13 ms·
The shit finally hits the fan....(James Gosling on Oracle vs Google)
- noonespecial 16y agoI... I only carried it for protection! To scare off the bad guys. I never meant for anyone to get shot!
- patentavoidance 16y agoAt my previous company, we had a patent lawyer who would always ask around if anything we developers did were patentable. I would always downplay what I was doing and come up with things that might be prior-art. My thinking is this: Even though the company would only use it for "defensive purposes" (which I believe), you never know who owns the company tomorrow. And you are not going to work there tomorrow either, so you might be the one being sued. Instead, I would try to get permission to blog about it, so it is available for everyone -- including my future self. I recommend everyone else do the same! (Throw-away account - I'm not sure future employers want this)
- jacquesm 16y agoWhat a fantastic position to take.
- adnam 16y agoIt's amazing that for fear of future repercussions, someone would create a throw-away account to express a sentiment such as this.
- adamc 16y agoIt's an excellent justification for allowing throw-away accounts.
- helveticaman 16y agoAlthough one could have a "make throwaway account" link from the account page.
- DougBTX 16y agoOr like Slashdot, and have a "post this anonymously" checkbox.
- minalecs 16y agoallow posting anonymously could work too, but that could open up a whole new can of worms.
- technomancy 16y ago> we had a patent lawyer who would always ask around if anything we developers did were patentable. Easy answer: "of course there's nothing patentable here--it's software!"
- 16s 16y agoIf RMS were your cube mate, the lawyers would run in fear. They might walk around asking these sort of questions once but never again.
- mahmud 16y agoYes, they would only ask him once: after which he goes on a violent tirade, leading to his quick and immediate .. departure.
- deleted 16y ago[deleted]
- jacquesm 16y agoThis week seems to be particularly bad for Big Names and their stance on such things as Net Neutrality and Software Patents, first Vint Cerf (who after Jon Postel was my internet hero #2) and now James Gosling, who seems to imply prior knowledge that this one was in the cards. So, if he saw their eyes sparkle that means that he is saying that he had an inkling that they were going to use that patent, and then he says "I hope to avoid getting dragged into the fray". Great guy, not only does he sell a cocked gun to a company that is well known for using guns, on top of that he hopes that he's not even going to have to testify.
- davidw 16y agoI don't think it was his decision to sell. He was forced out/quit/whatever soon after the acquisition anyway.
- jacquesm 16y agoOk, that is probably true. So he must have been in on the negotiations only because of his name being on those patents, or his unique understanding of those patents or something to that effect. I find it strange to see him talking to the Oracle lawyers explaining the patent situations in a 'we're selling you this asset with which you can attack google' mode, and to come out now and act all surprised and 'I hope I don't get dragged in to it' mode. He should probably expect to get dragged in to it, most likely by Googles council as a witness for the defense. If he presented it to Oracle in a way that 'made their lawyers eyes sparkle' that sounds like he presented it in a very favorable light (for Oracle and Sun) during those meetings, if he's going to be dragged in to it he will have to repeat his stance on why this is something that Oracle can do in court or he'll risk being sued by Oracle for misrepresentation during the meetings with Oracle if he comes down on the defense side with his point of view. I really wouldn't want to be in his shoes, this could get very nasty. And it could damage the Java brand considerably.
- jballanc 16y agoI just felt it cogent to point out that the article linked is a mere 71 words, while your above analysis of the situation is 215. I think you may be reading too much into this...
- fno 16y agoCould someone be so kind to explain why this is bad for Java instead being bad for patents? I guess we all agree that software patents are bad. This issue seems to be just about them. Why is Java dragged into this? (Genuine curiosity.)
- wazoox 16y agoBecause people will use something else instead of Java to avoid being sued by Oracle. Just like they stopped using OpenSolaris to avoid being sued by NetApp (like CoRaid). One by one, the open Sun technologies will fall into irrelevance.
- IdeaHamster 16y agoHold on a moment there... Java is still #1 on the TIOBE index and hasn't been lower than #2 since the index began in 2001. Oracle could declare by fiat that it was going to sue every single Java shop in existence, and it would still probably be cheaper for most of them to pay Oracle's settlement fee then to switch away from Java.
- Lewisham 16y agoThe problem is not that enterprise won't pay, they can and they will. That's how Oracle sells databases. The problem is a middle-term one: open-source will shy away from it (and the Apache/JBoss libraries are A Big Reason to use Java), academia will begin to stop teaching it (for all the "it doesn't matter what language you use" arguments, there are many mediocre programmers who can only handle the one thing they are taught), and new company projects will try and avoid the license fees and choose unencumbered languages. That sort of thing won't hurt Oracle now, but it will in five to ten years. Heck, if Microsoft ever saw the woods from the trees and freed C#, bought the Mono devs and pushed the .NET ecosystem to other platforms, creating a sea of programmers that use their language alone, Oracle could feel the results of this in less than three years.
- donw 16y ago
- akshayubhat 16y agoI feel like all universities should abandon Java, and completely banish it from all coursework.
- OoTheNigerian 16y agoI am not a programmer so permit my probably naive questions. 1. How difficult will it be for Google to 're do" Android and base it on another language say Objective C/UNIX like iOS? 2. Do you guys think this will affect Symbian? 3. What other OS's will this affect? 4. Is MYSQL next?
- baxter 16y agoThis is not my area of expertise but in answer to question 1: Really hard.
- dagw 16y agoThe answer to 1 is probably "very, but not impossible". They'd basically have to rewrite everything above kernel (which is Linux) from scratch. More importantly it would be a PR nightmare. Who wants to base their product on a platform where the platform owners are happy to throw away all your hard work and make you start from scratch every once in a while. As to 2 and 3, this probably won't affect anybody else. Symbian (and everybody else) use an officially licensed JVM from Sun(now Oracle) and as such should be safe. The reason Google is in trouble is that the wrote their own VM rather than licensing the VM from Oracle. As to 4. Well that's anyone's guess.
- telemachos 16y agoRe 4, I would add that if you have already started to think hard about moving away from MySQL, you really should now.
- axod 16y agoThat's pretty odd thinking. If I'm running MySQL on some servers, and it works great, it's not going to suddenly explode, or stop working.
- SkyMarshal 16y agoBut Oracle may suddenly change the licensing at some point in the future to something more onerous, so it would behoove you to consider not getting locked into MySQL now.
- jc-denton 16y agoThey start arguing about it instead of improving it :(
- reneky 16y agoSun poured billions into Java; is it so bad to ask for one of the biggest benefitors to share the profits?
- mojuba 16y ago"Asking" doesn't mean suing first thing in the morning.
- dagw 16y agoI'll bet good money that there was a lot of negotiation going on behind closed doors between Oracle and Google before this suit was filed. We're only seeing this suit because Google must have turned down Oracle's best offer.
- zyb09 16y agoWell they could have just gone with python if they had known this was coming. They probably picked Java on the basis that it is free to use and fits into the open-source community.
- joubert 16y agoGoogle didn't create Android. They bought it.
- gvb 16y agoAndroid, Inc. (the original company) chose Java because their target market (smartphones) nearly universally supported Java (JVM) at the time of the inception of Android, so the phones ran Java and phone developers knew and were comfortable with Java. Ref: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Android_%28operating_system%29#Acquisition_by_Google http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Android_%28operating_system%29#... I was unable to ascertain whether Dalvik came from Android, Inc. or was created by Google after acquiring Android. My memory says the later. The Dalvik VM is an end-run around the Sun JVM licensing issue: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dalvik_virtual_machine http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dalvik_virtual_machine See especially the reference http://www.betaversion.org/~stefano/linotype/news/110/ http://www.betaversion.org/~stefano/linotype/news/110/ This raised more than one eyebrowse, and sure did make me raise mine: how did Google manage to get Sun to license off a platform that could very well kill their own? Turns out, they didn’t: their move was even smarter than Sun’s. Today Google released the Android code and I took a serious look at its internals... and found the solution for the licensing problem. It’s called Dalvik and it’s the new name of Sun’s worst nightmares.
- JoachimSchipper 16y agoThis sort of things makes me think that http://www.illumos.org/ http://www.illumos.org/ (formerly OpenSolaris) could run into trouble sooner rather than later...
- wazoox 16y agoThey don't even need Oracle for that. NetApp already flexed muscles and made clear they'll go after anyone daring using OpenSolaris and most probably anything sporting ZFS (including *BSD), in a storage oriented product. Frankly, I don't see any reason to use OpenSolaris if not for ZFS. IMHO OpenSolaris won't represent much more than NetBSD pretty soon.
- JoachimSchipper 16y ago(Open)Solaris has other nice stuff, including dtrace, zones, and some big iron features (hotswapping CPUs and memory, for instance, and apparently an advanced hardware error detection system). I don't use it, but it does have some things to offer.
- wazoox 16y agoI know that, however the one and only feature that makes everyone drool is ZFS. We do live without all the other nifty features.
- tocomment 16y agoDumb question, isn't Java free and open source now? What are they suing about?
- dagw 16y agoGoogle didn't use Sun's open sourced version of Java as the base for their VM. They implemented their own VM from scratch and are thus not covered by the patent protection offered by the open source license.
- tocomment 16y agoSo why didn't they just use the open source version?
- RodgerTheGreat 16y agoNot-invented-here syndrome, probably. Dalvik seemed intentionally as different from a conventional JVM as possible (different instruction set, register-based rather than stack-based, different executable format, etc), and given the maturity of the JVM architecture it's hard to believe those decisions were entirely for engineering reasons.
- technomancy 16y ago> given the maturity of the JVM architecture The server JVM is very mature; millions of dollars have been poured into making it work great in long-running, high-memory conditions where it has a lot of time to optimize its JIT. The client JVM (focusing on quick startup and low resource usage) has been pretty much neglected ever since people realized "Java applets on the web" wasn't going to happen.
- mahmud 16y agoDalvik seemed intentionally as different from a conventional JVM as possible .. register-based rather than stack-based That's because register IRs are easier to optimize than stack based ones. Have you heard of SSA? the canonical intermediate representation for high performance compilers; yeah, it's register based. And Dalvik wasn't the first recent VM to be that "different"; heard of Parrot? it's register based.
- ericd 16y agoNot that it needed the help, but Oracle just became an even less attractive place to work, as a programmer.
- aaronbrethorst 16y agoSaying Oracle could be less attractive for developers is like saying there's a -1 Kelvin ;-)
- eru 16y agoJust for nit-picking: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negative_temperature http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negative_temperature
- jcromartie 16y agoThat's what happens when you sell your hacker company to a bunch of douchebags.
- bonzoesc 16y agoThat's what happens when your hacker company runs out of money and sells to a business with money and customers.
- jcromartie 16y agoSorry your dose of reality got fewer upvotes than my hyperbole. Here, have some karma!
- Aegean 16y agoOK but, did google not really think about this possibility? I think it was a very obvious risk and I would think they probably had a plan for this.
- cookiecaper 16y agoIt probably seemed relatively remote when Sun was still around, as Schwartz and Sun had a history of being very friendly to open-source philosophies. Most viewed Sun's patents as defensive. Schwartz has written about how the patents kept Sun out of this mess before -- Microsoft came and said "Cough up because OpenOffice violates our patents" and Schwartz countered with "O RLY, well, while we're at it, why don't we discuss licensing for our Java-related patents re: .NET", etc. But now what used to be Sun is the aggressor. Oracle bought Sun and everyone was concerned because Oracle is very evil.
- Aegean 16y agoOK but it's not convincing to think Google would have thought, oh Sun is a company that is nice to open source, so lets base our whole Android operating environment on this open source friendly Java language and JVM and disregard any possibility of being sued. I would think such companies would think about the possibility of someone else taking over or generally anything else happening. Its unprofessional to base your business decision on something as vague as attitude. You need something more solid like an agreement - especially for something as big as Android. So anyway my understanding is probably Google has some agreement or plan at hand for this situation. Ideas welcome.
- smokinn 16y agoThere has to be more behind this. They can't be suing Google just because they wrote their own embedded Java VM because if they were they'd be suing RIM too. And they certainly know RIM develops its own since they say so right on their own site: http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/systems/index-139239.html http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/systems/index-139239.html RIM's support for J2ME includes development of its own Java virtual machine (JVM) 1, which supports the Connected Limited Device Configuration (CLDC) and the Mobile Information Device Profile (MIDP).
- X-Istence 16y ago"RIM's support for J2ME [...]" The gist of the matter is right there. Since RIM supports J2ME, it means they have paid Sun, now Oracle for a J2ME license. That was one of the things that Google bypassed by writing their own implementation. See this comment on the other discussion: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1599834 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1599834
- cwp 16y agoThe crux of the matter is that Dalvik is not a JVM. It cannot run Java bytecode. Google supplies a tool to convert Java bytecode to Dalvik bytecode. I won't even pretend to understand Sun's ownership of the JVM IP, the licensing agreements it had with JVM implementors, patents etc. But my view from afar is that Google tried to route around all that by using a different VM architecture, but (possibly) exposed its self to a different set of legal vulnerabilities.
- mhd 16y agoI guess somewhere RMS is grinning from ear to ear.
- bigmac 16y agoI wonder if you're right... To the casual observer this seems to undermine the GPL.
- mhd 16y agoI'm not talking about RMS priming the lawyers, I'm talking about his general stance about patent-laden, open-source-but-not-really technologies. He must feel vindicated today. As many other said before, the fact that OpenJDK is GPL licensed doesn't mean anything for Dalvik.
- hasenj 16y agoI think he's referring to how he can use this incident to brag about how he's right with his views on open-source-but-not-really-free stuff.
- code_duck 16y agoOr, he could use this incident to demonstrate how he's right with his views on open-source-but-not-really-free stuff.
- stuff4ben 16y agoI don't know; he's been warning people about shit like this for years and no one seems to care. If anything I'd bet he's feeling a little like Sarah Conner before Skynet goes sentient.
- doki_pen 16y agoWhy? Rms has endorsed java since it went gpl. Goggles jvm is not gpl. If the used the gpl java then they might have less problems. I'm guessing Rms does not support either party here.
- bmm6o 16y agoIt seems like there's something missing from the story. I don't see how Google wouldn't have known they were infringing on Sun's patents. How could they release Android without a licensing agreement? It would be insane.
- alanh 16y agoIn the filing Oracle claims Google knows this because it hired Java programmers away from Sun years ago.
- btilly 16y agoThey are saying that because if they can prove willful infringement then they get increased damages. However it is unclear at this point that said Java programmers were the ones to implement this. And some may not have been aware of the patents in question.
- bmm6o 16y agoRight, my question is why didn't Google know they were opening themselves up to this kind of suit? Could they possibly have known but gone ahead anyway? That would be crazy.
- WildUtah 16y agoAs far as Google, they deliberately wrote a new virtual machine to be certain they were not infringing. With the patent system we have today, the only way to avoid opening themselves up to this kind of suit is to stop writing software entirely. Google isn't infringing on the patents and sure isn't violating the copyright. Oracle knows that a Texas jury won't understand the technical issues and hopes Google will settle to avoid the chance of losing billions over a bogus and ignorant verdict. The outcome of a jury trial in a case like this is like flipping a coin. There won't be any hackers on the jury or else it'd be a five minute decision out of the jury room for Google.
- hughw 16y ago
- alanh 16y ago“With Oracle, everything is always about money. It is the only metric they know.” — Gosling, comment on linked article.
- bonzoesc 16y agoOracle (NASDAQ: ORCL) is a public company, so… duh? "So say goodbye to the NAACP award […] But I'll just take the "I Got A Lot Of Cheese" award" — Kanye West, "Everything I Am"
- mhd 16y agoOkay, at least now I don't have to think about what language to learn next, Clojure or Erlang…
- jimm 16y agoI'd say Clojure, but it runs on the JVM.
- peripitea 16y agoText for anyone who can't see it due to site being down: Oracle finally filed a patent lawsuit against Google. Not a big surprise. During the integration meetings between Sun and Oracle where we were being grilled about the patent situation between Sun and Google, we could see the Oracle lawyer's eyes sparkle. Filing patent suits was never in Sun's genetic code. Alas.... I hope to avoid getting dragged into the fray: they only picked one of my patents (RE38,104) to sue over.
- carterschonwald 16y agofor those who can't see the page, heres the coral cache link http://nighthacks.com.nyud.net/roller/jag/entry/the_shit_finally_hits_the http://nighthacks.com.nyud.net/roller/jag/entry/the_shit_fin...