5 ms·
I wonder how the $$ Google might pay to Oracle compares to the $$ it is spending to move away from Java by building replacements (v8, Go, Dart, Flutter/Fuschia,
by stephen 9y ago
I wonder how the $$ Google might pay to Oracle compares to the $$ it is spending to move away from Java by building replacements (v8, Go, Dart, Flutter/Fuschia, etc.) that are all essentially "GC languages with a great runtime VM".
E.g. I can understand Oracle/Sun needing some amount of money for stewarding Java, as the teams required to build/maintain/QA/release the JVM were AFAIU in the hundreds, so not cheap. But "Java is free", so they didn't have a way for covering that cost from the majority of enterprise developers who were getting a free lunch, and instead relied on the J2ME licensing almost by accident/happenstance IMO.
So now, companies like Google are not "paying for hundreds of Oracle/Sun engineers to develop a platform/language/ecosystem", but instead "paying hundreds of internal engineers to develop (multiple) platforms/languages/ecosystems".
Which they can do, and still provide v8/Go/Dart/etc. "for free" because they have the luxury of paying for everything with ads, which Oracle/Sun didn't, which forced Oracle/Sun to commit the sin of asking for money.
Granted, don't want to be an Oracle/Sun apologist b/c they messed up in a lot of ways (stagnated the language/etc., don't have a great reputation, etc.) and the competition/iteration of the next-gen languages like Kotlin/TypeScript/Go/etc. is working out great.
Just interesting to think of the economic trade-off, e.g. if Oracle had been a little less controlling, and Google a little more willing to pay licensing/something, if the net effect would have been Java today being in a demonstrably stronger market position than it is.
And, either way, the rest of us are still being spoiled by so many free lunches: amazing tech (languages/libraries/frameworks/ecosystems) built by professional teams that we don't pay a dime for.
- gsnedders 9y agoV8 has little to do with Oracle, fundamentally. V8 came about because they wanted a higher performance JS VM for their browser; the JVM was never in contention there.
- admax88q 9y agoSure it does. Why did they want a higher performance JS VM for the browser? The language of choice to build interactive applications on the web before JS was really viable was Java. A high performance JS VM means we don't need to use applets anymore.
- danieldk 9y agoBy the early years of Google applets were already pretty much dead: https://www.javaworld.com/article/2076251/core-java/applets--still-essential-to-java.html https://www.javaworld.com/article/2076251/core-java/applets-... (Note that the article is from 2000.) Remember that Google was already doing AJAX in Gmail in 2004, years before V8.
- gsnedders 9y agoAnd V8 was first released in 2008. Java applets were pretty much completely gone from the web by this point. The only competition on the web, from plugins, at that point was Flash (okay, Silverlight deserves a footnote, but little more).
- adamrezich 9y agoV8 is ten years old?! How time flies...
- vanderZwan 9y agoI have the opposite response: only a decade old? Same with YouTube actually, I can't really remember what the Web was like without video streaming
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- icebraining 9y agoThere was streaming before. You installed Real Player so you couBuffering...
- r00fus 9y ago> The language of choice to build interactive applications on the web before JS was really viable was Java. I find this amusing. No one ever built anything meaningful client-side with Java. There's a reason Microsoft laughed off Java as "write once, debug many".
- randomerr 9y agoIn underlying code you are correct. But they both work in a C/C++ style. JavaScript has become a 'Write Once, Run Anywhere' foundation because of the web browser. Don't forget projects like NWJS (Node Webkit), Electron, Cordova/PhoneGap, Google Chrome Apps, NodeJS, and ClearScript(.NET). All of these JavaScript implementations use the V8 JVM and can make desktop and command line application. Depending on security settings they can give partial to full system access to the underlying OS just like Java. If this ruling is upheld I would look for Oracle to float a trial balloon on newer JavaScript implementations and for stealing their Java's API's.
- wolfgke 9y ago> All of these JavaScript implementations use the V8 JVM V8 is not a JVM (Java Virtual Machine), but a virtual machine for Javascript.
- cestith 9y agoV8 is not a JVM. It's a JS VM / ECMAScript VM. Java and JavaScript are not the same language. They are not even directly related languages.
- niftich 9y agoThough it has little to do with the parent post's point, technical development of both V8 and HotSpot was led by Lars Bak. V8 didn't come about because of the JVM, but it was done by the same guy who wrote the JVM.
- stephen 9y agoGah, I'm an idiot and replied to the top-level thread instead of here. See my "I agree it seems that way" comment down below.
- adventured 9y ago> And, either way, the rest of us are still being spoiled by so many free lunches: amazing tech (languages/libraries/frameworks/ecosystems) built by professional teams that we don't pay a dime for. Don't those things realistically exist precisely because of a virtuous, continual cycle in the greater tech community of paying that free lunch forward? Even the strictly free lunch use cases, where someone doesn't contribute time/money/effort back into the system, involve helping to popularize the whole and keeping it going; broadening it, spreading it, bringing more contributors in. Those people end up as popularizers/evangelists, which is a required ingredient for the virtuous cycle to keep going.
- paulryanrogers 9y agoIn some cases that's probably true. But consider how few resources were devoted to Openssl before they ended up in the limelight.