> think bringing up Harmony (or OpenJDK, or Clojure, or a bit of Java you wrote in college, etc) is either being a worrywart or taking Google's verbiage at face value.
Oracle is suing based upon relatively general patents that it would be difficult to implement a modern VM without running afoul of. The Apache Harmony DRLVM absolutely and positively runs afoul of exactly the same patents. In fact I would wager that Ruby, python, and several other runtimes are subject to exactly the same patent liability.
Saying "They didn't sue them" is preposterous. Patents don't require that you sue every subjective infringer. Instead, if you're a company like Oracle, you go after people with deep pockets.
And his point was basically that any VM implementing any bytecode language might very well violate the patents in question.
Anyway, Dalvik does not even claim to execute Java bytecode, but its own language. Does that not mean that it is in pretty much the same legal footing as, say, the Python bytecode interpreter?
And there exists plenty of prior art on the VM, all the way back to 1966 ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P-code_machine ), so I am not so easily convinced that the patent is going to survive the trial.
To my knowledge Harmony has never been given a patent grant. When they tried to obtain the blessing, Sun responded by releasing the OpenJDK, which they bound (with conditions) their patent grants to.
If something else happened that I am ignorant of, please tell me, but to my knowledge Harmony has zero patent protection.
As an aside, the reason Sun refused to grant Harmony a patent grant was that there was the open possibility that it could cannibalize J2ME (at the time Sun was fairly successful in that space, so they were deeply protective, whereas they were failing on the desktop)
Most of that is true, but is not what you said in the comment I replied to, and is not what I disagreed with. Apache Harmony isn't spec-compliant only because it hasn't been blessed by the TCK, and the only reason it hasn't been blessed by the TCK is because Apache disagrees with the licensing terms of the TCK on principle. But the intent of Harmony is to be fully-compliant, the code is something like 99.5% there, and Apache believes that other agreements from Sun around Java back up its position on the TCK issue, so if it came down to it, Apache would be in a very strong position if Oracle ever came after it. In the worst case scenario, they could simply grudgingly accept the TCK license and get the patent grants.
Dalvik, otoh, makes no claim or effort to be spec compliant, and there's no reason to expect they should get the grant.
I'm not defending Oracle here, btw. I think the suit is ridiculous, but on the more general grounds that software patents are inherently a bad idea that stifle innovation. I just don't think it helps anything to distract from the core issue by spreading FUD about Apache's exposure.
> Apache Harmony isn't spec-compliant only because it hasn't been blessed by the TCK, and the only reason it hasn't been blessed by the TCK is because Apache disagrees with the licensing terms of the TCK on principle
The Sun patent license grant is completely incompatible with the Apache License. As is it is impossible to combine the two. Apache isn't just grandstanding -- the conditions made it impossible for the patent grant to apply.
There is no FUD about Harmony. Harmony has zero patent protection. Any other cleanroom implementation has zero protection, exactly as I said, until you essentially bow to Sun cum Oracle. My original statement is factually correct.
Your claim that I was responding to was "it's impossible to write a clean room vm implementation without infringing these patents", which is false (J9, JRockit), and which is also a different issue than whether Harmony has a patent grant.
Harmony doesn't have a patent grant now, that's true. But the reason it doesn't is because it refuses to accept the current license terms. I don't think this is "grandstanding" - it's absolutely critical, and I completely side with Apache. But the simple reality is that Harmony is in a much more secure position than Dalvik, and Apache has a much more defensible position than Google. To claim otherwise is pure FUD.
Why does it matter? Because people should care about the Google suit independent of the idea that Apache might be next. When you try to sell that idea, you make it sound like this lawsuit isn't actually all that bad compared to what it could be, but that's wrong. This is the case that matters, not some hypothetical against Apache. Get pissed now.
If that's your way of covering for ignorance, I suppose you do what works for you. Again, if you had anything demonstrating your completely incorrect position (you won't gain truth through repeated assertion), go ahead and present it. You haven't, and you won't.
The Sun spec-compliant patent grant is impossible to bind to an open source license, outside of the targeted grant they provided OpenJDK (with its own conditions). Feel free to parade your ignorance though insults, but it doesn't prove your (completely wrong) claims.
No, it's my way of telling you you're a clueless idiot. And yes, it works for me. It's hard to present a position to someone who doesn't know how to read.
Oracle is suing based upon relatively general patents that it would be difficult to implement a modern VM without running afoul of. The Apache Harmony DRLVM absolutely and positively runs afoul of exactly the same patents. In fact I would wager that Ruby, python, and several other runtimes are subject to exactly the same patent liability.
Saying "They didn't sue them" is preposterous. Patents don't require that you sue every subjective infringer. Instead, if you're a company like Oracle, you go after people with deep pockets.