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>Or Google could have complied with the open-source license, as they did with Linux. But there was no way Google was ever going to let that happen. How exactly

>Or Google could have complied with the open-source license, as they did with Linux. But there was no way Google was ever going to let that happen. How exactly did Google not comply? Are you suggesting that if Google released the Android bits under the GPL license and not the Apache they would be been compliant and Oracle would have not sued? I highly doubt that. >Android hardly accounts for a few percentage points. Java would be in a constant annual decline had it not been for Google and Android. Just as Objective-C has sunk dramatically in the TIOBE index we'll see the same result when Google switches to Go, Dart or perhaps even Python.

pron 11y ago
> Are you suggesting that if Google released the Android bits under the GPL license and not the Apache they would be been compliant Of course! OpenJDK is licensed to the entire world under the GPL, and anyone is explicitly permitted to do whatever the hell they please with it. OpenJDK is probably the world's second-largest open-source project (after the Linux kernel), and possibly the world's most active. OTOH, with the rare exceptions of Android (that has significant parts forked from Apache Harmony) and Go, Google has made scant contributions to open-source in general. Netflix, Yahoo, LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook are all much bigger open-source contributors than Google. True, Oracle is not a big fan of the ton of open-sourceness it inherited from Sun, and has even made the terrible decision to stop contributing to OpenSolaris, but painting Google as a champion of the developer community and a defender of OSS is ridiculous. I have no love for Oracle, and even less love for Google, but in this story Oracle weren't the bad guys. > Java would be in a constant annual decline had it not been for Google and Android. That is completely unfounded. Even within Google (one of the world's biggest Java shops), Android is not one of the biggest Java codebases. Objective-C is a client-side language. Java is first and foremost used on the server. Client-side Java (including Android, which isn't really Java) is a very small part of the Java ecosystem.

pron 11y ago

> Are you suggesting that if Google released the Android bits under the GPL license and not the Apache they would be been compliant Of course! OpenJDK is licensed to the entire world under the GPL, and anyone is explicitly permitted to do whatever the hell they please with it. OpenJDK is probably the world's second-largest open-source project (after the Linux kernel), and possibly the world's most active. OTOH, with the rare exceptions of Android (that has significant parts forked from Apache Harmony) and Go, Google has made scant contributions to open-source in general. Netflix, Yahoo, LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook are all much bigger open-source contributors than Google. True, Oracle is not a big fan of the ton of open-sourceness it inherited from Sun, and has even made the terrible decision to stop contributing to OpenSolaris, but painting Google as a champion of the developer community and a defender of OSS is ridiculous. I have no love for Oracle, and even less love for Google, but in this story Oracle weren't the bad guys. > Java would be in a constant annual decline had it not been for Google and Android. That is completely unfounded. Even within Google (one of the world's biggest Java shops), Android is not one of the biggest Java codebases. Objective-C is a client-side language. Java is first and foremost used on the server. Client-side Java (including Android, which isn't really Java) is a very small part of the Java ecosystem.