11 ms·

Oracle Adds New Android Versions to Copyright Battle with Google

78 points by ghosh 11y ago

eggy 11y ago
I am going to buy a Nokia Lumia for Windows to replace my Sony Android phone. No more iOS or Android for me. Funny how MS is becoming an old "new" alternative for some of us.
- Oletros 11y ago
  How is this related with the submission?
  - eggy 11y ago
    I'll admit the comment may have been a bit sparse, and reactionary on my part, but it is not that far of an association; I think it has relevance. Open source Android is being fought over by two behemoths in an IP war over Java code. MS was proprietary, and not much loved amongst the OSS crowd, and now Windows 10 is going to have hooks for Java and Objective-C to make porting Android and iOS apps to Windows 10. Forgive me, but MS seems to be doing and end-around Oracle and Google...I don't see how there is more than 2 degrees of separation from the submission and the possible relevance of my comment. Is it because I refused to bite on the IP angle?
- rjbwork 11y ago
  My Nexus 5 mysteriously stopped booting one day a few months ago, so I got a Nokia 530 to tide me over... it's a 40 dollar phone. I'm still using it 4 months later... I may end up getting the next Nexus phone, but If the more expensive Lumias offer a commensurate increase in quality, I'd say they're probably great phones.
- silon7 11y ago
  Can I install Linux on it? If so, count me in.
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
blacktulip 11y ago
Isn't this case already closed?
- jordigh 11y ago
  Going through appeals.
- rdsnsca 11y ago
  No, most heard Google won the first trial and assumed it was. Oracle appealed and won the 2nd trial. They tried to reach a settlement but are way apart on how much it should be. Google tried to appeal to the Supreme Court but that was denied. So now they are having another go at it in a lower court.
  - blacktulip 11y ago
    Thanks. I thought it was ended as soon as the Supreme Court decided not to pick it up.
- shadowmint 11y ago
  https://www.eff.org/cases/oracle-v-google https://www.eff.org/cases/oracle-v-google On October 6, 2014, Google filed a petition asking the U.S. Supreme Court to review the Federal Circuit's decision. On November 7, 2014, EFF filed an amicus brief on behalf of many computer scientists that asked the Supreme Court to grant Google's petition for review, reverse the Federal Circuit, and reinstate Judge Alsup's opinion. Unfortunately, in June 2015 the Supreme Court denied Google's petition. The case will now return to the district court for a trial on Google's fair use defense. Didnt win in court because the judge actually had some clue what was happening? Dont worry, just keep those appeals flying, you'll get a clueless idiot evetually and your lobby money will win them over.
  - oblio 11y ago
    I doubt that Google isn't also using all its lobby money to prevent that.
hippo8 11y ago
Can someone explain why oracle is doing this? This is not good for their brand name, this is not good for Java. A large number of people use Java because of android app development, what is oracle trying to gain out of all this?
- rjbwork 11y ago
  Money, market exclusivity. Oracle is a big, dumb, litigious beast that pursues IP and money at the exclusion of everything else. See the Solaris/OpenSolaris/Illumous situation, and anyone who has ever worked somewhere with big Oracle databases.
  - creshal 11y ago
    And their CSO's attitude towards security: https://archive.is/iz4H2 https://archive.is/iz4H2
- vbezhenar 11y ago
  I guess that's their way to monetize Java.
  - deleted 11y ago
    [deleted]
- quarterto 11y ago
  http://www.bonkersworld.net/images/2011.06.27_organizational_charts.png http://www.bonkersworld.net/images/2011.06.27_organizational...
- andyjohnson0 11y ago
  Almost anyone who cares about this lawsuit is automatically someone whose opinions don't matter to Oracle. Oracle only cares about executives at large orgs with large budgets to spend on Oracle's enterprise software. And those people don't care about Java or Oracle's reputation among people outside their community. To understand Oracle's motivations it is necessary to review what Bryan Cantrill said about the company: "As you know people, as you learn about things, you realize that these generalizations we have are, virtually to a generalization, false. Well, except for this one, as it turns out. What you think of Oracle, is even truer than you think it is. There has been no entity in human history with less complexity or nuance to it than Oracle. And I gotta say, as someone who has seen that complexity for my entire life, it’s very hard to get used to that idea. It’s like, ‘surely this is more complicated!’ but it’s like: Wow, this is really simple! This company is very straightforward, in its defense. This company is about one man, his alter-ego, and what he wants to inflict upon humanity — that’s it! …Ship mediocrity, inflict misery, lie our asses off, screw our customers, and make a whole shitload of money. Yeah… you talk to Oracle, it’s like, ‘no, we don’t fucking make dreams happen — we make money!’ …You need to think of Larry Ellison the way you think of a lawnmower. You don’t anthropomorphize your lawnmower, the lawnmower just mows the lawn, you stick your hand in there and it’ll chop it off, the end. You don’t think ‘oh, the lawnmower hates me’ — lawnmower doesn’t give a shit about you, lawnmower can’t hate you. Don’t anthropomorphize the lawnmower. Don’t fall into that trap about Oracle." [1] Nothing that Oracle does makes sense without understanding this. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-zRN7XLCRhc&t=33m https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-zRN7XLCRhc&t=33m
manishsharan 11y ago
Could the HNers who have bought Oracle db or its enterprise apps share why they chose Oracle over other options. I have have been working in the s/w development side in the banking sector but I was never part of the purchasing decision for infrastructure. I do suspect that the banks keep on buying Oracle or IBM DB2 because of their (Oracle and IBM) reputation for reliability and the army of Oracle or DB2 DBA already in the banks' employment. I have often recommended Jboss over Weblogic for my applications but that option is not considered viable because of Oracle's reputation and existing support contracts. So, why did you buy Oracle db over say (i)Postgres (ii) MS SQL or Sybase ?
- bni 11y ago
  Consultants that sell Oracle to customers on a regular basis get personal bonuses from Oracle. These could be personal vacation trips or cash.
- kailuowang 11y ago
  I imagine it's extremely rare that someone comes to HN regularly would choose to buy Oracle with alternative options on the table. Here is the cynical view: the majority of "enterprise" S/W development happens in companies whose CTOs knows very little about software development other than the powerpoint slides they saw from sales or consultants. And all their CEOs can do to improve their technology is to throw more money to those CTOs, who in most cases can only spend those money by buying expensive services/support, hiring AAA brand consultants and hiring as many managers as it takes to "improve the productivity." Well, what else can they do, good engineers don't want to work there.
- toyg 11y ago
  I work in the space. Oracle gets picked because is perceived as "safe" by executives, because they have armies of people you can shout at when things go wrong (not that it will solve anything, but executives usually enjoy it). In addition, their portfolio is so vast that any large business will likely have something else that can be leveraged in any discussion ("don't like our db pricing? Let me cut the renewal price of this other product you bought last year. Or what if I throw in a few licenses of that other product you were already evaluating?"). This also allows one good product to cover for the shortcomings of others ("ok, this project failed horribly, but that other thing last year was hot stuff! You got to give us another chance!"). Of course, they already are on the list of approved vendors, so there is no bureaucracy or exposure for whoever signs the purchase order. CYA rules. If you want to get really technical, however, most Oracle products will just "tick all boxes". They might not be the best option, the fastest one or the easiest to maintain (and they are never the cheapest), but they're likely the most feature-complete. For example, the db: want multiple active-active instances? can do. Active-passive? can do. Multiple names for same instance? can do. Multiple instances on same box? can do. Cross-platform? can do. Working without DNS? can do. Objects? can do. XML? Can do. Your company has weird storage requirements? No prob. Maintenance tools? More than you will ever use. And so on and so forth. On paper (which is where executives live), it's hard to justify anything else; problems only come up when you actually try to use the beast.
kozukumi 11y ago
Every time I read about this awful case I am reminded how happy I am to have left Java behind. Yes as a developer this makes no difference to me in any practical way but it did put an awkward and uncomfortable cloud over the Java framework for me. Using a language owned by a company who does this kind of thing just didn't feel "right" and I disliked knowing I was [indirectly] supporting Oracle by using Java.
- Someone1234 11y ago
  The most depressing part, to me, is if you asked anyone who "owned" Java back in the Sun days they would have told you nobody. Since it is OSS and aside from Microsoft's J++ lawsuit, Sun was pretty liberal about how people used Java (as they mostly profited from value adds, rather than the core language or libraries). If Sun were still around, I suspect not only would they not be suing Google, but they would be actively involved in the Android development scene, producing tooling and other assists and offering enterprise support. Oracle are just evil™
  - kozukumi 11y ago
    Couldn't agree more. Sun, for all their faults, knew what Java was about. For me Java died the day Oracle bought Sun. I am glad I have nothing to do with Oracle anymore. With Microsoft making more and more of .NET open source I hope to see C# replace Java in the enterprise.
  - toyg 11y ago
    > If Sun were still around, I suspect not only would they not be suing Google, but they would be actively involved in the Android development scene That's a big stretch. For one, Sun people weren't particularly happy that Google blatantly sidestepped them; all the time Sun was a going concern, backroom discussions with Google were ongoing and not particularly conciliatory. Sun didn't contribute to Dalvik and would likely never had (why, when they had OpenJDK?). The fact that they never granted use of the TCK is quite revealing in itself.
    - clumsysmurf 11y ago
tempodox 11y ago
This is why MS was wise to create their own “MS Java”, named C# (when Sun still existed). I wouldn't want to depend on Oracle for anything.
- Zigurd 11y ago
  C# exists, in part, because Sun sued over Visual J++.
  - toyg 11y ago
    Well, I don't know. VJ++ had a completely different target market from modern Java / C#: it was the Age of the Desktop, Java was supposed to be the client-side Nirvana of write-once-run-everywhere, and VJ++ was a blatant embrace-and-extinguish play in that sense ("write once, run on Windows only" basically), based on platform-specific UI libs. C# was developed when the market had changed and Java had become the language of choice for web apps. MS needed a competitor there, and it didn't make sense for their platform lock-in strategies to build anything but MS-specific tech. They couldn't have adopted Java at that point, regardless of lawsuits.
    - Zigurd 11y ago
      Visual J++ was, at the time, the best implementation of Java as a language integrated with an IDE, UI stack, and runtime that ran on a commonly used OS. If it was "embrace and extinguish" it had considerable merit. It would have completely transformed Windows software development, especially for interactive software. At the time, Forte and Eclipse were a bog-slow nightmare to use with insane hardware requirements relative to even high-end PCs of that time, and Sun's UI stacks still haven't produced any human-usable software, never mind back then. I don't always think Microsoft should win IP cases, but Sun destroyed a very worthwhile product and they had no comparable product to protect. It was a purely destructive action.
kahirsch 11y ago
What we really need is a revision to the copyright statutes. Is anybody working on that?
ericmo 11y ago
If Android usage of Java is in violation of Oracle's copyright, than why isn't OpenJDK? I don't code much in Java and when I do I use Oracle's version, so I don't know how different it is, but I guess the "API" should be the same, no? Also, I don't see how is it better for Google to be sued by Oracle than using OpenJDK just because it is GPL-ed. Why? It doesn't make sense!
- papercrane 11y ago
  > If Android usage of Java is in violation of Oracle's copyright, than why isn't OpenJDK? OpenJDK was released by Sun as GPL.
  - ericmo 11y ago
    Well, couldn't be simpler than that, thanks for clearing that up for me!
PSeitz 11y ago
Java is dying since Oracle bought it. Google made a mistake to build Android upon it.

78 points by ghosh 11y ago

eggy 11y ago

I am going to buy a Nokia Lumia for Windows to replace my Sony Android phone. No more iOS or Android for me. Funny how MS is becoming an old "new" alternative for some of us.

Oletros 11y ago
How is this related with the submission?
- eggy 11y ago
  I'll admit the comment may have been a bit sparse, and reactionary on my part, but it is not that far of an association; I think it has relevance. Open source Android is being fought over by two behemoths in an IP war over Java code. MS was proprietary, and not much loved amongst the OSS crowd, and now Windows 10 is going to have hooks for Java and Objective-C to make porting Android and iOS apps to Windows 10. Forgive me, but MS seems to be doing and end-around Oracle and Google...I don't see how there is more than 2 degrees of separation from the submission and the possible relevance of my comment. Is it because I refused to bite on the IP angle?
rjbwork 11y ago
My Nexus 5 mysteriously stopped booting one day a few months ago, so I got a Nokia 530 to tide me over... it's a 40 dollar phone. I'm still using it 4 months later... I may end up getting the next Nexus phone, but If the more expensive Lumias offer a commensurate increase in quality, I'd say they're probably great phones.
silon7 11y ago
Can I install Linux on it? If so, count me in.

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]

blacktulip 11y ago

Isn't this case already closed?

jordigh 11y ago
Going through appeals.
rdsnsca 11y ago
No, most heard Google won the first trial and assumed it was. Oracle appealed and won the 2nd trial. They tried to reach a settlement but are way apart on how much it should be. Google tried to appeal to the Supreme Court but that was denied. So now they are having another go at it in a lower court.
- blacktulip 11y ago
  Thanks. I thought it was ended as soon as the Supreme Court decided not to pick it up.
shadowmint 11y ago
https://www.eff.org/cases/oracle-v-google https://www.eff.org/cases/oracle-v-google On October 6, 2014, Google filed a petition asking the U.S. Supreme Court to review the Federal Circuit's decision. On November 7, 2014, EFF filed an amicus brief on behalf of many computer scientists that asked the Supreme Court to grant Google's petition for review, reverse the Federal Circuit, and reinstate Judge Alsup's opinion. Unfortunately, in June 2015 the Supreme Court denied Google's petition. The case will now return to the district court for a trial on Google's fair use defense. Didnt win in court because the judge actually had some clue what was happening? Dont worry, just keep those appeals flying, you'll get a clueless idiot evetually and your lobby money will win them over.
- oblio 11y ago
  I doubt that Google isn't also using all its lobby money to prevent that.

hippo8 11y ago

Can someone explain why oracle is doing this? This is not good for their brand name, this is not good for Java. A large number of people use Java because of android app development, what is oracle trying to gain out of all this?

rjbwork 11y ago
Money, market exclusivity. Oracle is a big, dumb, litigious beast that pursues IP and money at the exclusion of everything else. See the Solaris/OpenSolaris/Illumous situation, and anyone who has ever worked somewhere with big Oracle databases.
- creshal 11y ago
  And their CSO's attitude towards security: https://archive.is/iz4H2 https://archive.is/iz4H2
vbezhenar 11y ago
I guess that's their way to monetize Java.
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
quarterto 11y ago
http://www.bonkersworld.net/images/2011.06.27_organizational_charts.png http://www.bonkersworld.net/images/2011.06.27_organizational...
andyjohnson0 11y ago
Almost anyone who cares about this lawsuit is automatically someone whose opinions don't matter to Oracle. Oracle only cares about executives at large orgs with large budgets to spend on Oracle's enterprise software. And those people don't care about Java or Oracle's reputation among people outside their community. To understand Oracle's motivations it is necessary to review what Bryan Cantrill said about the company: "As you know people, as you learn about things, you realize that these generalizations we have are, virtually to a generalization, false. Well, except for this one, as it turns out. What you think of Oracle, is even truer than you think it is. There has been no entity in human history with less complexity or nuance to it than Oracle. And I gotta say, as someone who has seen that complexity for my entire life, it’s very hard to get used to that idea. It’s like, ‘surely this is more complicated!’ but it’s like: Wow, this is really simple! This company is very straightforward, in its defense. This company is about one man, his alter-ego, and what he wants to inflict upon humanity — that’s it! …Ship mediocrity, inflict misery, lie our asses off, screw our customers, and make a whole shitload of money. Yeah… you talk to Oracle, it’s like, ‘no, we don’t fucking make dreams happen — we make money!’ …You need to think of Larry Ellison the way you think of a lawnmower. You don’t anthropomorphize your lawnmower, the lawnmower just mows the lawn, you stick your hand in there and it’ll chop it off, the end. You don’t think ‘oh, the lawnmower hates me’ — lawnmower doesn’t give a shit about you, lawnmower can’t hate you. Don’t anthropomorphize the lawnmower. Don’t fall into that trap about Oracle." [1] Nothing that Oracle does makes sense without understanding this. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-zRN7XLCRhc&t=33m https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-zRN7XLCRhc&t=33m

manishsharan 11y ago

Could the HNers who have bought Oracle db or its enterprise apps share why they chose Oracle over other options. I have have been working in the s/w development side in the banking sector but I was never part of the purchasing decision for infrastructure. I do suspect that the banks keep on buying Oracle or IBM DB2 because of their (Oracle and IBM) reputation for reliability and the army of Oracle or DB2 DBA already in the banks' employment. I have often recommended Jboss over Weblogic for my applications but that option is not considered viable because of Oracle's reputation and existing support contracts. So, why did you buy Oracle db over say (i)Postgres (ii) MS SQL or Sybase ?

bni 11y ago
Consultants that sell Oracle to customers on a regular basis get personal bonuses from Oracle. These could be personal vacation trips or cash.
kailuowang 11y ago
I imagine it's extremely rare that someone comes to HN regularly would choose to buy Oracle with alternative options on the table. Here is the cynical view: the majority of "enterprise" S/W development happens in companies whose CTOs knows very little about software development other than the powerpoint slides they saw from sales or consultants. And all their CEOs can do to improve their technology is to throw more money to those CTOs, who in most cases can only spend those money by buying expensive services/support, hiring AAA brand consultants and hiring as many managers as it takes to "improve the productivity." Well, what else can they do, good engineers don't want to work there.
toyg 11y ago
I work in the space. Oracle gets picked because is perceived as "safe" by executives, because they have armies of people you can shout at when things go wrong (not that it will solve anything, but executives usually enjoy it). In addition, their portfolio is so vast that any large business will likely have something else that can be leveraged in any discussion ("don't like our db pricing? Let me cut the renewal price of this other product you bought last year. Or what if I throw in a few licenses of that other product you were already evaluating?"). This also allows one good product to cover for the shortcomings of others ("ok, this project failed horribly, but that other thing last year was hot stuff! You got to give us another chance!"). Of course, they already are on the list of approved vendors, so there is no bureaucracy or exposure for whoever signs the purchase order. CYA rules. If you want to get really technical, however, most Oracle products will just "tick all boxes". They might not be the best option, the fastest one or the easiest to maintain (and they are never the cheapest), but they're likely the most feature-complete. For example, the db: want multiple active-active instances? can do. Active-passive? can do. Multiple names for same instance? can do. Multiple instances on same box? can do. Cross-platform? can do. Working without DNS? can do. Objects? can do. XML? Can do. Your company has weird storage requirements? No prob. Maintenance tools? More than you will ever use. And so on and so forth. On paper (which is where executives live), it's hard to justify anything else; problems only come up when you actually try to use the beast.

kozukumi 11y ago

Every time I read about this awful case I am reminded how happy I am to have left Java behind. Yes as a developer this makes no difference to me in any practical way but it did put an awkward and uncomfortable cloud over the Java framework for me. Using a language owned by a company who does this kind of thing just didn't feel "right" and I disliked knowing I was [indirectly] supporting Oracle by using Java.

Someone1234 11y ago
The most depressing part, to me, is if you asked anyone who "owned" Java back in the Sun days they would have told you nobody. Since it is OSS and aside from Microsoft's J++ lawsuit, Sun was pretty liberal about how people used Java (as they mostly profited from value adds, rather than the core language or libraries). If Sun were still around, I suspect not only would they not be suing Google, but they would be actively involved in the Android development scene, producing tooling and other assists and offering enterprise support. Oracle are just evil™
- kozukumi 11y ago
  Couldn't agree more. Sun, for all their faults, knew what Java was about. For me Java died the day Oracle bought Sun. I am glad I have nothing to do with Oracle anymore. With Microsoft making more and more of .NET open source I hope to see C# replace Java in the enterprise.
- toyg 11y ago
  > If Sun were still around, I suspect not only would they not be suing Google, but they would be actively involved in the Android development scene That's a big stretch. For one, Sun people weren't particularly happy that Google blatantly sidestepped them; all the time Sun was a going concern, backroom discussions with Google were ongoing and not particularly conciliatory. Sun didn't contribute to Dalvik and would likely never had (why, when they had OpenJDK?). The fact that they never granted use of the TCK is quite revealing in itself.
  - clumsysmurf 11y ago

tempodox 11y ago

This is why MS was wise to create their own “MS Java”, named C# (when Sun still existed). I wouldn't want to depend on Oracle for anything.

Zigurd 11y ago
C# exists, in part, because Sun sued over Visual J++.
- toyg 11y ago
  Well, I don't know. VJ++ had a completely different target market from modern Java / C#: it was the Age of the Desktop, Java was supposed to be the client-side Nirvana of write-once-run-everywhere, and VJ++ was a blatant embrace-and-extinguish play in that sense ("write once, run on Windows only" basically), based on platform-specific UI libs. C# was developed when the market had changed and Java had become the language of choice for web apps. MS needed a competitor there, and it didn't make sense for their platform lock-in strategies to build anything but MS-specific tech. They couldn't have adopted Java at that point, regardless of lawsuits.
  - Zigurd 11y ago
    Visual J++ was, at the time, the best implementation of Java as a language integrated with an IDE, UI stack, and runtime that ran on a commonly used OS. If it was "embrace and extinguish" it had considerable merit. It would have completely transformed Windows software development, especially for interactive software. At the time, Forte and Eclipse were a bog-slow nightmare to use with insane hardware requirements relative to even high-end PCs of that time, and Sun's UI stacks still haven't produced any human-usable software, never mind back then. I don't always think Microsoft should win IP cases, but Sun destroyed a very worthwhile product and they had no comparable product to protect. It was a purely destructive action.

kahirsch 11y ago

What we really need is a revision to the copyright statutes. Is anybody working on that?

ericmo 11y ago

If Android usage of Java is in violation of Oracle's copyright, than why isn't OpenJDK? I don't code much in Java and when I do I use Oracle's version, so I don't know how different it is, but I guess the "API" should be the same, no? Also, I don't see how is it better for Google to be sued by Oracle than using OpenJDK just because it is GPL-ed. Why? It doesn't make sense!

papercrane 11y ago
> If Android usage of Java is in violation of Oracle's copyright, than why isn't OpenJDK? OpenJDK was released by Sun as GPL.
- ericmo 11y ago
  Well, couldn't be simpler than that, thanks for clearing that up for me!

PSeitz 11y ago

Java is dying since Oracle bought it. Google made a mistake to build Android upon it.