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Your only accusation of wrongdoing (either ethical or legal) seems to be that Google "acted in bad faith," but I have no idea what you mean by that. I believe t

by chc 15y ago

Your only accusation of wrongdoing (either ethical or legal) seems to be that Google "acted in bad faith," but I have no idea what you mean by that. I believe that phrase normally means "used deception and subterfuge," but I don't see how Google did anything duplicitous. You seem to think I'm "rushing to Google's defense as if they've been acting altruistically". This is incorrect. I don't know what your motivation is here, but I don't really have strong feelings about Google one way or the other. I'm just calling 'em as I see 'em. All Google did is create its own implementation of a programming language. Never before in history has this been considered an evil thing. It happens all the time. I wouldn't call Rich Hickey or Guy Steele evil for "stealing" Lisp from John McCarthy, so out of consistency, I can't call Google evil for doing the same thing with Java. I also don't see how Google was deceitful in this, as you claim. They seem to have been quite up-front about what they were doing. In fact, I'll go further: If any party acted in bad faith, it would have to be Oracle, which supported Google and Apache's alternative Java implementations up until it sued Google and gave Apache the middle finger.

pron 15y ago
Google did not just implement the language. In fact, they didn't implement the language at all: to the best of my knowledge they haven't even written a Java compiler. All they did was write a translation tool that takes Java binaries and makes them run on a different VM, not covered by the Java license. Unlike others who implement languages to provide technical benefits, Google had no such intention. Their only consideration when choosing to re-implement a piece of Java or not was whether it would allow them to evade Java's legal restrictions. My stake in this is that as a Java/other-JVM-languages developer, I don't like the fact that we now have two incompatible Javas. Now, Google explain their actions by saying that Sun were dragging their feet during negotiations, and maybe they're right. Maybe, thanks to Google we have an almost-Java thingy on a successful mobile platform. I think the parties should settle, and I hope the result (whether money changes hands or not) would be bringing Android in the Java fold, and making it compatible.

by chc 15y ago

pron 15y ago

Google did not just implement the language. In fact, they didn't implement the language at all: to the best of my knowledge they haven't even written a Java compiler. All they did was write a translation tool that takes Java binaries and makes them run on a different VM, not covered by the Java license. Unlike others who implement languages to provide technical benefits, Google had no such intention. Their only consideration when choosing to re-implement a piece of Java or not was whether it would allow them to evade Java's legal restrictions. My stake in this is that as a Java/other-JVM-languages developer, I don't like the fact that we now have two incompatible Javas. Now, Google explain their actions by saying that Sun were dragging their feet during negotiations, and maybe they're right. Maybe, thanks to Google we have an almost-Java thingy on a successful mobile platform. I think the parties should settle, and I hope the result (whether money changes hands or not) would be bringing Android in the Java fold, and making it compatible.