Oracle sues Google over Android

[coleridge78]

That is just nerd rage nonsense. Java is a fine language. I would use it over "wacky syntax scripting language of the week".

Half these new 'rad' languages that seem to pop out every week are whitespace dependent. Talk about a monstrosity best left in the past that I haven't used since FORTRAN.

Most of these are hobby languages used by people that like to be different, have some pet feature of the author. One month they are telling everyone how great Python is, next month they are singing the praises of Ruby, next they are all about Rhino, next month... who knows...

You have no idea what you're talking about. I detest Python because of its whitespace-dependence, but it is the only one of the popular languages that has that "feature", and it is yet very heavily deployed in the scientific space--and has been since before Java existed. Very few of theses languages are younger than Java, which is only fifteen years old. I'll see your "nerd rage" and raise you an "ignorant of even the most recent history".

The only thing Java had going for it compared to C++ was the promise of cross-platform code. That is the *only* reason it had such uptake (and that happened only because Java had the fortune to appear just before the dot-com era, giving it a perfect opportunity to be spread far and wide by people with more VC money than competent programmers). They are both painful and stupid languages, with different sorts of poison. This isn't a nerd perspective. I don't have a CSci or math background, though I do have an MS in Software Engineering. I'm talking from a very practical "does this language get in my way when I'm trying to get things done" perspective. Again: there is a reason why running languages other than Java in the JVM is becoming de rigueur, regardless of your defensiveness of your chosen I'll-learn-this-because-I-can-only-think-in-one-language-and-this-is-the-enterprise-flavor-of-the-decade-just-like-COBOL-was-before-it skill.

 

[robotmonkey]

The reason I visit macrumors is to hear news about google and oracle.

 

[coleridge78]

That is just nerd rage nonsense. Java is a fine language. I would use it over "wacky syntax scripting language of the week".

Oh, I see a pattern emerging... the guy who thinks Java has been around forever and Python is a new fad is also the guy who said that the "big deal" about Java was its "openness", when it's been open for less than a third of its lifetime. And wasn't open when it rose to prominence.

Again, ignorant of even recent history. Learning first, talking second, son.

 

[michaelvoigt]

Good on Oracle, sue the pants off 'em

It sounds like there is some meat behind this, you cannot just take Java and re-engineer it the way you see fit.

 

[mdriftmeyer]

You have no idea what you're talking about. I detest Python because of its whitespace-dependence, but it is the only one of the popular languages that has that "feature", and it is yet very heavily deployed in the scientific space--and has been since before Java existed. Very few of theses languages are younger than Java, which is only fifteen years old. I'll see your "nerd rage" and raise you an "ignorant of even the most recent history".

The only thing Java had going for it compared to C++ was the promise of cross-platform code. That is the *only* reason it had such uptake (and that happened only because Java had the fortune to appear just before the dot-com era, giving it a perfect opportunity to be spread far and wide by people with more VC money than competent programmers). They are both painful and stupid languages, with different sorts of poison. This isn't a nerd perspective. I don't have a CSci or math background, though I do have an MS in Software Engineering. I'm talking from a very practical "does this language get in my way when I'm trying to get things done" perspective. Again: there is a reason why running languages other than Java in the JVM is becoming de rigueur, regardless of your defensiveness of your chosen I'll-learn-this-because-I-can-only-think-in-one-language-and-this-is-the-enterprise-flavor-of-the-decade-just-like-COBOL-was-before-it skill.

How'd you pull off a masters in software engineering w/o a bachelor's in computer science, let alone not having a math background?

That's like me having a masters in Mechanical Engineering w/o my bachelor's in M.E. Or my masters in CS w/o my bachelors and both w/o having accumulated nearly a bachelor's in pure and applied mathematics?

 

[coleridge78]

How'd you pull off a masters in software engineering w/o a bachelor's in computer science, let alone not having a math background?

That's like me having a masters in Mechanical Engineering w/o my bachelor's in M.E. Or my masters in CS w/o my bachelors and both w/o having accumulated nearly a bachelor's in pure and applied mathematics?

Twenty years of accidental programming experience, 10 of it professional. With a lot of that focused on IMAP clients and servers in C. I figured it was time to get a better handle on approaching design with some formal rigor. I'm still not sure I found what I was looking for.

Edit to add: by "no math background" I meant, not of the extent that some of my CSci/discrete math/etc. friends have. I did make it through differential equations and some statistical analysis classes as an undergrad back when.

 

[AZREOSpecialist]

I wonder how Eric Schmidt feels about this.

From Eric Schmidt's wiki

So Eric Schmidt ripped off Java from Sun and ripped off iPhone ideas from Apple. Anyone seeing a trend here?

 

[Bytor65]

You have no idea what you're talking about. I detest Python because of its whitespace-dependence, but it is the only one of the popular languages that has that "feature",

Popular? What are the other popular alternative languages. Do any of them have more than 1% market share? (I am talking about real languages here not scripting languages ) There are other of these alternative languages that use whitespace dependence like Haskell and Occam, but I guess they don't count because they aren't popular?

Of general purpose computer languages,the C based languages (C/C++/Java/C#/obj-C) are likely well in excess of 90% of the development work done. For developers C-based languages are just a fact of life.

Of the people I see disparaging the C-based languages they are usually either people with non programming backgrounds who find them difficult. Or extreme nerds going on about one of the oddball alternative languages.

Like one of the main Java complainers in this thread:

It may be my limited experience with it because I gave up on the language after - when following example exactly - it didn't work as it was supposed to.

 

[John.B]

I imagine Oracle doesn't want to kill Java on Android, which would serve no purpose. They would rather perform a cash-ectomy.

The point of the suit is to protect against the bastardization of the JVM by Google and the Dalvik VM Google uses in Android.

Think back to the Sun Micro suit against Microsoft's J++ and the Microsoft JVM. If Microsoft wanted to split off from the "official" Sun Java and JVM, their only solution was to abandon Java/J++ entirely and develop their own non-infringing Java-like language and VM (which eventually became C# and .NET).

The only way for Google to settle this that I can see would be to use the standard Java JVM in place of their Dalvik VM, and at that point it wouldn't be Android anymore. Or replace Java with some Java-like language developed by Google. Which also wouldn't be Android anymore.

If that is the case then Google simply can't afford to lose this lawsuit.

For all the bright people at Google, sometimes they don't seem to be very smart.

 

[John.B]

Of general purpose computer languages,the C based languages (C/C++/Java/C#/obj-C) are likely well in excess of 90% of the development work done. For developers C-based languages are just a fact of life.

I don't know about 90%. There is still an awful lot of VB/VB.NET code running in the corporate world today (Windows7 be damned).

Or is VB not considered general purpose enough?

 

[coleridge78]

Popular? What are the other popular alternative languages. Do any of them have more than 1% market share? (I am talking about real languages here not scripting languages like) There are other of these alternative languages that use whitespace dependence like Haskell and Occam, but I guess they don't count because they aren't popular?

Of general purpose computer languages,the C based languages (C/C++/Java/C#/obj-C) are likely well in excess of 90% of the development work done.

Of the people I see disparaging the C-based languages they are usually either people with non programming backgrounds who find them difficult. Or extreme nerds going on about one of the oddball alternative languages.

For developers C-based languages are just a fact of life.

Look, your argumentation here is a mess. You're all over the place.

1. What do you mean by "market share" in this context?

2. Yes, languages such as Perl, Ruby, Javascript, and PHP have far more than "1% marketshare", for any sensible definition of it. As do Smalltalk-related languages, particularly in certain markets, though you ignored those.

3. Yes, of course languages like Haskell "don't count" for this discussion. You were the one that brought up "popularity" and "fad" languages. Haskell is neither without a ridiculously liberal interpretation of those terms.

4. You can't support your assertion that C-based languages account for 90% of the development work done (because you're wrong), but it's irrelevant. The question was one of trends, not point-in-time numbers.

5. I've contributed to projects like UW-IMAP, Dovecot, and Prayer (an IMAP client written in C which uses HTTP/HTML for its display layer). My latest hobby is writing ARM assembly to repurpose the sensors and circuits from digital cameras. I'm not really interested in your assessment of whether I find programming in C difficult.

5. We were specifically discussing Java (and C++), but now you're shifting the goalposts. You're lumping "the other C-based languages" in there to (I guess) make Java seem a larger and more forward-looking beast than it truly is. C-based languages are a fact of life FOR CERTAIN KINDS OF PROBLEMS. In many other areas, they are elephants misused as horses and are only a fact of life because of historical considerations, and thus are fading into the background as time goes on.

"Hi Bob. We need a frontend for XYZ workflow item with a bit of a db backend. I'd like you to provide me a 1-year roadmap for how you plan to accomplish this in our J2EE environment by extending our vertically-integrated Java codebase."

"Okay sir... if you'd like, I could also get it done with a little JRuby over my lunch break tomorrow. I'll submit a plan for that as well in case you're interested."

At this point, there's about a fifty-fifty split between managers who say "SOLD!" and those who say "Are you crazy? Java only!" As we speak, the latter group are losing because they respond to market demands and changes less quickly than their competitors. There are three kinds of software-based businesses today: those with a monopoly, those who are moving to polyglot development, and those who are slowly failing.

 

[cumanzor]

The point of the suit is to protect against the bastardization of the JVM by Google and the Dalvik VM Google uses in Android.

Think back to the Sun Micro suit against Microsoft's J++ and the Microsoft JVM. If Microsoft wanted to split off from the "official" Sun Java and JVM, their only solution was to abandon Java/J++ entirely and develop their own non-infringing Java-like language and VM (which eventually became C# and .NET).

The only way for Google to settle this that I can see would be to use the standard Java JVM in place of their Dalvik VM, and at that point it wouldn't be Android anymore. Or replace Java with some Java-like language developed by Google. Which also wouldn't be Android anymore.

If that is the case then Google simply can't afford to lose this lawsuit.

For all the bright people at Google, sometimes they don't seem to be very smart.

There is something I just don't understand about this. Certainly, Dalvik is not the only alternative JVM out there, is it? Then what is the big deal? Why would Oracle want to attack Google (and Dalvik)? The only thing that comes to mind is that they want to get a piece of the Android pie.

 

[Bytor65]

If that is the case then Google simply can't afford to lose this suit.

For all the bright people at Google, sometimes they don't seem to be very smart.

Google must have run all this by their lawyers and think they have a pretty strong position. That is the only reason they would have originally told Sun to go pound sand, when they forked their own version of Googles not-really-standard-Java Java.

The claims of Oracle are both Patent and copyright based. The patent claims will be based on whether the patents withstand scrutiny(how difficult it will be for Google to work around), but the copyright claims may have little to stand on, depending on the licensing language etc...

It should be interesting to watch this one play out.

 

[Bytor65]

Look, your argumentation here is a mess. You're all over the place.

1. What do you mean by "market share" in this context?

2. Yes, languages such as Perl, Ruby, Javascript, and PHP have far more than "1% marketshare", for any sensible definition of it. As do Smalltalk-related languages, particularly in certain markets, though you ignored those.

These are largely scripting languages doing a very limited set of things. How many desktop applications are developend in Perl/Ruby/Javascript/PHP?? How many telecom switches are? The world isn't all accessing a DB through a web page. If you have a scritpting task, by all means use a scripting language.

What exactly are your gripes with Java (and I presume other C based languages) as general purpose computer programming language?

 

[Azathoth]

I hope you don't teach that!It's kinda short sighted.

Re: SW patents, the IEEE ran some interesting editorial in the past on the patent system and its flaws wrt SW. FWIW AFAIK Europe does not grant SW patents...

 

[John.B]

Oracle picked the perfect time to fire up this lawsuit, Droid is starting to gain serious ground.

Apple has invested billions of dollars developing the iPhone platform, Google apparently has taken some major shortcuts.

Open source has this tendency to either breed a mindset that everything should be there for the taking; or that people with a free-for-the-taking mindset naturally gravitate toward open source.

I simply can't believe that someone at Google didn't look at the J++ precedent and conclude this was dangerous ground, using the Java language with their own customized VM.

Maybe they just think they're smarter than everyone else?

 

[coleridge78]

These are largely scripting languages doing a very limited set of things. How many desktop applications are developend in Perl/Ruby/Javascript/PHP?? How many telecom switches are? The world isn't all accessing a DB through a web page. If you have a scritpting task, by all means use a scripting language.

What exactly are your gripes with Java (and I presume other C based languages) as general purpose computer programming language?

There you go again, lumping Java in with "other C based languages". Did you miss the part where I mentioned that I've spent years steeped in C, by choice?

I've touched telecom switch software, and none of it that I encountered was in Java. How many desktop applications are written in Java? An extremely small minority, unless we're talking about desktop frontends for internal corporate apps (most of which, ironically, are doing little more than simplistic DB frontends).

I brought up dynamic and interpreted languages not because they are good for all the things that a language like C or Obj-C can do, but specifically because they are showing a tendency to supplant Java (often running in the JVM itself) specifically because so much Java only exists because of the cross-platform promise. For thousands of applications small and large, languages like Ruby and Python and PHP (shudder) are supplanting Java in places where its "power" is unnecessary and the superior flexibility (in many ways) of dynamic languages make them a much better value proposition.

Obviously, Java is not "dying". But it is fading into the background as a language of choice because its primary reason for existing is now much less unique--or meaningful--than it was in 1995, and so its downsides are a more significant relative cost.

 

[John.B]

There is something I just don't understand about this. Certainly, Dalvik is not the only alternative JVM out there, is it? Then what is the big deal?

I think the other JVM alternatives stick to standard Java. So far only the Microsoft J++ JVM and the Harmony/Google/Android JVMs seem to have "repurposed" the Sun JVM for the purpose of developing their own system.

Why would Oracle want to attack Google (and Dalvik)? The only thing that comes to mind is that they want to get a piece of the Android pie.

No, this is strictly about protecting the Java assets from being fragmented into dozens of pieces. Only a unified Java environment has value to the corporate world, and nobody knows this better than Oracle. Otherwise it becomes the same type of mess that UNIX turned into with every hardware vendor having their own semi-compatible variant.

 

[John.B]

Google must have run all this by their lawyers and think they have a pretty strong position. That is the only reason they would have originally told Sun to go pound sand, when they forked their own version of Googles not-really-standard-Java Java.

Like I said, I'm sure Google believes they are smarter than everyone else.

What is undeniable is that they leveraged/co-opted/stole the Java language itself since there was probably little interest in everyone learning a special Google one-off language (they may be a lot of things, but Google isn't Microsoft).

The other issue is that Oracle can't afford to lose this lawsuit either, not if they want to continue to market a unified Java in the enterprise. (For example, given how awful AIX is I can only imagine how bad IBM, left to their own devices, would butcher Java...)

The claims of Oracle are both Patent and copyright based. The patent claims will be based on whether the patents withstand scrutiny(how difficult it will be for Google to work around), but the copyright claims may have little to stand on, depending on the licensing language etc...

It should be interesting to watch this one play out.

The most interesting thing will be to watch for reaction from the Android hardware partners as this plays out over the next weeks or months.

 

[Bytor65]

There you go again, lumping Java in with "other C based languages". Did you miss the part where I mentioned that I've spent years steeped in C, by choice?

I lump them together because you don't seem to have a problem with the JVM(since you suggest other languages while still using JVM), so your problem must be syntax related and the lanaguages share common syntax elements. You said:

that Java itself is just a stupid, stupid, terribly-designed language

So what exactly is so stupid, stupid and terrible???

I've touched telecom switch software, and none of it that I encountered was in Java. How many desktop applications are written in Java? An extremely small minority, unless we're talking about desktop frontends for internal corporate apps (most of which, ironically, are doing little more than simplistic DB frontends).

I am lumping in C++ which is very similar to Java syntactically, yet is the major language for these activities.

I am a Telecom Developer (networking,driver etc..) it is just about 100% Assembler/C/C++ in this field.

Java I just dabble with at home. But I am just not getting where your hatred and vitriol about how horribly designed it is. I am not huge Java fan mainly because I don't like VMs and GCs for anything serious, but I actually find the language fairly slick and the cross platform libs extensive. If I wanted to code a personal cross platform GUI app, I would probably use Java. Then there would be no issue about easily running it on Mac/Linux/Windows.

 

[Žalgiris]

Should I start spreading more uninformed fanboi FUD instead? Will that make you happy?

Writing well informed facts seem to be hurting the fanboi agenda a lot lately.

+1 if you are joking.

 

[kirk26]

Go Oracle!

 

[Žalgiris]

So Eric Schmidt ripped off Java from Sun and ripped off iPhone ideas from Apple. Anyone seeing a trend here?

One thing he is good at.

 

[John.B]

So what exactly is so stupid, stupid and terrible???

I'll admit I sometimes find Java maddening, but it's only because I first learned C++, and by extension, Java (aka: C-plus-plus-minus-minus ) sometimes seems needlessly crippled or held back. The languages you master first have a tendency to color your opinion of languages you master later on.

 

[John.B]

Miguel de Icaza's Initial Thoughts on Oracle vs Google Patent Lawsuit blog (via gruber) is well worth a read. -- esp this part:

Some Background on the Java Patents

The Java specification patent grant seems to be only valid as long as you have a fully conformant implementation:

(a) fully implements the Specification including all its required interfaces and functionality;

(b) does not modify, subset, superset or otherwise extend the Licensor Name Space, or include any public or protected packages, classes, Java interfaces, fields or methods within the Licensor Name Space other than those required/authorized by the Specification or Specifications being implemented; and

(c) passes the Technology Compatibility Kit (including satisfying the requirements of the applicable TCK Users Guide) for such Specification ("Compliant Implementation").

IANAL, but I can't see how all those bright brains at Google thought they were going to get around this.

Also interesting:

Sun's GPL

By GPLing Java, Sun lost some of the exclusive rights that they used to have, in particular, anyone using the open sourced version of the OpenJDK is given the patent rights to run the software.

The problem is that the rights are only available as long as you are using the GPL version of Java. Any patent grants are not available if you use a third-party licensed version of the Java virtual machine. In that case, it seems like the only option would be to to go back to the Sun licensing terms.

Also James Gosling's blog, which naturally is fireballed at the moment (note: bit.ly link because MR replaces the "s" word in the http://nighthacks.com URL with asterisks ; it's covered in Icaza's blog anyway.)