
How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the New Axis of Evil (Oracle) - gacba
http://www.lessonsoffailure.com/companies/how-i-learned-to-love-new-evil-empire-oracle/
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technomancy
> Java not good enough for Android? Fine, let’s make a new language that
> finally innovates on the mobile device, unlocking us from the collective
> disasters of Objective C, mobile Windows, and bloated Java ME.

While I appreciate the sentiment of this post, it displays some ignorance of
the actual legal issues at play. Oracle's patent attack has nothing to do with
the Java language. They have to do with virtual machines, and any VM (even
clean-room like Dalvik) running any language is going to run afoul of them
since they're absurdly broad.

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jacquesm
Never mind that VMs are as old as UCSD p-code.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UCSD_Pascal>

edit: Interesting voting here, would someone please explain what's so bad
about UCSD p-code being a primitive byte code interpreter + associated VM ?

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bad_user
Modern VMs use some techniques for optimizing runtime dispatch, or for
security, or for dynamic loading of code, etc... techniques which are newer.

Sun did research on Self, and Strongtalk which they've bought was heavily
influenced by Self, which later became Hotspot.

So Oracle might own really relevant IP to modern implementation techniques for
a VM ... for which there might NOT be prior-art. And some of those techniques
are really not trivial.

This is just speculation btw, without a careful analysis of their patents. But
if I'm right, Oracle can nuke all modern VM implementations.

~~~
jacquesm
The parent comment wrote explicitly: "and any VM (even clean-room like Dalvik)
running any language is going to run afoul of them since they're absurdly
broad."

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abp
Who votes for Scala developers free scala from java vm and .net with compiler
for own vm or runtime?

~~~
jacquesm
And a self hosting clojure.

~~~
abp
Let the engineers build the vm modular and plug everything that deserves it.

But i dont't know if this could be really fast accomplished, because the java
vm has such a maturity.

Goodies could be modern concepts deeply incorporated and specific
configurations for current and future hardware usage.

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JoelMcCracken
Not a fan of these strangelove references. First time was good, but it has
become cliché

