

Oracle CEO Larry Ellison: I don't know if Java is free - donretag
http://news.cnet.com/8301-1035_3-57415324-94/oracle-ceo-larry-ellison-i-dont-know-if-java-is-free/

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whalesalad
While I certainly prefer iOS to Android ... it's really unfortunate that such
a situation has emerged. I think the Android platform has only done good for
our planet. Developers have more jobs, more interesting apps are being
created, more devices are being sold, there are more powerful and less
expensive devices in the smartphone world that are becoming popular in
emerging markets and third world countries (don't quote me, but a nearly free
Android handset in Nigeria?) Mobile is a paradigm shift. People are more and
more connected while away from their homes and desks. Payments are going
mobile. Also, Android is the biggest competitor to Apple. I'm certainly an
Apple guy in all aspects, but I do appreciate competition in the market to
keep everyone working hard and innovating.

Sucks that Oracle will not consider any of that. That no terms could be
reached out of simple goodheartedness. Oracle isn't losing money because of
Android as far as I am concerned. There might be profit lost due to licensing,
but it just feels wrong to me.

~~~
protomyth
> Oracle isn't losing money because of Android as far as I am concerned. There
> might be profit lost due to licensing

From an Oracle shareholder's point of view (which I'm not), lost licensing
fees == losing money.

~~~
rbanffy
By scaring everybody away from the Java ecosystem, I believe they'll lose a
lot more money on the long run.

~~~
protomyth
Is Oracle really scaring their customers (read: enterprise)? I really don't
think they care about people on this board or twitter. They earn a lot of
money with their current model which involves payments from companies. From a
company point of view, Oracle is a lot more stable than Sun ever was.

>> On a personal note, I really wish both Oracle and Google had handled this
quite a bit differently. Google probably should have gone with Python when it
looked like Java was going to cause trouble. Sun / Oracle really needed to
have a decent smart (not feature) phone spec for Java / JVM with a small
licensing fee. Java seems cursed with anything that needs an actual UI,
something always goes wrong.

~~~
rbanffy
Enterprises move very slowly, but, if Oracle starts trying to aggressively
monetize Java, future deployments may end up using alternative technologies.

In Google's defense, when they started Android Java belonged to Sun. Sun never
was as malignant as Oracle.

In retrospect, they should have acquired Sun (maybe Larry and Sergei would
have to pool their credit cards). That Sun ended up being part of Oracle is a
larger tragedy than DEC ending up being acquired by Compaq.

~~~
jsnell
Really? I would have thought that in retrospect it's clear that Google should
not have bought Sun. If they lose in the courts, they're still rather unlikely
to end up paying $7 billion in damages...

Really Google wouldn't have done anything with Sun except for the patents. No
use for the hardware or services business, no use for Solaris, limited use for
controlling Java, etc.

~~~
rbanffy
There is a huge value in preventing year-long problems and just moving on.

Google is in the business of making people use the web. More Solaris servers,
more Java applications (I have some issues with that, but let's play along
this line) can only be a good thing for them.

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waterlesscloud
So the message is pretty clear. No one should ever again build anything on top
of Java.

~~~
wmf
The lawsuit is not about building on top of Java; it's about building JVMs.
Sun said all along that if you build a JVM you need to be compatible and in
some cases you need to pay.

~~~
jshen
And who in their right mind would want to build software on top of the JVM if
what you say is true?

~~~
wmf
Everyone? People generally like JVMs to be compatible. Since you're not making
a specific argument I don't really know how to respond.

~~~
jshen
What you're implying is that the JVM is a proprietary platform. I think most
people have treated the JVM as an open platform all these years (or they
trusted Sun to effectively treat it as such), and I bet many of them wouldn't
have used it if they'd thought it was a proprietary platform where the only
allowed implementations have to be approved by Oracle.

You seem to be implying that it's no big deal if it is proprietary. I
disagree.

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patrickgzill
Bryan Cantrill (formerly Sun, then worked for Oracle, now working elsewhere)
talks about Oracle in his interesting talk here:
[http://smartos.org/2011/12/15/fork-yeah-the-rise-and-
develop...](http://smartos.org/2011/12/15/fork-yeah-the-rise-and-development-
of-illumos-2/)

He compares Oracle to a lawnmower - if you stick your hand in a mower, it will
cut your hand off.

Oracle is simple in the way that a mower is simple - a mower cuts what is put
in front of the blade. Oracle wants money from whoever they can get it from.

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rollypolly
What's the worse case scenario in this dispute? I'm sure Oracle just wants
money, but could they legally prevent Google from using Java entirely? I can
hardly imagine rebuilding the Android ecosystem on another language.

~~~
ChuckMcM
The worst case scenario is that the court finds, and it is upheld on appeal,
that you can copyright the names of API calls, the number of arguments to
those API calls, and the types associated with those arguments.

In that scenario Novell would own the copyrights to things like read(int fd,
char *buf, int size); and could sue you if you used them without compensation
to Novell.

Now that would be hugely disruptive and counter to a lot of existing case law
in adjacent areas, perhaps the most directly applicable are Memorex vs IBM in
the 70's with regard to making 'plug compatible' storage devices. Memorex made
a compatible "DASD" (Direct Access Storage Devices, otherwise known as a hard
disk) product and sold it to people who had IBM mainframes. IBM sued, Memorex
counter sued, eventually Memorex prevailed and removed the threat of
litigation over people whole made 'third party' add-ons.

I don't think this case will try to contravene that case law but you did ask
for the 'worst case' :-)

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mindslight
How is it that Google (et al) does not just fall back on the _GPL-licensed_
OpenJDK? I understand that Oracle has a lot of money to burn on lawyers and
other forms of harassment, but why does it seem that the common wisdom (not
just this case, but the whole Java community seems generally scared of Oracle)
is to completely ignore the generally accepted legal grants of this one
specific GPL-licensed project?

~~~
wmf
OpenJDK would completely suck on a phone; the memory overhead and startup time
are about 10x worse than Dalvik. And fixing the overhead requires eliminating
JAR files, which breaks compatibility.

~~~
mindslight
Vanilla OpenJDK is a resource pig, yes. But one could start off with the
OpenJDK code base, drop JAR files and perform other wildly-breaking changes,
and end up with a GPL-licensed Dalvik. Claiming current Dalvik as a derivative
work of OpenJDK would be dubious, of course. But my point is that a path
exists that should be able to morph the Java technology into any new
GPL+classpath-licensed system regardless of Oracle's whining, yet it seems
like this option is never considered.

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zeruch
Ellison doesn't seem to know a lot these days (and this isn't just snark): his
moves to purchase then effectively lose influence over various large aspects
of the Sun assets (Jenkins, Open Office, MySQL), his vacillation on whether
NoSQL is a threat or not, and this ever churning battle with Google over
Java...just shows a very unfocused leadership at the helm.

~~~
rbanffy
There is nothing more dangerous for a person like Ellison than being
surrounded by yes-men. When you are effectively shielded from reality, it's
really hard to make informed decisions.

~~~
zeruch
I'd agree with this. Ellison definitely seemed to have more of a steady hand
when he had Ray Lane as COO; a textbook pragmatist, Lane was the diametric
opposite of Ellison, and the balance between the two worked really well.

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why-el
Is there any other programming language with similar legal history? I would
like to know.

~~~
protomyth
We probably would have gotten a good preview with the Ashton-Tate vs Fox
Software if Ashton-Tate hadn't totally bungled their copyright filings for
dBase.

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Agathos
I wouldn't answer in his position either. If there's any internal record that
he wasn't sure (and how could he be before the trial's over), and if he
mentioned it to anyone who isn't a lawyer (no attorney-client privilege), then
a definite answer either way invites a perjury charge.

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laconian
I wonder if a ruling that favors Oracle will taint JVM-based languages such as
Clojure?

~~~
edwinnathaniel
This has nothing to do with Clojure, JRuby, or Jython at all to my knowledge.

To understand why: assume Clojure is just a software running on top of
Oracle's JVM. Just like Apache Tomcat.

~~~
laconian
Yes, but the same chilling effect that it would have on adoption of JVM-based
solutions could transitively pass on to whatever builds on its stack.

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chaostheory
I wonder what would have happened if IBM won the bidding war for Sun instead
of Oracle.

~~~
rbanffy
Both companies have reputations to preserve. Oracle is just preserving theirs.

