. Oracle, because of the Sun acquisition, has many, many interesting patents
related to programming languages and virtual machines. Consider that Sun was
involved in the research for making Smaltalk VMs fast and they also developed
Self. The IP for all the fancy techniques used in Java's HotSpot VM? Well Sun
owned it. Do you think Go is safe because it's not based on Java, or because
it doesn't have a Java-like VM? Think again, at the very least it has a
garbage collector ;-)

Thing is, if Google would have cloned OpenJDK, they would have been safe
because of the GPL license. But they didn't, they used Apache Harmony instead,
a project that never passed the Java TCK because Sun never allowed it to.

~~~
noir_lord
> 1\. Oracle is basically arguing about APIs being copyrightable and if APIs
> are deemed to be copyrightable, we're fucked as an industry ;-)

In the US, in Europe where we are somewhat more sane on this issue I'd look
forward to a boom in software development the like of which we've never seen.

The implications for the US software industry are pretty horrify though, it
makes software patents look mild.

~~~
fauigerzigerk
Why a boom in software development?

~~~
toyg
parent thinks the industry will flee to safer European shores, because the
local legal climate is much more liberal than the US when it comes to software
(for example, patent trolls are very rare over here).

In practice this is unlikely for a number of reasons, in particular the fact
that Europe is way too expensive for the industry that spearheaded third-world
"offshoring".

~~~
fauigerzigerk
It's not just unlikely, it's completely nonsensical from a legal perspective.
If Google's Android division were located in Europe, that would make zero
difference for their legal fight against Oracle.

The only way to avoid US law is to not trade in the US at all, otherwise
someone should have told Samsung and SAP before they paid hundereds of
millions to Apple and Oracle respectively.

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manishsharan
Could the HNers who have bought Oracle db or its enterprise apps share why
they chose Oracle over other options. I have have been working in the s/w
development side in the banking sector but I was never part of the purchasing
decision for infrastructure. I do suspect that the banks keep on buying Oracle
or IBM DB2 because of their (Oracle and IBM) reputation for reliability and
the army of Oracle or DB2 DBA already in the banks' employment. I have often
recommended Jboss over Weblogic for my applications but that option is not
considered viable because of Oracle's reputation and existing support
contracts. So, why did you buy Oracle db over say (i)Postgres (ii) MS SQL or
Sybase ?

~~~
toyg
I work in the space. Oracle gets picked because is perceived as "safe" by
executives, because they have armies of people you can shout at when things go
wrong (not that it will solve anything, but executives usually enjoy it).

In addition, their portfolio is so vast that any large business will likely
have something else that can be leveraged in any discussion ("don't like our
db pricing? Let me cut the renewal price of this other product you bought last
year. Or what if I throw in a few licenses of that other product you were
already evaluating?"). This also allows one good product to cover for the
shortcomings of others ("ok, this project failed horribly, but that other
thing last year was hot stuff! You got to give us another chance!").

Of course, they already are on the list of approved vendors, so there is no
bureaucracy or exposure for whoever signs the purchase order. CYA rules.

If you want to get really technical, however, most Oracle products will just
"tick all boxes". They might not be the best option, the fastest one or the
easiest to maintain (and they are never the cheapest), but they're likely the
most feature-complete. For example, the db: want multiple active-active
instances? can do. Active-passive? can do. Multiple names for same instance?
can do. Multiple instances on same box? can do. Cross-platform? can do.
Working without DNS? can do. Objects? can do. XML? Can do. Your company has
weird storage requirements? No prob. Maintenance tools? More than you will
ever use. And so on and so forth. On paper (which is where executives live),
it's hard to justify anything else; problems only come up when you actually
try to use the beast.

~~~
craftsman
This is spot on.

Regarding the last paragraph, I was once in a meeting at a very large company
in which an AVP asked me and several other experienced _engineers_ : "Ignore
the technical details; is there any reason we shouldn't purchase this large
suite of Oracle products?" That was the litmus test, so yes, it's purely a
safety play for many.

~~~
aswanson
That is hilarious, straight out of an SNL/Onion skit. And these are the folks
who run the world.

~~~
pas
Because it usually doesn't matter. If you are not a Google/Facebook scale op,
cobbling together something with SQLite on a battery backed RAM disk is
probably properly enough. I'm pretty sure that could run the store part of
Amazon with enough madness thrown at it.

So for most companies UX is more important than how messy your backing store
is. And yes, delivering good UX requires quick iterations, and that probably
means a good operational support for experimenting with various data access
patterns, but - again - SQL is enough. Just throw more Hadoop at it, if not.
(For specialized data stores. Or just more hardware and even more 12c
instances and use that as your key-value store. Doesn't matter. Wrap it and
spend more time on UX and features.)

Yes, disrupting them with better technical skills is possible, but don't
forget that in the end you have to provide value, and rarely a "contains only
F/OSS" sticker is enough.

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blacktulip
Isn't this case already closed?

~~~
shadowmint
[https://www.eff.org/cases/oracle-v-google](https://www.eff.org/cases/oracle-
v-google)

    
    
        On October 6, 2014, Google filed a petition asking the 
        U.S. Supreme Court to review the Federal Circuit's 
        decision.  On November 7, 2014, EFF filed an amicus brief 
        on behalf of many computer scientists that asked the 
        Supreme Court to grant Google's petition for review, 
        reverse the Federal Circuit, and reinstate Judge Alsup's    
        opinion.
    
        Unfortunately, in June 2015 the Supreme Court denied 
        Google's petition. The case will now return to the 
        district court for a trial on Google's fair use defense.
    

Didnt win in court because the judge actually had some clue what was
happening?

Dont worry, just keep those appeals flying, you'll get a clueless idiot
evetually and your lobby money will win them over.

~~~
oblio
I doubt that Google isn't also using all its lobby money to prevent that.

------
ericmo
If Android usage of Java is in violation of Oracle's copyright, than why isn't
OpenJDK? I don't code much in Java and when I do I use Oracle's version, so I
don't know how different it is, but I guess the "API" should be the same, no?

Also, I don't see how is it better for Google to be sued by Oracle than using
OpenJDK just because it is GPL-ed. Why? It doesn't make sense!

~~~
papercrane
> If Android usage of Java is in violation of Oracle's copyright, than why
> isn't OpenJDK?

OpenJDK was released by Sun as GPL.

~~~
ericmo
Well, couldn't be simpler than that, thanks for clearing that up for me!

------
tempodox
This is why MS was wise to create their own “MS Java”, named C# (when Sun
still existed). I wouldn't want to depend on Oracle for anything.

~~~
Zigurd
C# exists, in part, because Sun sued over Visual J++.

~~~
toyg
Well, I don't know.

VJ++ had a completely different target market from modern Java / C#: it was
the Age of the Desktop, Java was supposed to be the client-side Nirvana of
write-once-run-everywhere, and VJ++ was a blatant embrace-and-extinguish play
in that sense ("write once, run on Windows only" basically), based on
platform-specific UI libs.

C# was developed when the market had changed and Java had become the language
of choice for web apps. MS needed a competitor there, and it didn't make sense
for their platform lock-in strategies to build anything but MS-specific tech.
They couldn't have adopted Java at that point, regardless of lawsuits.

~~~
Zigurd
Visual J++ was, at the time, the best implementation of Java as a language
integrated with an IDE, UI stack, and runtime that ran on a commonly used OS.
If it was "embrace and extinguish" it had considerable merit. It would have
completely transformed Windows software development, especially for
interactive software.

At the time, Forte and Eclipse were a bog-slow nightmare to use with insane
hardware requirements relative to even high-end PCs of that time, and Sun's UI
stacks still haven't produced any human-usable software, never mind back then.

I don't always think Microsoft should win IP cases, but Sun destroyed a very
worthwhile product and they had no comparable product to protect. It was a
purely destructive action.

------
kahirsch
What we really need is a revision to the copyright statutes. Is anybody
working on that?

------
PSeitz
Java is dying since Oracle bought it. Google made a mistake to build Android
upon it.

------
eggy
I am going to buy a Nokia Lumia for Windows to replace my Sony Android phone.
No more iOS or Android for me. Funny how MS is becoming an old "new"
alternative for some of us.

~~~
Oletros
How is this related with the submission?

~~~
eggy
I'll admit the comment may have been a bit sparse, and reactionary on my part,
but it is not that far of an association; I think it has relevance. Open
source Android is being fought over by two behemoths in an IP war over Java
code. MS was proprietary, and not much loved amongst the OSS crowd, and now
Windows 10 is going to have hooks for Java and Objective-C to make porting
Android and iOS apps to Windows 10. Forgive me, but MS seems to be doing and
end-around Oracle and Google...I don't see how there is more than 2 degrees of
separation from the submission and the possible relevance of my comment. Is it
because I refused to bite on the IP angle?

