
James Gosling: Some more comments about the Oracle Java lawsuit - bensummers
http://nighthacks.org/roller/jag/entry/some_more_comments
======
Aegean
From a point where he goes slightly off topic, but I really liked it:

 _It's not so much that the game favors evil, but that the definition of
"good" is really twisted: Good adj: anything which increases the stock price.
Considerations about employees, products, customers and community are all
secondary. They only enter the equation as ways to achieve goal 1. Morality or
high principles have no place in the corporate discourse. They maximize the
stock price, within the bounds of the law. Corporations like Oracle and Exxon
tend to be perfectly rational. They "buy laws" because it's perfectly legal to
spend money on lobbyists and political campaigns. While you and I might think
that it is morally reprehensible to buy elections, like the recent case with
Target, it is nonetheless totally legal. Given the rules of the game, it would
be bad for a corporation to not buy an election, if failing to do so would
negatively impact their stock price. I could rant for a long time on this one,
but not today… The whole modern concept of a public company is deeply flawed.
But the game is what it is._

~~~
jacquesm
That's almost verbatim from this movie iirc:

<http://www.thecorporation.com/>

~~~
peregrine
Great movie. I tried to get my civics teacher to show it in HS, but my
argument that the US is mostly controlled by corps wasn't very good.

~~~
Create
To help develop your argument, try:

Edward Bernays: Propaganda or the movie "version": Century of the Self (both
on archive.org, btw Adam Curtis is about as underrated as Robert Fisk -- no
means by accident)

Manufacturing Consent (same spirit movie as in the thread)

Understanding Power (basically they simplify and reiterate stuff backed up in
this book)

And and if you are still reading this, have fun reading Dictators, by Jacques
Bainville.

~~~
arethuza
Robert Fisk's "The Great War for Civilisation: The Conquest of the Middle
East" is strongly recommended - a very personal account, and all the better
for it.

------
jrockway
I know I'm going to be downmodded, but I don't care, I want to share my
feelings.

Java is one of my least favorite things in the world. Yeah, I know, starving
children, war, genocide, that stuff is bad too. But Java is what I hate most.

So it makes me ... gleeful ... to see that Oracle is doing such an amazing job
killing it. People want to keep using it, they want new features, they want to
improve the ecosystem, they want to pay Oracle lots of money for the privilege
of using it. But instead, Oracle sues its users, fires the innovators that
made it, and does everything in their power to kill it. And now we have a
"dead language"(which, as a Perl programmer, is a term I really like to throw
around and _mean_ ).

Anyway, good work, Oracle.

~~~
jbooth
Well, no offense, but remind me never to work with you. I'm sorry that the
Java programmers were condescending to the Perl programmers back in 2002 but
could you just get over it? Sometimes Java is the right tool for a given job.
If you're against any platform on principle (aside from the single-vendor
principle), then you're guaranteed to be wrong some % of the time.

If all you do is webapps, fine, Java sucks for webapps, continue hating.

~~~
loewenskind
The Perl programmers I personally know hate Java because it's always been more
popular and had more libraries.

~~~
jrockway
I hate it because it's designed to prevent me from writing good code. I like
writing good code, so I don't like tools that stand in my way. Perl lets me do
whatever I want. (Which in my case, is to use a state-of-the-art object
system, instead of Java's baked-in 1970s era object system.)

Perl has many more high-quality Free libraries, and I personally know a good
percentage of the authors, which makes it all that much more appealing. Java
may have more programmers, but there is no community; it's all 9-5ers that
couldn't care less about programming.

Honestly, the only language I've ever used that didn't have enough libraries
was Common Lisp.

~~~
jbooth
'bless' is state of the art?

~~~
jrockway
No, the Class::MOP metaobject protocol and Moose are.

bless is an object system object system. Class::MOP adds introspection and
first-class classes, attributes, methods, and so on. Moose is the object
system on top of all that.

The flexibility of Perl's original object system object system allows all
object systems -- whether they are hand-coded 'bless'-based objects,
Class::Accessor objects, Mouse objects, or Moose objects -- to interact
seamlessly.

This means the system can constantly improve, and it does. There are hundreds
of "MooseX::" extensions that tweak the way a class or object works, and they
all compose nicely together because they all follow the metaobject protocol.
The MOP allows further extension and exploration, like easy-to-use and
efficient object databases (see KiokuDB).

Anyway, Java keeps trying to add extensibility. But its extensibility is
tacked on, and it is massively underused by the community. (Too many people
_still_ write getters and setters and think they are "programming"!)

Perl has always been about extensibility, and its community has always been
about using it. In the 90s (when Java was created) this was maybe not so good.
Now, though, it's _awesome_.

~~~
jbooth
Well, I agree that Java's bumping into some hard limits -- lack of standard
accessor methods as you point out, and no reified generics are constantly
annoying. I do think it's reaching the end of it 's natural life and will be
looking to move to Go for the same class of problem in the future.

I guess we can just agree to disagree on the rest.

------
davidw
> > I think it's quite hard to stop fragmentation on mobile without stopping
> innovation. Mobile phones differ radically in speed, screen, memory,
> bandwidth, input-method, and so on, to produce a single app that runs
> everywhere well is a tall order, even if the APIs were identical. J2ME was a
> nice try, but the profiles themselves created fragmentation. Android devices
> are fragmented in a smaller way by contrast, first, the bar for performance
> minimum and OS features are set way higher. Secondly, there's no profiles

> This was very true in the mobile world a decade ago and was a huge driver of
> fragmentation; but with todays dramatically more powerful handsets, and
> especially given the concentration on high-end handsets, there's no reason
> for any fragmentation.

Hrm. He seems to be forgetting how many non-super-fancy-high-end phones there
are out there. Ironically, those phones are one reason to keep using Java ME.

~~~
acqq
I use J2ME and enjoy it. I purchased three J2ME applications, worth 100 EUR,
that as far as I know still don't exist on "smartphones" (good dictionaries).
I also use Opera Mini which is exactly what I need. For me J2ME apps seem to
be much "safer" to use than the "smartphone" ones which typically get access
to much more on the phone than it would be really needed. Not to mention that
the dictionaries do work perfectly "offline."

~~~
fhars
Yeah, Opera Mini 4 not being available on android is a major consoling factor
when I decide once again to keep my crappy Symbian phone and spend the money
on something else instead. (Opera Mini 5 is available, but it is a horrible
usability regression. All the functions I use regularly like "reload"(hi, HN
frontpage) and "switch to mobile view" which are at most three key presses in
4 are more than ten in 5, and the font rendering which sometimes seems to use
non-system fonts is atrocious, using 50% more space than the small system font
while being less readable and still not displaing italics.

------
anigbrowl
I can't help thinking that Gosling is very likely to get roped into this thing
as a witness, and all his public statements are going to be grist for the two
mega-companies' legal mills. If I was him I'd be taking a vacation somewhere
without telephones right now. For a year.

~~~
hga
As "The Father of Java" and an author of one of the patents in question he's
probably resigned to getting roped into this (although not necessarily as a
witness, maybe only depositions).

~~~
jamesbritt
And, if he gets roped in, he might then be forbidden from commenting on the
case. Speaking out now might be the best chance he'll have.

~~~
hga
I think that would be unlikely seeing as he's not being employed by either
company.

He has to observe his non-disclosure duties to Oracle regardless of the suit,
although obviously they are going to be a lot more prominent due to it. Oracle
could try to take legal action to shut him up but the fallout from that would
be catastrophic and they've not shown themselves to be _that_ dumb yet (I
think; encouraging most/nearly all??? of their best software developers to
jump ship by paying them a lot less is seriously dumb, though, unless they
bought Sun's software portfolio purely for its IP as Gosling has been
wondering).

------
bad_user
Cool quote ...

    
    
        No matter what the merits of the case may be, or who is 
        right, or who has a "right" to do what, the crossfire in 
        the battle will be hugely distractive (and I don't just 
        mean the patent case). I wish they'd all vent their 
        testosterone elsewhere.
    

In the meantime, no recent news on Java 7.

------
Nwallins
Interestingly relevant to BSD-style vs. GPL-style licensing:

> _The vision of freedom that most of the big corporate interests had was the
> ability to make their platform sticky: to destroy interoperability so that
> (for example) Java software developed on Microsoft platforms could only run
> on Microsoft platforms. They wanted the freedom to capture developers. ...
> "Freedom" is a freakishly relative word. The freedom of the large software
> companies is directly at odds with the freedom of developers._

