7 ms·

James Gosling: Some more comments about the Oracle Java lawsuit

78 points by bensummers 16y ago

bad_user 16y ago
Cool quote ... No matter what the merits of the case may be, or who is right, or who has a "right" to do what, the crossfire in the battle will be hugely distractive (and I don't just mean the patent case). I wish they'd all vent their testosterone elsewhere. In the meantime, no recent news on Java 7.
davidw 16y ago
> > I think it's quite hard to stop fragmentation on mobile without stopping innovation. Mobile phones differ radically in speed, screen, memory, bandwidth, input-method, and so on, to produce a single app that runs everywhere well is a tall order, even if the APIs were identical. J2ME was a nice try, but the profiles themselves created fragmentation. Android devices are fragmented in a smaller way by contrast, first, the bar for performance minimum and OS features are set way higher. Secondly, there's no profiles > This was very true in the mobile world a decade ago and was a huge driver of fragmentation; but with todays dramatically more powerful handsets, and especially given the concentration on high-end handsets, there's no reason for any fragmentation. Hrm. He seems to be forgetting how many non-super-fancy-high-end phones there are out there. Ironically, those phones are one reason to keep using Java ME.
- acqq 16y ago
  I use J2ME and enjoy it. I purchased three J2ME applications, worth 100 EUR, that as far as I know still don't exist on "smartphones" (good dictionaries). I also use Opera Mini which is exactly what I need. For me J2ME apps seem to be much "safer" to use than the "smartphone" ones which typically get access to much more on the phone than it would be really needed. Not to mention that the dictionaries do work perfectly "offline."
  - fhars 16y ago
    Yeah, Opera Mini 4 not being available on android is a major consoling factor when I decide once again to keep my crappy Symbian phone and spend the money on something else instead. (Opera Mini 5 is available, but it is a horrible usability regression. All the functions I use regularly like "reload"(hi, HN frontpage) and "switch to mobile view" which are at most three key presses in 4 are more than ten in 5, and the font rendering which sometimes seems to use non-system fonts is atrocious, using 50% more space than the small system font while being less readable and still not displaing italics.
Aegean 16y ago
From a point where he goes slightly off topic, but I really liked it: It's not so much that the game favors evil, but that the definition of "good" is really twisted: Good adj: anything which increases the stock price. Considerations about employees, products, customers and community are all secondary. They only enter the equation as ways to achieve goal 1. Morality or high principles have no place in the corporate discourse. They maximize the stock price, within the bounds of the law. Corporations like Oracle and Exxon tend to be perfectly rational. They "buy laws" because it's perfectly legal to spend money on lobbyists and political campaigns. While you and I might think that it is morally reprehensible to buy elections, like the recent case with Target, it is nonetheless totally legal. Given the rules of the game, it would be bad for a corporation to not buy an election, if failing to do so would negatively impact their stock price. I could rant for a long time on this one, but not today… The whole modern concept of a public company is deeply flawed. But the game is what it is.
- jacquesm 16y ago
  That's almost verbatim from this movie iirc: http://www.thecorporation.com/ http://www.thecorporation.com/
  - peregrine 16y ago
    Great movie. I tried to get my civics teacher to show it in HS, but my argument that the US is mostly controlled by corps wasn't very good.
    - jacquesm 16y ago
      Scary movie too in many ways. Especially the bits about water and cattle / news.
    - Create 16y ago
      To help develop your argument, try: Edward Bernays: Propaganda or the movie "version": Century of the Self (both on archive.org, btw Adam Curtis is about as underrated as Robert Fisk -- no means by accident) Manufacturing Consent (same spirit movie as in the thread) Understanding Power (basically they simplify and reiterate stuff backed up in this book) And and if you are still reading this, have fun reading Dictators, by Jacques Bainville.
anigbrowl 16y ago
I can't help thinking that Gosling is very likely to get roped into this thing as a witness, and all his public statements are going to be grist for the two mega-companies' legal mills. If I was him I'd be taking a vacation somewhere without telephones right now. For a year.
- dman 16y ago
  Maybe he looks at himself as having an activist role through all this - one where he has to influence public opinion and generate enough momentum with the public and Sun's customers to actually force Oracle's hand. Thats my reading between the lines based on the last few blog posts he has made.
- hga 16y ago
  As "The Father of Java" and an author of one of the patents in question he's probably resigned to getting roped into this (although not necessarily as a witness, maybe only depositions).
  - jamesbritt 16y ago
    And, if he gets roped in, he might then be forbidden from commenting on the case. Speaking out now might be the best chance he'll have.
    - deleted 16y ago
      [deleted]
    - hga 16y ago
      I think that would be unlikely seeing as he's not being employed by either company. He has to observe his non-disclosure duties to Oracle regardless of the suit, although obviously they are going to be a lot more prominent due to it. Oracle could try to take legal action to shut him up but the fallout from that would be catastrophic and they've not shown themselves to be that dumb yet (I think; encouraging most/nearly all??? of their best software developers to jump ship by paying them a lot less is seriously dumb, though, unless they bought Sun's software portfolio purely for its IP as Gosling has been wondering).
jrockway 16y ago
I know I'm going to be downmodded, but I don't care, I want to share my feelings. Java is one of my least favorite things in the world. Yeah, I know, starving children, war, genocide, that stuff is bad too. But Java is what I hate most. So it makes me ... gleeful ... to see that Oracle is doing such an amazing job killing it. People want to keep using it, they want new features, they want to improve the ecosystem, they want to pay Oracle lots of money for the privilege of using it. But instead, Oracle sues its users, fires the innovators that made it, and does everything in their power to kill it. And now we have a "dead language"(which, as a Perl programmer, is a term I really like to throw around and mean). Anyway, good work, Oracle.
- mcav 16y ago
  Those of us who work with the JVM (in spite of Java) feel otherwise.
  - jrockway 16y ago
    Why doesn't the "active" JVM community fork the OSS dump from a few years ago and start improving that?
    - artsrc 16y ago
      From what I can tell, there is a patent grant on the OSS version provided you pass the closed source compatibility suite. > (iv) pass all test suites relating to the most recent published version of the specification of the Java 2 Platform, Standard Edition, that are available from SUN http://java.sun.com/docs/books/jls/second_edition/html/jcopyright.doc.html http://java.sun.com/docs/books/jls/second_edition/html/jcopy...
      - jrockway 16y ago
        Ah, so not open source at all. That's a shame.
      - _delirium 16y ago
Nwallins 16y ago
Interestingly relevant to BSD-style vs. GPL-style licensing: > The vision of freedom that most of the big corporate interests had was the ability to make their platform sticky: to destroy interoperability so that (for example) Java software developed on Microsoft platforms could only run on Microsoft platforms. They wanted the freedom to capture developers. ... "Freedom" is a freakishly relative word. The freedom of the large software companies is directly at odds with the freedom of developers.
deleted 16y ago
[deleted]

78 points by bensummers 16y ago

Cool quote ... No matter what the merits of the case may be, or who is right, or who has a "right" to do what, the crossfire in the battle will be hugely distractive (and I don't just mean the patent case). I wish they'd all vent their testosterone elsewhere. In the meantime, no recent news on Java 7.

davidw 16y ago

> > I think it's quite hard to stop fragmentation on mobile without stopping innovation. Mobile phones differ radically in speed, screen, memory, bandwidth, input-method, and so on, to produce a single app that runs everywhere well is a tall order, even if the APIs were identical. J2ME was a nice try, but the profiles themselves created fragmentation. Android devices are fragmented in a smaller way by contrast, first, the bar for performance minimum and OS features are set way higher. Secondly, there's no profiles > This was very true in the mobile world a decade ago and was a huge driver of fragmentation; but with todays dramatically more powerful handsets, and especially given the concentration on high-end handsets, there's no reason for any fragmentation. Hrm. He seems to be forgetting how many non-super-fancy-high-end phones there are out there. Ironically, those phones are one reason to keep using Java ME.

acqq 16y ago
I use J2ME and enjoy it. I purchased three J2ME applications, worth 100 EUR, that as far as I know still don't exist on "smartphones" (good dictionaries). I also use Opera Mini which is exactly what I need. For me J2ME apps seem to be much "safer" to use than the "smartphone" ones which typically get access to much more on the phone than it would be really needed. Not to mention that the dictionaries do work perfectly "offline."
- fhars 16y ago
  Yeah, Opera Mini 4 not being available on android is a major consoling factor when I decide once again to keep my crappy Symbian phone and spend the money on something else instead. (Opera Mini 5 is available, but it is a horrible usability regression. All the functions I use regularly like "reload"(hi, HN frontpage) and "switch to mobile view" which are at most three key presses in 4 are more than ten in 5, and the font rendering which sometimes seems to use non-system fonts is atrocious, using 50% more space than the small system font while being less readable and still not displaing italics.

Aegean 16y ago

From a point where he goes slightly off topic, but I really liked it: It's not so much that the game favors evil, but that the definition of "good" is really twisted: Good adj: anything which increases the stock price. Considerations about employees, products, customers and community are all secondary. They only enter the equation as ways to achieve goal 1. Morality or high principles have no place in the corporate discourse. They maximize the stock price, within the bounds of the law. Corporations like Oracle and Exxon tend to be perfectly rational. They "buy laws" because it's perfectly legal to spend money on lobbyists and political campaigns. While you and I might think that it is morally reprehensible to buy elections, like the recent case with Target, it is nonetheless totally legal. Given the rules of the game, it would be bad for a corporation to not buy an election, if failing to do so would negatively impact their stock price. I could rant for a long time on this one, but not today… The whole modern concept of a public company is deeply flawed. But the game is what it is.

jacquesm 16y ago
That's almost verbatim from this movie iirc: http://www.thecorporation.com/ http://www.thecorporation.com/
- peregrine 16y ago
  Great movie. I tried to get my civics teacher to show it in HS, but my argument that the US is mostly controlled by corps wasn't very good.
  - jacquesm 16y ago
    Scary movie too in many ways. Especially the bits about water and cattle / news.
  - Create 16y ago
    To help develop your argument, try: Edward Bernays: Propaganda or the movie "version": Century of the Self (both on archive.org, btw Adam Curtis is about as underrated as Robert Fisk -- no means by accident) Manufacturing Consent (same spirit movie as in the thread) Understanding Power (basically they simplify and reiterate stuff backed up in this book) And and if you are still reading this, have fun reading Dictators, by Jacques Bainville.

anigbrowl 16y ago

I can't help thinking that Gosling is very likely to get roped into this thing as a witness, and all his public statements are going to be grist for the two mega-companies' legal mills. If I was him I'd be taking a vacation somewhere without telephones right now. For a year.

dman 16y ago
Maybe he looks at himself as having an activist role through all this - one where he has to influence public opinion and generate enough momentum with the public and Sun's customers to actually force Oracle's hand. Thats my reading between the lines based on the last few blog posts he has made.
hga 16y ago
As "The Father of Java" and an author of one of the patents in question he's probably resigned to getting roped into this (although not necessarily as a witness, maybe only depositions).
- jamesbritt 16y ago
  And, if he gets roped in, he might then be forbidden from commenting on the case. Speaking out now might be the best chance he'll have.
  - deleted 16y ago
    [deleted]
  - hga 16y ago
    I think that would be unlikely seeing as he's not being employed by either company. He has to observe his non-disclosure duties to Oracle regardless of the suit, although obviously they are going to be a lot more prominent due to it. Oracle could try to take legal action to shut him up but the fallout from that would be catastrophic and they've not shown themselves to be that dumb yet (I think; encouraging most/nearly all??? of their best software developers to jump ship by paying them a lot less is seriously dumb, though, unless they bought Sun's software portfolio purely for its IP as Gosling has been wondering).

jrockway 16y ago

I know I'm going to be downmodded, but I don't care, I want to share my feelings. Java is one of my least favorite things in the world. Yeah, I know, starving children, war, genocide, that stuff is bad too. But Java is what I hate most. So it makes me ... gleeful ... to see that Oracle is doing such an amazing job killing it. People want to keep using it, they want new features, they want to improve the ecosystem, they want to pay Oracle lots of money for the privilege of using it. But instead, Oracle sues its users, fires the innovators that made it, and does everything in their power to kill it. And now we have a "dead language"(which, as a Perl programmer, is a term I really like to throw around and mean). Anyway, good work, Oracle.

mcav 16y ago
Those of us who work with the JVM (in spite of Java) feel otherwise.
- jrockway 16y ago
  Why doesn't the "active" JVM community fork the OSS dump from a few years ago and start improving that?
  - artsrc 16y ago
    From what I can tell, there is a patent grant on the OSS version provided you pass the closed source compatibility suite. > (iv) pass all test suites relating to the most recent published version of the specification of the Java 2 Platform, Standard Edition, that are available from SUN http://java.sun.com/docs/books/jls/second_edition/html/jcopyright.doc.html http://java.sun.com/docs/books/jls/second_edition/html/jcopy...
    - jrockway 16y ago
      Ah, so not open source at all. That's a shame.
    - _delirium 16y ago

Nwallins 16y ago

Interestingly relevant to BSD-style vs. GPL-style licensing: > The vision of freedom that most of the big corporate interests had was the ability to make their platform sticky: to destroy interoperability so that (for example) Java software developed on Microsoft platforms could only run on Microsoft platforms. They wanted the freedom to capture developers. ... "Freedom" is a freakishly relative word. The freedom of the large software companies is directly at odds with the freedom of developers.

deleted 16y ago

[deleted]