

Analysts: Oracle vs. Google May Hurt Future of Java as Dev Platform - msredmond
http://adtmag.com/blogs/watersworks/2010/08/oracle-google-lawsuit-hurt-java.aspx

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whyenot
What I wonder is, long term, how does Oracle's willingness to pursue lawsuits
like this affect the adoption of other JVM languages like Scala, Clojure,
Jython, etc.

If you were contemplating starting a new project using Clojure, for instance,
would this lawsuit give you pause? I think I would worry about it, at least a
little.

~~~
cemerick
Why, exactly? Will the impact (if any) on android change those languages? I
can't see how.

Those fretting about "Oracle's stewardship of Java" all need to take a breath.
Honestly, things can't be worse than they were under Sun -- except perhaps in
the eyes of those that make platform decisions based on the patent-management
policies of multinational corporations. If FUD or "morale" or "community" is
the chief concern for others, then they've forgotten the lessons of Java's
history: i.e. the shit keeps hitting the fan in different ways, yet code
running on JVMs is _everywhere_ , and that'll continue to be the case for
decades.

Anyway, I honestly can't see how this has any bearing on "userspace" as it
were. If I were a VM vendor, I'd be very concerned, but application and
library developers would seem to be entirely unaffected by the suit.

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DougBTX
> Why, exactly?

Imagine you are developing a new language to run on the JVM, and it turns out
that to get a 10x performance improvement, it would be really great to have
this new bytecode instruction added to the JVM. To get it into every JVM, you
would have to go through Oracle anyway, so nothing changes there. But if you
wanted to distribute your own variation, a hypothetical openJVM+, Oracle is
saying that they may well go after you with patent suits.

Good for people happy with the current JVM, looking for stability. Bad for
people wanting to bring innovations to the JVM without explicit consent from
Oracle.

~~~
cemerick
Bollocks. People in the alternative JVM language space have been hankering for
all sorts of VM changes/additions for _years_ , including TCO, fixnums, method
handles, continuations, etc etc etc. How many openJVM+ implementations have
ever been implemented, nevermind used out in the world? None, AFAIK -- the
progress, as it is, happens in the MLVM, which is under the umbrella of
OpenJDK.

So as I said, the exceptions to this might be highly VM vendors, such as Azul,
GAE, and various people that have worked on (maybe deployed, I don't know?)
full-stack Java operating systems and/or Java-on-a-chip (for embedded
applications I suppose). Anyone developing applications, libraries, et al. are
entirely unaffected AFAICT.

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gamble
Maybe with open-source developers, but not with Java's corporate bread-and-
butter. They might actually like the warm security blanket provided by
purchasing official Java licenses, support contracts, certifications, etc that
Sun wasn't quite corporatey enough to provide.

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ig1
Java is practically dead in the water now. Oracle will be lucky if their
database product doesn't get badly damaged.

The best developers at Sun were already leaving, with this ? - if I was a
recruiter I'd be outside their offices on monday handing out flyers.

Oracle has committed seppuku. They simply won't be able to hire good
developers any more, they've horribly tainted their brand. For the next 3-5
years while the lawsuit goes on they're going to be the SCO of the developer
world. No decent developer is going to want to touch them.

Any time one of their developers introduces themselves as "I work as a
developer for Oracle" to another developer at a party, conference, meetup etc.
what do you think the topic of conversation is going to be ?

Once software development companies are no-longer able to hire the best
developers there's only one direction for the company to go in.

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diego_moita
Bad reputations don't hurt anyone in this business. Up until the 90's no other
company had a bully reputation as bad as IBM (e.g.: their Hollerith machines
were used by Hitler to control who was going to the gas chambers).

But still, no other company in the world has attracted so many bright minds
(Jon Von Neuman, John Backus, Ted Cobb, etc), got so many Nobel prizes or made
so many important technological achievements.

~~~
ig1
In the past IBM, AT&T Labs, and now Google all had the huge advantages in
being at the cutting edge of research which allowed them to attract talent.

If you want to see a company dying because it can't hire good developers
because of it's reputation look at Nokia.

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technomancy
I've been thinking an openJDK fork would be inevitable ever since the Sun
acquisiton was announced. The one upside to this announcement is it may just
accelerate the fork by making Oracle's hostility to free software more
obvious. The community should be able to get the JVM moving forward again.

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tzs
What would be the point of a fork?

If the fork subsets or supersets Java, or if it fails to comply to the Java
specification, I believe that Sun's patent promise does not apply, and so the
fork would be vulnerable to Oracle patent suits.

~~~
hga
And you can't prove compliance without getting a JTCK license from ... Oracle.
Which Sun wasn't very interested in supplying to the Apache Harmony project,
and when I checked into the terms a few months ago they're still _very_
restrictive. Basically if you aren't furthering openJDK, forget it.

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Hoff
Depending on the outcome of the negotiations, Google (and somewhat less
directly, the telcos and end-users) will have clearly taken hit points against
a critical part of the Android stack.

A discussion of vertical integration and competition and of maintaining
control over the key parts of the product stacks, of managing outside
dependencies, of Adobe, and of Google and J2ME, from a few months back:

[http://www.businessinsider.com/steve-jobs-is-a-genius-
contro...](http://www.businessinsider.com/steve-jobs-is-a-genius-control-
freak-2010-5)

And what Oracle might seek in return here will be interesting. Buckets of
money would be the most obvious, but Oracle can also play a much longer game.

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matrix
For me, the big question is: where does all this leave IBM? IBM has a huge
investment in Java, but now Oracle has made it clear that they're not going to
play nice. The senior guys at IBM have to be thinking long and hard about
that...

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tptacek
Gee, you think?

~~~
spooneybarger
Even "obvious" articles need to be written because there are many people out
there for whom, they aren't obvious.

~~~
krschultz
i.e investors

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Zak
Investors who can't see that suing people who use your technology might reduce
the popularity of said technology should probably not be investing in
technology. As Warren Buffett says: invest in what you know.

~~~
ig1
Suing people who use your technology without licensing it is typically a net
positive. Hence it needs to be pointed out why that isn't the case here.

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auxbuss
Of course, Oracle's action threatens what we know as Sun's Java.

Indeed, it kills Java ME stone dead. But it was dead a couple of years ago. So
no loss there.

However, I'm not clear how this affects Android, since Android is not Java.

When I code Android I 'feel' like I'm coding Java, because the syntax is the
same. But I'm not running Java. I know that, and I feel that.

So, if Oracle want to attack Java, or protect its patents, take your pick, I
say: knock yourself out. Here in Android world, it's no concern of mine as I'm
not using Java.

Attacking Java isn't an attack on Android development. Although that appears
to be what Oracle thinks it is doing.

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alec
My reaction was the opposite. They're not going after people who use their
Java implementation or OpenJDK, they're going after the distributors of an
alternate implementation of something like Java that is infringing on the
patents related to language implementation. Oracle's (formerly Sun's) Java
versions, including ME and EE, still look safe.

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contol-m
I'm wondering if the lawsuit has anything to do with Apple. Ellison and Jobs
are best friends, as far as I know.

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jdc
Is anyone else's reaction to the situation: "Oracle is dispensable"?

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hga
Well, not any time soon (the Java/JVM ecosystem is too big, too rich). But in
the long term, at the moment I agree with this observation in the article
which captures the most relevant and important issue for me:

 _Forrester Research analyst John Rymer agrees [ this will have a chilling
effect on developers ]: "I think this lawsuit casts the die on Java’s future,"
he said. "It will become a slow-evolving legacy technology. Oracle’s lawsuit
links deep innovation in Java with license fees, and that will kill deep
innovation in Java by anyone outside Oracle or startups hoping to sell out to
Oracle. Software innovation just doesn’t do well in the kind of environment
Oracle just created."_

"Deep innovation" in e.g. JVM GC for functional languages (Clojure) is
_exactly_ the sort of thing I'm interested in ... and that's now at best on
hold while I get a better grasp of this mess and its implications. But the
real scope of the implications probably won't become clear for years and I'm
certainly not going to wait that long.

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mkramlich
Just the latest event to make the LNPP/LNPR stack more attractive. (Linux,
Nginx, PostgreSQL, Python/Ruby)

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imasr
Does anyone think Google didn't plan for this? Isn't this a great excuse to
displace Java and use their own language? I'm already scared.

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sliverstorm
That would be just dandy. I wonder how many decades school will continue
teaching Java after it has truly and finally become obsolete?

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sabat
_Oracle vs. Google May Hurt Future of Java as Dev Platform_

Maybe that's not such a bad thing.

