Google did not "strip out" any GNU licensing. Java is a specification, and anyone is free to implement it. The only licensing requirement previously imposed was trademark use. If you wanted to call the result "Java(tm)" and use the Java logo, you had to pass the TCK (Technical Compatibility Kit). Otherwise, you could do anything you want, and for 20 years, many many Java implementations were produced. There is a 20 year history of open, free, third party Java implementations: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Java_virtual_machines
The vast majority of those used no code from Sun nor Oracle.
Android did not "strip out" GPL licensing. It shipped Apache Harmony, a free, open source, alternative, clean-room implementation of the Java APIs. It was never GPL'ed in the first place. This is not any different than someone shipping something like WINE - the Windows API emulator (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wine_(software) ) or Samba, the open source windows file server. Actually, it's different than WINE in this respect: Sun openly encouraged other implementations, and they even tried to make it an ISO specification (http://www.open-std.org/JTC1/SC22/JSG/docs/m3/docs/jsgn3-6.htm). They clearly wanted things like Android to exist.
As for destroying Oracle's ability to monetize Java on phones, that was destroyed by Sun and Apple. Apple did more to destroy Java on mobile than Google even did. Remember Steve Job's comments when iOS launched? Remember the dream of Java on OSX when it launched vs the reality years later?
Before the iPhone launched, J2ME was on a billion feature phones. But all Java provides on mobile, J2ME, CLDC, CDC, PersonalJava, all of them sucked very bad. Sun's reaction to this was not to make Java better on the client (which is what Google did with Dalvik), but to go after Adobe Flash and SIlverlight by dumping resources into JavaFX. For the next few years, Oracle continued JavaOne keynotes showcasing JavaFX on mobile devices, and no one cared: It wasn't Java, and it wasn't efficient.
The simple fact of the matter is, Google shipped the first version of Java on a mobile device that actually worked semi-decent. In doing so, they rescued Java on mobile, whereas Sun and Oracle were destroying it with incompetence and with no ability to answer the iPhone threat. Had Android went with say, C++, Java would be completely dead on mobile today.
I'll say it again, Larry Ellison had no intention of reviving the Java platform. When Oracle buys a company, they destroy it. This has happened numerous times in the past. People say Google bought Motorola for just the patents, but at least they are plowing money into it trying to rescue it. Larry Ellison would have handed the patents to the lawyers, and fired 30,000 employees.
I don't think enemy-of-enemy-is-friend reasoning applies here. However much you blindly hate Google, Larry Ellison is far more of a douche-bag.
Ellison didn't destroy Sun, Sun is still going strong aren't they? Java was not really a major part of why Oracle bought Sun, it came with it, but it wasn't the main focus. The main focus was HARDWARE.
"Fact is, Google didn't just implement a similar API, they lifted almost the complete API, they copied the whole concept, including the runtime environment and that's where things get hairy, because they essentially stole the whole technology, even if they implemented most methods themselves. Let's be serious, you could take most non UI related Java code out there and run it 1:1 in Dalvik, unchanged and yes, I think this is a problem."
Google did no such thing. Android is the combination of an open source Linux operating system modified for mobile, the Apache Harmony Open Source Java implementation, and the Dalvik VM. Google didn't implement anything, they shipped Harmony. There are three implementations of the Java APIs, all of them open source. There's Apache Harmony under ASL. There's GNU Classpath under GPL, and there's OpenJDK under GPL. Usage of the terminology "stolen" with respect to open source is a non-sequitur. You can't steal something meant to be distributed and allow derivative works. Did Apple "steal" KHTML when they created WebKit?
Complaining about someone shipping a clean-room implementation of a virtual machine that can run code compiled with other tools is a ridiculous. Imagine I wrote an iOS game by using Microsoft Visual C/C++ tools for 99% of the work, and then at the last step, I linked it with XCode and a Cocoa<->WPF library to produce a working iOS app. Should Microsoft sue for someone to ship such a tool? It's fundamentally outrageous to tell a developer what he can do with his code. The fact that you use tools to create code doesn't entitle you to ownership of the result. That would be a crazy regression of rights.
If I write some Java code with Oracle's tools, they have no rights, zero, to saying what I can do with the results or where I can run it.
Also, Ellison is completely ignoring what Android is doing for Java -- making it relevant on the client again. Java died on the client, and the only place it survived was in the enterprise. Now there are almost a billion devices that run Java code on the client. Rather than trying to extract a tax out of Google for rescuing the platform that was dying a rapid death of relevance on the client, he should have been looking at ways to make Oracle relevant in this new universe of Java phones.
The real issue is, Ellison bought venerable Sun, a company which produced many innovative technologies, Java, the SPARC processor, Solaris, DTrace, et al, and he did not buy it to continue their tradition. He bought it to be an IP troll, thinking he'd be able to sue to get a slice of every Android handset sold. He destroyed the Open Solaris community. He cancelled Sun research into revolutionary future CPUs like MAJC. He basically shredded the company and kept the rolodex and IP. Basically, Larry Ellison is a corporate raider in the sense of Gordon Gecko of the 1980's Wall Street, who doesn't really care about innovation.
Bullshit. Sun is still very much a big part of Oracle. They still make most of what they already had made, they are just updating their products, just like anyone else. SPARC is still around, Solaris is still around, etc. They did come out with a flavor of Linux to have yet another OS to offer to run certain apps that run on Linux. He doesn't just buy a company and break them up and sell them in pieces like the Gordon Gecko as you suggest. Sun is very much part of Oracle.
"Fact is, Google didn't just implement a similar API, they lifted almost the complete API..."
Google did no such thing. Android is the combination of an open source Linux operating system modified for mobile, the Apache Harmony Open Source Java implementation, and the Dalvik VM. Google didn't implement anything...
Ahem! Google implemented the Dalvik VM that you mention, which is a clone of the Oracle/Sun Java VM. Google did this after recruiting Java head Eric Schmidt and his colleagues from Sun, where they had implemented the Java VM. That is evil.
Gotta wonder why a non-compete clause wouldn't have existed and stopped such shenanigans.
The issue is not using / distributing. The license clearly says the sharing / distributing has to be done by following some rules. For example: you cannot run threads in android which is against the java definition. This is just one example. there will be hundreds of conditions like these. This is an issue for Java brand image and Google should respect this.
Huh? What are you talking about? There is nothing in the Java license that says anything about threads. What the license says is that you can have a free access to the patents that cover the VM portion of Java if you don't subset or superset any of the APIs, that is, as long as you produce a 100% identical clone of the desktop Java, you will not be sued. But this is why Steve Jobs said "Java is a pig", because the desktop APIs are simply impossible to run on mobile devices, they are simply a mismatch. Sun tried this with PersonalJava on the Nokia Communicator and it was a disaster.
Everyone who produced mobile variants of Java ended up subsetting, even Sun. Sun's interest in writing these license terms wasn't to profit from Java, but to prevent fragmentation. But Sun themselves produced a bewildering array of fragmented J2ME profiles, all of which were pretty terrible. The reality is, people wanted to use the Java language and the core APIs, but no one cared about running bloatware like CORBA/RMI on mobile devices.
Google got around the patent issue by implementing a completely different kind of VM in a clean room. The standard Java VM is stack based byte-code. Dalvik is a register based VM. The implementations are completely different. Then they simply provided a tool that converts Java code into register based format.
The Judge and Jury agreed with this and Oracle lost. You cannot permit independent implementations of a specification of language syntax. Language and APIs can't be copyrighted.
Ahem! Google implemented the Dalvik VM that you mention, which is a clone of the Oracle/Sun Java VM. Google did this after recruiting Java head Eric Schmidt and his colleagues from Sun, where they had implemented the Java VM. That is evil.
Gotta wonder why a non-compete clause wouldn't have existed and stopped such shenanigans.
Ahem, there are dozens of clones of Sun's Java VM. Writing Java VM implementations is a past-time of college students and research labs. Byte code virtual machines are not magic. A CS graduate student can implement one in a few weeks with zero knowledge of Java VM internals and only reference to the openly published bytecode spec. See (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Java_virtual_machines) for an in-complete list. IBM themselves wrote several Java VMs. Even back on the Palm Pilot, there was the Ghost VM and Waba VM which ran Java code.
Eric Schmidt didn't implement any Java VM, in fact, he left for Novell in 1997 before the first real Java VM (v 1.1 with JIT) was released. Dalvik was implemented by Dan Bornstein, who wrote Java VMs while he worked at Danger. The chief people on Android are not ex-Sun employees, they are ex-Danger employees.
Sorry, but there's no evil here no matter how you spin it.
Ellison didn't destroy Sun, Sun is still going strong aren't they? Java was not really a major part of why Oracle bought Sun, it came with it, but it wasn't the main focus. The main focus was HARDWARE.
Sun going strong? If you count huge yearly declines in sales of Sun hardware. You might want to ask Keith Block, whose leaked conversation basically said Sun was dead and the only thing Oracle cared about was Exadata, a software product with a hardware smokescreen. Oracle closed the entire 1 million sq ft Menlo Park campus, 15% of Sun was laid off through the merger. Many of the core engineering talent left. The open source community rebelled. MySQL was forced. Open Solaris maintainers resigned. OpenOffice was forked and everyone left. Oracle based burned their bridges. Larry Ellison claimed they hired 3000 employees back, but the reality is, they are sales people, not engineers.
Oracle knows Sun is dead, the SPARC products they are shipping are largely designs that were already in the pipeline. I highly doubt there will be a SPARC T6, my prediction is, Oracle kills what's left Sun HW and goes low-end x86.
I guess it is a matter of semantics, but what is saw after the Oracle acquisition is layoffs and attrition, investment in "sales" and not technology.
I think what Google do is grey business. They always live in grey area by make money from other's content and now technology also.
It's hard to say they are evil but it appear they aren't high ethic company.
That depends on what you think is ethical. For people in the open source community, closed source software and intellectual property are unethical and evil. Many people believe that every one has a basic right to create derivative works of authorship, and this is especially true when you're talking about independent reimplementations of an open specification.
Imagine that your house is powered by Oracle Electrical Sockets (tm), a special plug with 5 holes. Oracle publishes an official spec diagram, and pinouts detailing the electrical specifications. You can buy official Oracle plugs, but let's say you are a guy good with electronics, and after a trip to radio shack, you've built your own plug adapter, without ever looking at the internals of Oracle's, nor any of their patents. Are you unethical? Now let's say you tell a friend how to do the same, and you publish your design freely for anyone else to make. Evil? Instead of that plug, substitute in your car's brakes, or engine, or any other component. Do I have a right to make aftermarket brakes for a car according to the specs? How about after market cupholders?
This is like a Rorschach test. A lot of hackers and engineers will say that you can't own something like that. You can copyright a book, the characters name's the specifics, but you can't copyright the basic structure of a narrative.
The people behind Linux, the GCC compiler, the original WebKit (KHTML), Firefox, and many many other core components of the internet, would find ownership of specs the most evil and Google's behavior far from gray area, but actually fitting with the community. In fact, if anything, they'd argue Google doesn't go far enough and actually allows proprietary vendors to get away with shipping binary blobs and locked bootloaders, and if Google is doing any kind of unethical evil, it's by allowing others to create copies of say, Qualcomm's GPU driver.
I see we have another new shill here on AI **cough** closure **cough**. Do you think you're fooling anyone here? People like you show up every time there's an article like this to spew your twisted view of reality (which you will claim as fact).
My block list is going to cause a stack overflow soon.
During the interview Ellison dissed both Apple and Google. Strangely there were no published negative comments on the other member of the "big three", Microsoft. I halfway expected an article to pop up within a day or so with Ellison's opinion of Ballmer and Company. Now I understand why he avoided juicy quotes about MS.
Little more than a month ago Oracle and Microsoft became cloud partners and will now work together to compete with cloud offerings from Google and Apple. So there ya'go. Another backstory that puts things in perspective.
During the interview Ellison dissed both Apple and Google.
Hardly on the same level but the usual pro-Google sugarcoating is expected. He said Google was evil and Apple would struggle without Steve. The latter is more praise for Steve than it is a criticism of Apple considering they've been doing just fine so far. It took 10 years for Apple to fail the last time (Larry's virtual graph curves were too steep) and that was with some soft drinks guy in charge. This time, they have enough spare change to stay afloat and someone capable at the helm. Their yearly operating expenses are $19b so even if they coasted along on their savings, they'd last another few years without lifting a finger. They'll last another couple of decades easy and there are inherent problems that will arise regardless of what else happens with the company like what Intel calls the end of meaningful compute.
Strangely there were no published negative comments on the other member of the "big three", Microsoft. I halfway expected an article to pop up within a day or so with Ellison's opinion of Ballmer and Company. Now I understand why he avoided juicy quotes about MS.
Besides the partnership, I also think the media just doesn't care about Microsoft any more. They are a boring company with boring products. They'd get much the same reaction as if someone went to an Apple forum and was all like "Google, Google, Google, Google, Google, Google, Google, Google, Google, Google, Google, Google, Google, Google, Google, Google, Google, Google, Google, Google, Google, Google, Google, Google, Google, Google, Google, Google, Google, Google, Google, Google, Google, Google", nobody would really care that much either. Not least because neither Google nor Microsoft actually drive the changes in the industry. Imagine if Google had gone to market with just their Blackberry clone (another example of ripping off IP and giving it away for free) and people were stuck with hardware keyboards. Google is only successful in mobile because of Apple and because the Android handset makers copied Apple. Microsoft is only successful because they copied the Mac OS.
He said Google was evil and Apple would struggle without Steve. . .
Besides the partnership, I also think the media just doesn't care about Microsoft any more. They are a boring company with boring products... Imagine if Google had gone to market with just their Blackberry clone (another example of ripping off IP and giving it away for free) and people were stuck with hardware keyboards. Google is only successful in mobile because of Apple and because the Android handset makers copied Apple. Microsoft is only successful because they copied the Mac OS.
Yeah all that too. So now it's clearer why Ellison didn't have anything bad to say about Microsoft. Thanks.
Staying on topic, did Ellison say Google was evil? I don't believe he did, tho I would certainly have expected he would. He didn't even go so far as to say Page was evil, only that in this case (Java) Ellison thinks Page made an evil decision.
That doesn't mean Google isn't evil, but Ellison isn't claiming they are and in fact he went out of his way to clarify he wasn't saying they were. I don't think I'm mistaken am I?
did Ellison say Google was evil? I don't believe he did, tho I would certainly have expected he would. He didn't even go so far as to say Page was evil, only that in this case (Java) Ellison thinks Page made an evil decision.
Is evil, was evil, did evil, all of the above, whichever you prefer, there's evil in there somewhere. The determination of the current presence of evil would have to depend on what the evil was. It was the act of copying someone else's commercial product and giving it away for free or no-profit to support their own advertising business model. The first thing they copied was Blackberry, which was the smartphone to beat back in 2006:
(in case any lawyers can't tell the difference, the Blackberry is on the left).
Android was built on the Java API structure without licensing Java so that's another incident of copying. Then came the iPhone and the new target emerged but they had to wait until it was both successful in order to be worth copying and until they could figure out how to do a multi-touch keyboard.. After they did this, they of course defended Samsung's plagiarism by using Motorola against Apple. It doesn't seem like an isolated evil incident but rather a misguided notion that taking IP and giving it away for free under an ad-supported model is ethically justified.
The equivalent would be for Apple to buy up data centers all over the place, start a search engine using Google's algorithms (or equivalent APIs with the code changed sufficiently to avoid prosecution) acquired somehow (reverse engineering, people on the board etc) and give away free or inexpensive advertising and subsidise it by promoting their own profit-making hardware using that monopolistic ad network. Like Google does with their ad network:
You'd think that if you had such a large marketshare of ads that you wouldn't be allowed to use it to promote your own products. I like how they justify it:
"We look closely at our budgets, managing our spend against CPC and CPA (cost-per-acquisition)."
Yeah Google wouldn't want to lose money on cost per click by paying Google all that money. Imagine if Google lost all their money to Google, what a disaster that would be.
I can't think of a reason why I should disagree with you Marvin and a couple of reasons why I shouldn't.
Android did originally plan around the basic Microsoft phone design IMO, tho some people see a Blackberry instead. Perhaps Microsoft was influenced by Blackberry or vice-versa, but it doesn't matter really. After the iPhone was introduced it clearly built on what came before and then leaped-frogged it's competitors by a significant degree.. It was pretty easy to see that and any other smartphone builder that ignored it was doing so at it's own peril. I can't imagine you'd be in the camp claiming "Apple invented all touch interfaces and no one can ever use one other than Apple". Other companies eventually using a touch interface was inevitable just like going from steam engines to gasoline.
Microsoft ignored the iPhone for too long. So did Blackberry. So did Nokia. Google and the members of the OHA didn't make the same mistake. I say kudos for not dismissing the obvious benefits to touch control. Yeah, I'll agree Android smartphone features were absolutely influenced by Apple's superior iPhone design. So out with the Microsoft/Blackberry roller-ball and physical keyboard interface (altho even the very successful original Droid still used a real keyboard) and in with the much better iPhone-influenced touch interface. Seems like a common sense move rather than evil.
Now if we were discussing Samsung and it's design efforts I'd absolutely agree with anyone that said Sammy unethically "copied" the iPhone/iPad look and feel in too many of their products. Even Google would agree with that.
Now if we were discussing Samsung and it's design efforts I'd absolutely agree with anyone that said Sammy unethically "copied" the iPhone/iPad look and feel in too many of their products. Even Google would agree with that.
...not only Apple, Apple was the first one to stand up to Samsung's blatant copying:-
Comments
Quote:
Originally Posted by closure
Google did not "strip out" any GNU licensing. Java is a specification, and anyone is free to implement it. The only licensing requirement previously imposed was trademark use. If you wanted to call the result "Java(tm)" and use the Java logo, you had to pass the TCK (Technical Compatibility Kit). Otherwise, you could do anything you want, and for 20 years, many many Java implementations were produced. There is a 20 year history of open, free, third party Java implementations: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Java_virtual_machines
The vast majority of those used no code from Sun nor Oracle.
Android did not "strip out" GPL licensing. It shipped Apache Harmony, a free, open source, alternative, clean-room implementation of the Java APIs. It was never GPL'ed in the first place. This is not any different than someone shipping something like WINE - the Windows API emulator (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wine_(software) ) or Samba, the open source windows file server. Actually, it's different than WINE in this respect: Sun openly encouraged other implementations, and they even tried to make it an ISO specification (http://www.open-std.org/JTC1/SC22/JSG/docs/m3/docs/jsgn3-6.htm). They clearly wanted things like Android to exist.
As for destroying Oracle's ability to monetize Java on phones, that was destroyed by Sun and Apple. Apple did more to destroy Java on mobile than Google even did. Remember Steve Job's comments when iOS launched? Remember the dream of Java on OSX when it launched vs the reality years later?
Before the iPhone launched, J2ME was on a billion feature phones. But all Java provides on mobile, J2ME, CLDC, CDC, PersonalJava, all of them sucked very bad. Sun's reaction to this was not to make Java better on the client (which is what Google did with Dalvik), but to go after Adobe Flash and SIlverlight by dumping resources into JavaFX. For the next few years, Oracle continued JavaOne keynotes showcasing JavaFX on mobile devices, and no one cared: It wasn't Java, and it wasn't efficient.
The simple fact of the matter is, Google shipped the first version of Java on a mobile device that actually worked semi-decent. In doing so, they rescued Java on mobile, whereas Sun and Oracle were destroying it with incompetence and with no ability to answer the iPhone threat. Had Android went with say, C++, Java would be completely dead on mobile today.
I'll say it again, Larry Ellison had no intention of reviving the Java platform. When Oracle buys a company, they destroy it. This has happened numerous times in the past. People say Google bought Motorola for just the patents, but at least they are plowing money into it trying to rescue it. Larry Ellison would have handed the patents to the lawyers, and fired 30,000 employees.
I don't think enemy-of-enemy-is-friend reasoning applies here. However much you blindly hate Google, Larry Ellison is far more of a douche-bag.
Ellison didn't destroy Sun, Sun is still going strong aren't they? Java was not really a major part of why Oracle bought Sun, it came with it, but it wasn't the main focus. The main focus was HARDWARE.
Quote:
Originally Posted by William Brown
Well said. Larry Ellison and Oracle are the real epitome of evil in action. That's technology douchebaggery at it finest.
How so? Be specific please.
Quote:
Originally Posted by closure
"Fact is, Google didn't just implement a similar API, they lifted almost the complete API, they copied the whole concept, including the runtime environment and that's where things get hairy, because they essentially stole the whole technology, even if they implemented most methods themselves. Let's be serious, you could take most non UI related Java code out there and run it 1:1 in Dalvik, unchanged and yes, I think this is a problem."
Google did no such thing. Android is the combination of an open source Linux operating system modified for mobile, the Apache Harmony Open Source Java implementation, and the Dalvik VM. Google didn't implement anything, they shipped Harmony. There are three implementations of the Java APIs, all of them open source. There's Apache Harmony under ASL. There's GNU Classpath under GPL, and there's OpenJDK under GPL. Usage of the terminology "stolen" with respect to open source is a non-sequitur. You can't steal something meant to be distributed and allow derivative works. Did Apple "steal" KHTML when they created WebKit?
Complaining about someone shipping a clean-room implementation of a virtual machine that can run code compiled with other tools is a ridiculous. Imagine I wrote an iOS game by using Microsoft Visual C/C++ tools for 99% of the work, and then at the last step, I linked it with XCode and a Cocoa<->WPF library to produce a working iOS app. Should Microsoft sue for someone to ship such a tool? It's fundamentally outrageous to tell a developer what he can do with his code. The fact that you use tools to create code doesn't entitle you to ownership of the result. That would be a crazy regression of rights.
If I write some Java code with Oracle's tools, they have no rights, zero, to saying what I can do with the results or where I can run it.
Also, Ellison is completely ignoring what Android is doing for Java -- making it relevant on the client again. Java died on the client, and the only place it survived was in the enterprise. Now there are almost a billion devices that run Java code on the client. Rather than trying to extract a tax out of Google for rescuing the platform that was dying a rapid death of relevance on the client, he should have been looking at ways to make Oracle relevant in this new universe of Java phones.
The real issue is, Ellison bought venerable Sun, a company which produced many innovative technologies, Java, the SPARC processor, Solaris, DTrace, et al, and he did not buy it to continue their tradition. He bought it to be an IP troll, thinking he'd be able to sue to get a slice of every Android handset sold. He destroyed the Open Solaris community. He cancelled Sun research into revolutionary future CPUs like MAJC. He basically shredded the company and kept the rolodex and IP. Basically, Larry Ellison is a corporate raider in the sense of Gordon Gecko of the 1980's Wall Street, who doesn't really care about innovation.
Bullshit. Sun is still very much a big part of Oracle. They still make most of what they already had made, they are just updating their products, just like anyone else. SPARC is still around, Solaris is still around, etc. They did come out with a flavor of Linux to have yet another OS to offer to run certain apps that run on Linux. He doesn't just buy a company and break them up and sell them in pieces like the Gordon Gecko as you suggest. Sun is very much part of Oracle.
Quote:
Originally Posted by closure
"Fact is, Google didn't just implement a similar API, they lifted almost the complete API..."
Google did no such thing. Android is the combination of an open source Linux operating system modified for mobile, the Apache Harmony Open Source Java implementation, and the Dalvik VM. Google didn't implement anything...
Ahem! Google implemented the Dalvik VM that you mention, which is a clone of the Oracle/Sun Java VM. Google did this after recruiting Java head Eric Schmidt and his colleagues from Sun, where they had implemented the Java VM. That is evil.
Gotta wonder why a non-compete clause wouldn't have existed and stopped such shenanigans.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Prasad Velkuri
The issue is not using / distributing. The license clearly says the sharing / distributing has to be done by following some rules. For example: you cannot run threads in android which is against the java definition. This is just one example. there will be hundreds of conditions like these. This is an issue for Java brand image and Google should respect this.
Huh? What are you talking about? There is nothing in the Java license that says anything about threads. What the license says is that you can have a free access to the patents that cover the VM portion of Java if you don't subset or superset any of the APIs, that is, as long as you produce a 100% identical clone of the desktop Java, you will not be sued. But this is why Steve Jobs said "Java is a pig", because the desktop APIs are simply impossible to run on mobile devices, they are simply a mismatch. Sun tried this with PersonalJava on the Nokia Communicator and it was a disaster.
Everyone who produced mobile variants of Java ended up subsetting, even Sun. Sun's interest in writing these license terms wasn't to profit from Java, but to prevent fragmentation. But Sun themselves produced a bewildering array of fragmented J2ME profiles, all of which were pretty terrible. The reality is, people wanted to use the Java language and the core APIs, but no one cared about running bloatware like CORBA/RMI on mobile devices.
Google got around the patent issue by implementing a completely different kind of VM in a clean room. The standard Java VM is stack based byte-code. Dalvik is a register based VM. The implementations are completely different. Then they simply provided a tool that converts Java code into register based format.
The Judge and Jury agreed with this and Oracle lost. You cannot permit independent implementations of a specification of language syntax. Language and APIs can't be copyrighted.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Cpsro
Ahem! Google implemented the Dalvik VM that you mention, which is a clone of the Oracle/Sun Java VM. Google did this after recruiting Java head Eric Schmidt and his colleagues from Sun, where they had implemented the Java VM. That is evil.
Gotta wonder why a non-compete clause wouldn't have existed and stopped such shenanigans.
Ahem, there are dozens of clones of Sun's Java VM. Writing Java VM implementations is a past-time of college students and research labs. Byte code virtual machines are not magic. A CS graduate student can implement one in a few weeks with zero knowledge of Java VM internals and only reference to the openly published bytecode spec. See (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Java_virtual_machines) for an in-complete list. IBM themselves wrote several Java VMs. Even back on the Palm Pilot, there was the Ghost VM and Waba VM which ran Java code.
Eric Schmidt didn't implement any Java VM, in fact, he left for Novell in 1997 before the first real Java VM (v 1.1 with JIT) was released. Dalvik was implemented by Dan Bornstein, who wrote Java VMs while he worked at Danger. The chief people on Android are not ex-Sun employees, they are ex-Danger employees.
Sorry, but there's no evil here no matter how you spin it.
I think what Google do is grey business. They always live in grey area by make money from other's content and now technology also.
It's hard to say they are evil but it appear they aren't high ethic company.
Quote:
Originally Posted by drblank
Ellison didn't destroy Sun, Sun is still going strong aren't they? Java was not really a major part of why Oracle bought Sun, it came with it, but it wasn't the main focus. The main focus was HARDWARE.
Sun going strong? If you count huge yearly declines in sales of Sun hardware. You might want to ask Keith Block, whose leaked conversation basically said Sun was dead and the only thing Oracle cared about was Exadata, a software product with a hardware smokescreen. Oracle closed the entire 1 million sq ft Menlo Park campus, 15% of Sun was laid off through the merger. Many of the core engineering talent left. The open source community rebelled. MySQL was forced. Open Solaris maintainers resigned. OpenOffice was forked and everyone left. Oracle based burned their bridges. Larry Ellison claimed they hired 3000 employees back, but the reality is, they are sales people, not engineers.
Oracle knows Sun is dead, the SPARC products they are shipping are largely designs that were already in the pipeline. I highly doubt there will be a SPARC T6, my prediction is, Oracle kills what's left Sun HW and goes low-end x86.
I guess it is a matter of semantics, but what is saw after the Oracle acquisition is layoffs and attrition, investment in "sales" and not technology.
Quote:
Originally Posted by JohnSmithSon
I think what Google do is grey business. They always live in grey area by make money from other's content and now technology also.
It's hard to say they are evil but it appear they aren't high ethic company.
That depends on what you think is ethical. For people in the open source community, closed source software and intellectual property are unethical and evil. Many people believe that every one has a basic right to create derivative works of authorship, and this is especially true when you're talking about independent reimplementations of an open specification.
Imagine that your house is powered by Oracle Electrical Sockets (tm), a special plug with 5 holes. Oracle publishes an official spec diagram, and pinouts detailing the electrical specifications. You can buy official Oracle plugs, but let's say you are a guy good with electronics, and after a trip to radio shack, you've built your own plug adapter, without ever looking at the internals of Oracle's, nor any of their patents. Are you unethical? Now let's say you tell a friend how to do the same, and you publish your design freely for anyone else to make. Evil? Instead of that plug, substitute in your car's brakes, or engine, or any other component. Do I have a right to make aftermarket brakes for a car according to the specs? How about after market cupholders?
This is like a Rorschach test. A lot of hackers and engineers will say that you can't own something like that. You can copyright a book, the characters name's the specifics, but you can't copyright the basic structure of a narrative.
The people behind Linux, the GCC compiler, the original WebKit (KHTML), Firefox, and many many other core components of the internet, would find ownership of specs the most evil and Google's behavior far from gray area, but actually fitting with the community. In fact, if anything, they'd argue Google doesn't go far enough and actually allows proprietary vendors to get away with shipping binary blobs and locked bootloaders, and if Google is doing any kind of unethical evil, it's by allowing others to create copies of say, Qualcomm's GPU driver.
I see we have another new shill here on AI **cough** closure **cough**. Do you think you're fooling anyone here? People like you show up every time there's an article like this to spew your twisted view of reality (which you will claim as fact).
My block list is going to cause a stack overflow soon.
Little more than a month ago Oracle and Microsoft became cloud partners and will now work together to compete with cloud offerings from Google and Apple. So there ya'go. Another backstory that puts things in perspective.
http://www.mercurynews.com/ci_23529756/oracle-microsoft-forge-cloud-computing-deal
Hardly on the same level but the usual pro-Google sugarcoating is expected. He said Google was evil and Apple would struggle without Steve. The latter is more praise for Steve than it is a criticism of Apple considering they've been doing just fine so far. It took 10 years for Apple to fail the last time (Larry's virtual graph curves were too steep) and that was with some soft drinks guy in charge. This time, they have enough spare change to stay afloat and someone capable at the helm. Their yearly operating expenses are $19b so even if they coasted along on their savings, they'd last another few years without lifting a finger. They'll last another couple of decades easy and there are inherent problems that will arise regardless of what else happens with the company like what Intel calls the end of meaningful compute.
Besides the partnership, I also think the media just doesn't care about Microsoft any more. They are a boring company with boring products. They'd get much the same reaction as if someone went to an Apple forum and was all like "Google, Google, Google, Google, Google, Google, Google, Google, Google, Google, Google, Google, Google, Google, Google, Google, Google, Google, Google, Google, Google, Google, Google, Google, Google, Google, Google, Google, Google, Google, Google, Google, Google, Google", nobody would really care that much either. Not least because neither Google nor Microsoft actually drive the changes in the industry. Imagine if Google had gone to market with just their Blackberry clone (another example of ripping off IP and giving it away for free) and people were stuck with hardware keyboards. Google is only successful in mobile because of Apple and because the Android handset makers copied Apple. Microsoft is only successful because they copied the Mac OS.
Yeah all that too. So now it's clearer why Ellison didn't have anything bad to say about Microsoft. Thanks.
Staying on topic, did Ellison say Google was evil? I don't believe he did, tho I would certainly have expected he would. He didn't even go so far as to say Page was evil, only that in this case (Java) Ellison thinks Page made an evil decision.
That doesn't mean Google isn't evil, but Ellison isn't claiming they are and in fact he went out of his way to clarify he wasn't saying they were. I don't think I'm mistaken am I?
Is evil, was evil, did evil, all of the above, whichever you prefer, there's evil in there somewhere. The determination of the current presence of evil would have to depend on what the evil was. It was the act of copying someone else's commercial product and giving it away for free or no-profit to support their own advertising business model. The first thing they copied was Blackberry, which was the smartphone to beat back in 2006:
(in case any lawyers can't tell the difference, the Blackberry is on the left).
Android was built on the Java API structure without licensing Java so that's another incident of copying. Then came the iPhone and the new target emerged but they had to wait until it was both successful in order to be worth copying and until they could figure out how to do a multi-touch keyboard.. After they did this, they of course defended Samsung's plagiarism by using Motorola against Apple. It doesn't seem like an isolated evil incident but rather a misguided notion that taking IP and giving it away for free under an ad-supported model is ethically justified.
The equivalent would be for Apple to buy up data centers all over the place, start a search engine using Google's algorithms (or equivalent APIs with the code changed sufficiently to avoid prosecution) acquired somehow (reverse engineering, people on the board etc) and give away free or inexpensive advertising and subsidise it by promoting their own profit-making hardware using that monopolistic ad network. Like Google does with their ad network:
http://adwords.blogspot.co.uk/2010/11/why-google-uses-adwords.html
You'd think that if you had such a large marketshare of ads that you wouldn't be allowed to use it to promote your own products. I like how they justify it:
"We look closely at our budgets, managing our spend against CPC and CPA (cost-per-acquisition)."
Yeah Google wouldn't want to lose money on cost per click by paying Google all that money. Imagine if Google lost all their money to Google, what a disaster that would be.
Android did originally plan around the basic Microsoft phone design IMO, tho some people see a Blackberry instead. Perhaps Microsoft was influenced by Blackberry or vice-versa, but it doesn't matter really. After the iPhone was introduced it clearly built on what came before and then leaped-frogged it's competitors by a significant degree.. It was pretty easy to see that and any other smartphone builder that ignored it was doing so at it's own peril. I can't imagine you'd be in the camp claiming "Apple invented all touch interfaces and no one can ever use one other than Apple". Other companies eventually using a touch interface was inevitable just like going from steam engines to gasoline.
Microsoft ignored the iPhone for too long. So did Blackberry. So did Nokia. Google and the members of the OHA didn't make the same mistake. I say kudos for not dismissing the obvious benefits to touch control. Yeah, I'll agree Android smartphone features were absolutely influenced by Apple's superior iPhone design. So out with the Microsoft/Blackberry roller-ball and physical keyboard interface (altho even the very successful original Droid still used a real keyboard) and in with the much better iPhone-influenced touch interface. Seems like a common sense move rather than evil.
Now if we were discussing Samsung and it's design efforts I'd absolutely agree with anyone that said Sammy unethically "copied" the iPhone/iPad look and feel in too many of their products. Even Google would agree with that.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Gatorguy
Now if we were discussing Samsung and it's design efforts I'd absolutely agree with anyone that said Sammy unethically "copied" the iPhone/iPad look and feel in too many of their products. Even Google would agree with that.
...not only Apple, Apple was the first one to stand up to Samsung's blatant copying:-