Catz: Google's Android hurt Oracle's Java business Google’s free distribution of Android damaged Oracle’s business – according to Oracle. The database giant reportedly told a US federal court that giving Android to handset makers for free destroyed the revenue it could have made on licensing Java. Oracle's co-chief executive Safra Catz reportedly told a San Francisco jury …
I am inappropriately amused by this thread.
An oracle is an essential component to early harass.
Hurd is an operating system. Oh I see even better. I like this thread more and more.
CatZ is cheesy.
Herd is what you do with sheep. Hurd is what you do to CatZ. Unless he's Zerg, then you use oracles.
Ultralisks are now op.
SCO vs IBM is still running. SCO had little resources (although not none, thanks to you-know-who) whereas Oracle has huge resources. This might run forever. (Even Jarndyce and Jarndyce ran out of steam eventually: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jarndyce_and_Jarndyce)
One of the reasons why Java has not become a niche language is exactly Android.
Having it as the only language for a platform this size makes up for a considerable change in economics of Java, its toolchain, educational interest and potential, etc.
In any case, the whole spat is about a massive case of sour grapes: SnOracle tried to artificially restrict and prevent the use of the full Java potential in mobile (retarded idea No 1). SnOracle tried to artificially restrict any security mechanisms on a multi-application java platform to be "internal" and Java only instead of a combination of external (uids + zygote) and internal (retarded idea No 2). Google showed Oracle the middle finger on both and delivered.
In reality, both restrictions should have been subjected to competition law scrutiny wrong ago. Google should have started with that first (it would have succeeded at that point too).
"In reality, both restrictions should have been subjected to competition law scrutiny wrong ago"
Really? I suspect we would still be waiting for the count verdict and the last decade of phone development would have been at a snail's pace (unless Nokia or MS had really stepped up to challenge Apple, and they seemed to struggle at that due to bureaucracy).
Otherwise you are quite right, Sun seriously mis-stepped on mobile and Oracle appear to simple want Java to sue Google. Given the current piss-poor state of Java, after several years of Oracle's finest guidance and support, in terms of compatibility and security it manages to make Android's lack of patching seem almost benign. Almost.
Anyone who's ever used an Oracle Java webapp knows what a mistake that was, and that's entirely Oracle's fault. By flooding the corporate world with that garbage, Oracle undermined Java's value. Maybe that was part of a plan to acquire Sun at fire-sale price, but that acquisition and subsequent lawsuit(s?) were the final nails in Java's coffin. What a greedy, boneheaded company.
I can only imagine that the Android devs chose Java in their formative years due to the popularity (among geeks) of JVM languages like Scala and Clojure at the time. LLVM would've been a better choice if its future had been more certain back then.
Oracle flat out refused to licence full strength Java for mobile, insisting on crippled J2ME. Their own actions excluded Oracle from licensing in the smartphone market, where J2ME is totally unsuitable.
You can't lose licensing income in a market you're refusing to take part in.
I followed that archive link. I can't believe the balls on Eric Schmidt:
"It’s essentially C++ without the guns, knives, and Mace; all right."
- That's fine if you need a babysitter, but if you want a soldier, seems like you need some of those things.
"We don’t let the Java program do many of the classic virus kinds of behaviors"
- Well, thanks to Java, we saw plenty of NEW virus kinds of behaviors.
"And finally, because of the way the language was designed, and the virtual machine was implemented, that system is machine-independent." ... "I believe that ultimately Java will be seen as a replacement for C++."
- Yeah, except what will people program their JVMs in?
By including Java in Android, they've driven up the number of JVM installations and Java IDEs for developers / helped consolidate the use of Java / JVM as a server technology.
Microsoft weren't going to go anywhere near the JVM for a mobile OS after having been slapped down by Sun, and Apple were going their own route anyway with Objective-C and Swift. Oracle never had - and likely never would have - a play in the mobile OS space.
So, I can only figure that Oracle have been hurt by keeping Java relevant, when they would rather leave it to fester.
They could have continued to dominate mobile, but they tried too hard to play nice and let the manufacturers do whatever they wanted to do with phone design. That was the root cause of Java ME fragmentation issues, not the software, but rather the huge diversity of device capabilities.
There were efforts to fix that, but because they were trying to work within the JCP it took far too long and never took off.
Oracle is playing to the Jury. The jury have no technical knowledge; Oracle made sure of that. The readers here at The Reg know what is going on and which way the verdict SHOULD go. However, I fear the jury is going to find in Oracle's favour, simply because their lawyers are playing the game better than Google's are. If Oracle does win, it will have had nothing to do with facts.
So... ASF produces harmony/dalvik, based on Java, and Google pinches it and runs it on Android. Oracle couldn't make anything stick against ASF, so how on earth can they expect to make it stick against Google? Google surely were permitted to do what they did under the terms of whatever Apache licence the ASF attached to harmony/dalvik. Surely a case of nothing to see here or am I missing the point? Oh Yeah. Larry is a ****.
It's very simple really, the open sourcing of Java including a field of use restriction that prevented open source Java from being used in mobile devices. Google knew that, their own engineers even told them that and suggested they just license Java ME and pay the licensing fees.
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