6 ms·

> I am just a little uneasy with Oracle lurking around, I just don't know what they are going to do next. What do you mean by "lurking"? Oracle is the company

by pron 8y ago

> I am just a little uneasy with Oracle lurking around, I just don't know what they are going to do next. What do you mean by "lurking"? Oracle is the company developing OpenJDK, and it will continue to do so. All our projects are done in the open, with lots of communication.

jptoto 8y ago
The licensing has gotten super onerous.
- sanxiyn 8y ago
  What licensing? OpenJDK is licensed under GPLv2 plus Classpath exception, the same as ever.
- pron 8y ago
  The licensing has gotten far better. First, Oracle has just open sourced the entire JDK for the first time ever, and second, instead of offering a mixed free/paid, open/proprietary JDK (with -XX:+UnlockCommercialFeatures flags), it now offers the JDK under either a completely free and open license (under the name OpenJDK) or a commercial license for Oracle support subscription customers (under the name Oracle JDK).
  - ksec 8y ago
    Thanks, that clear things up bit.
nickpsecurity 8y ago
In a lawsuit, Oracle pushed for API's to be copywritten, not just their implementation. They also have paid lobbyists. They're also greedy assholes. The combo of greedy assholes and the ability to rewrite the law is a dangerous one. So, I don't use a language unless it's open with patent grants and has a non-malicious owner. At this point, Wirth's stuff is probably legally the safest.
- microcolonel 8y ago
  > copywritten copyrighted "Copywritten" probably means nothing, but if it did, it would have something to with copy writing, the act of writing for publication (usually commercial, usually not long-form). Added: FYI "copyrighting" is not a conscious decision, or an action you can take. Copyright emerges automatically when you create a work, what they've done is defend their copyright in court, and the courts have mixed opinions on the matter.
  - chc 8y ago
    That is a gross mischaracterization of what Oracle did. They didn't just defend a copyright in court. They pushed to extend copyright to a mostly functional element that copyright law has not traditionally been thought to cover. It's a tremendously harmful viewpoint for interoperability.
    - btilly 8y ago
      Not just "not traditionally been thought to cover", but which existing precedent said DID NOT cover. Does it surprise anyone that this case was decided by the Federal Circuit? The rogue court most consistently overturned by the Supreme Court, which also is responsible for most of the disastrous software patent cases out there. The only bright light is that the Supreme Court has reopened the question. Given how often they overturn the Federal Circuit, we have real hope that we'll return to the previous precedent. Which is that since matching APIs is a functional part of how code works, and things that are functional are by law not copyrightable, APIs are not copyrightable.
  - CobrastanJorji 8y ago
    Yes, copywritten isn't a word, but their point was that Oracle pushed for API's to be copywritable, which was not the case before their suit. It's an incredibly bad result with many shitty implications that are currently mostly being ignored but could lead to legal nuclear war at any time.
    - 8y ago
ksec 8y ago
I do understand Oracle is paying the bill. As well as the team working on Graal and TruffleRuby. so I am grateful for that. Thank You. >What do you mean by "lurking"? Referring to Copywriting API a while ago and the JakartaEE problem which has blown up on my twitter feeds. I understand why Oracle is trying to charge money, and I am perfectly fine with that, I just don't like they are using Copywriting API as the tool. And whatever problem it is with JakartaEE this time around I don't have time to follow.
sonnyblarney 8y ago
Oracle has a long track record of Sales & Marketing tactics which we can use as a reliable benchmark to predict outcomes. Oracle will likely pursue the most aggressive strategy they can get away with Java. I don't believe Sun was suing Google, but Oracle did. The fact that Google is switching to Kotlin is mostly a means to absolve themselves of the 'Oracle risk' - it's a big change surely, a decision not taken lightly. The future of Java under Oracle is hard to predict but there's legit concerns Oracle will make things hard.
- ptx 8y ago
  Kotlin uses the same VM and API, so it makes no difference in this regard. It's not a big change – it's fully interoperable with Java. You can easily take a single class in a Java application and rewrite it in Kotlin, and everything continues working just as before. Google adopted it because, as they more or less said in the announcement, it was already being adopted by the community and it hugely improved development experience.
  - bcit-cst 8y ago
    but you splitting your developer base. * There will be people better at kotlin * There will be people better at java. This is a problem when you are looking at hiring new people etc . This fragmentation is going cause issues just because people are hedging against Oracle future decisions. In a perfect world Google should have bought Sun and the current version of Java would look at lot like Kotlin.
    - gliop 8y ago
      Kotlin is a light syntax for a coding style. It's as easy for a Java dev to learn Kotlin as it is to learn Spring or Hibernate or whatever library or framework the team at your new job uses
      - sonnyblarney 8y ago
        It's a whole other domain of things to learn, and now we're stuck with context switching all of the time. Even if Kotline were 'better' (And I don't think it is), it'd have to be quite a jump better. It's a little nicer for getting ideas down quickly, but beyond that to me it's just 'different' and now a whole other bag of things to support. If I have to chose between Kotlin+Java or just Java I'll take just Java. Going back to Java from Kotlin there's really nothing I miss.
btilly 8y ago
By "lurking" people mean that the executives who care nothing about open source are firmly in control, and some day may try to assert their control in ways that nobody else likes. You may not remember incidents like why Jenkins was forked from Hudson, but Oracle is run by people driven by what they think they can get away with, and not by what is good for the projects that they have power over.
- pron 8y ago
  > the executives who care nothing about open source are firmly in control, and some day may try to assert their control in ways that nobody else likes. I have no idea what Oracle may do tomorrow, but Oracle has been in control of Java for a decade, and what it has actually done is 1. significantly increase the investment in the platform and 2. open source the entire JDK. So I don't know about the next ten years, but the past ten years have been really good for Java (well, at least on the server). > Oracle is run by people driven by what they think they can get away with, and not by what is good for the projects that they have power over. I don't share your romantic views of multinational corporations. Corporations are not our friends, and while they're made of people, they're not themselves people, despite what some courts may have ruled. But like people, different corporations have different styles, and it would be extremely hard to call any of them "good." I have certainly never heard of one is driven by caring (although what you do when you don't care may differ; some may be aggressive with licensing, some are in the business of mass surveillance, some help subvert democracy, others drive entire industries out of business through centralizations and others still drive kids to conspiracy theories). When you look at what Oracle has actually done so far for Java, I think it has been a better, and more trustworthy steward than Microsoft and Google have been for their own projects (Java's technical leadership at Oracle is made up of the same people who led it at Sun). And people who bet on Java ten years ago are happier now than those who bet on alternatives (well, at least on the server). This despite some decisions that made some people unhappy. You can like the good stuff and be disappointed about the bad stuff without some emotional attraction or rejection to these conglomerate monsters.
  - btilly 8y ago
    Your opinion is your opinion. My opinion of the company and its products is more consistently negative than any other large company. And while you think that the non-Java world is suffering, I think you have some tunnel vision. Let's just say that I am personally happy with my decision to stay away from Java. And the brief periods where I had to work with Java were misery. Languages have personalities as well as companies, and there is a reason that the startup world stays away from Java in droves.

by pron 8y ago

jptoto 8y ago

The licensing has gotten super onerous.

sanxiyn 8y ago
What licensing? OpenJDK is licensed under GPLv2 plus Classpath exception, the same as ever.
pron 8y ago
The licensing has gotten far better. First, Oracle has just open sourced the entire JDK for the first time ever, and second, instead of offering a mixed free/paid, open/proprietary JDK (with -XX:+UnlockCommercialFeatures flags), it now offers the JDK under either a completely free and open license (under the name OpenJDK) or a commercial license for Oracle support subscription customers (under the name Oracle JDK).
- ksec 8y ago
  Thanks, that clear things up bit.

nickpsecurity 8y ago

In a lawsuit, Oracle pushed for API's to be copywritten, not just their implementation. They also have paid lobbyists. They're also greedy assholes. The combo of greedy assholes and the ability to rewrite the law is a dangerous one. So, I don't use a language unless it's open with patent grants and has a non-malicious owner. At this point, Wirth's stuff is probably legally the safest.

microcolonel 8y ago
> copywritten copyrighted "Copywritten" probably means nothing, but if it did, it would have something to with copy writing, the act of writing for publication (usually commercial, usually not long-form). Added: FYI "copyrighting" is not a conscious decision, or an action you can take. Copyright emerges automatically when you create a work, what they've done is defend their copyright in court, and the courts have mixed opinions on the matter.
- chc 8y ago
  That is a gross mischaracterization of what Oracle did. They didn't just defend a copyright in court. They pushed to extend copyright to a mostly functional element that copyright law has not traditionally been thought to cover. It's a tremendously harmful viewpoint for interoperability.
  - btilly 8y ago
    Not just "not traditionally been thought to cover", but which existing precedent said DID NOT cover. Does it surprise anyone that this case was decided by the Federal Circuit? The rogue court most consistently overturned by the Supreme Court, which also is responsible for most of the disastrous software patent cases out there. The only bright light is that the Supreme Court has reopened the question. Given how often they overturn the Federal Circuit, we have real hope that we'll return to the previous precedent. Which is that since matching APIs is a functional part of how code works, and things that are functional are by law not copyrightable, APIs are not copyrightable.
- CobrastanJorji 8y ago
  Yes, copywritten isn't a word, but their point was that Oracle pushed for API's to be copywritable, which was not the case before their suit. It's an incredibly bad result with many shitty implications that are currently mostly being ignored but could lead to legal nuclear war at any time.
  - 8y ago

ksec 8y ago

I do understand Oracle is paying the bill. As well as the team working on Graal and TruffleRuby. so I am grateful for that. Thank You. >What do you mean by "lurking"? Referring to Copywriting API a while ago and the JakartaEE problem which has blown up on my twitter feeds. I understand why Oracle is trying to charge money, and I am perfectly fine with that, I just don't like they are using Copywriting API as the tool. And whatever problem it is with JakartaEE this time around I don't have time to follow.

sonnyblarney 8y ago

Oracle has a long track record of Sales & Marketing tactics which we can use as a reliable benchmark to predict outcomes. Oracle will likely pursue the most aggressive strategy they can get away with Java. I don't believe Sun was suing Google, but Oracle did. The fact that Google is switching to Kotlin is mostly a means to absolve themselves of the 'Oracle risk' - it's a big change surely, a decision not taken lightly. The future of Java under Oracle is hard to predict but there's legit concerns Oracle will make things hard.

ptx 8y ago
Kotlin uses the same VM and API, so it makes no difference in this regard. It's not a big change – it's fully interoperable with Java. You can easily take a single class in a Java application and rewrite it in Kotlin, and everything continues working just as before. Google adopted it because, as they more or less said in the announcement, it was already being adopted by the community and it hugely improved development experience.
- bcit-cst 8y ago
  but you splitting your developer base. * There will be people better at kotlin * There will be people better at java. This is a problem when you are looking at hiring new people etc . This fragmentation is going cause issues just because people are hedging against Oracle future decisions. In a perfect world Google should have bought Sun and the current version of Java would look at lot like Kotlin.
  - gliop 8y ago
    Kotlin is a light syntax for a coding style. It's as easy for a Java dev to learn Kotlin as it is to learn Spring or Hibernate or whatever library or framework the team at your new job uses
    - sonnyblarney 8y ago
      It's a whole other domain of things to learn, and now we're stuck with context switching all of the time. Even if Kotline were 'better' (And I don't think it is), it'd have to be quite a jump better. It's a little nicer for getting ideas down quickly, but beyond that to me it's just 'different' and now a whole other bag of things to support. If I have to chose between Kotlin+Java or just Java I'll take just Java. Going back to Java from Kotlin there's really nothing I miss.

btilly 8y ago

By "lurking" people mean that the executives who care nothing about open source are firmly in control, and some day may try to assert their control in ways that nobody else likes. You may not remember incidents like why Jenkins was forked from Hudson, but Oracle is run by people driven by what they think they can get away with, and not by what is good for the projects that they have power over.

pron 8y ago
> the executives who care nothing about open source are firmly in control, and some day may try to assert their control in ways that nobody else likes. I have no idea what Oracle may do tomorrow, but Oracle has been in control of Java for a decade, and what it has actually done is 1. significantly increase the investment in the platform and 2. open source the entire JDK. So I don't know about the next ten years, but the past ten years have been really good for Java (well, at least on the server). > Oracle is run by people driven by what they think they can get away with, and not by what is good for the projects that they have power over. I don't share your romantic views of multinational corporations. Corporations are not our friends, and while they're made of people, they're not themselves people, despite what some courts may have ruled. But like people, different corporations have different styles, and it would be extremely hard to call any of them "good." I have certainly never heard of one is driven by caring (although what you do when you don't care may differ; some may be aggressive with licensing, some are in the business of mass surveillance, some help subvert democracy, others drive entire industries out of business through centralizations and others still drive kids to conspiracy theories). When you look at what Oracle has actually done so far for Java, I think it has been a better, and more trustworthy steward than Microsoft and Google have been for their own projects (Java's technical leadership at Oracle is made up of the same people who led it at Sun). And people who bet on Java ten years ago are happier now than those who bet on alternatives (well, at least on the server). This despite some decisions that made some people unhappy. You can like the good stuff and be disappointed about the bad stuff without some emotional attraction or rejection to these conglomerate monsters.
- btilly 8y ago
  Your opinion is your opinion. My opinion of the company and its products is more consistently negative than any other large company. And while you think that the non-Java world is suffering, I think you have some tunnel vision. Let's just say that I am personally happy with my decision to stay away from Java. And the brief periods where I had to work with Java were misery. Languages have personalities as well as companies, and there is a reason that the startup world stays away from Java in droves.