bigmushroom

tzeshan said:

But I have publicized it on some Chinese web site. 

Nice to know there is some good patriotic Chinese informers like yourself who tell the Chinese government whom else to pressure and blackmail. While you are at it, while you don't you tell your handlers to take a bit easier on those millions of Uyghurs they locked up in concentration camps (sorry - education camps). Some of those stupid Westerners have started to notice. 

Just a guess - Google probably doesn't care as much about China since they essentially left in 2009 and don't have much activity left there. Unlike Apple.

MplsP said:

beowulfschmidt said:

cropr said:

I am chessplayer and a common rule in chess strategy is that the threat is stronger than the execution. That why I don't understand the actions of Apple. Apple might contractually be 100% right, but it should have looked at other options to make Facebook and Google comply to its requirements. Publicly threatening the revoke the certificate is much more effective than actually doing it

This could hit massively back in Apple's face.  CIO's of large companies have now to consider the possibility that Apple could cripple the internal working of the company by revoking the certificate.  So a CIO might start contemplating if it would not be better to standardize on Android. Even if only a small percentage of the CIO actually decides to do that,  Apple can only loose.

Or, they might decide not to violate the terms of the agreement to which they agreed.  Integrity.  What a concept, huh?

Yes, It’s just odd that it only took 5 hours for things to change and for the service to be restored. I’m thinking there was more going on than we were aware of, likely some talks preceding the outage, but if the talks were ongoing and Google was moving towards rectifying the issue, why pull the plug at all?

I think they had to recall the certificate in order to disable all app installations.  Even if Facebook and Google claim that they discontinued the program, the simplest way for Apple to ensure that it's actually disabled is to recall the certificate and then issue new ones - probably with the stipulation that the next violation will result in a more lengthy gap.

command_f said:

Thoughtful article, thank you.

Google's appropriation of Java does seem to me to be morally, even if not legally, wrong and I respect Oracle for pursuing the case. That said, I'm not sure that (hypothetically) abandoning Android would be an adequate strategy for avoiding any ultimate verdict in Oracle's favour. Any such settlement would likely allow for continuing use of Android through licensing (or whatever) for huge numbers of existing and updatable devices. Unless Google just abandoned the entire user base, which seems unlikely.

1) The Oracle/Google trial affects the Android runtime (which exposes the Java API) - the virtual machine that runs Google Play apps. It does not matter whether this runtime is running on the Android kernel, on Chrome OS or on Fuchsia OS. If Google wanted to avoid the Oracle troubles they would have to abandon their app store. That's not going to happen since it's central to Chrome OS now too. So any switch from Android to Chrome OS to run the Google Play apps is not motivated by this trial.

2) Whatever happens with the trial it will unlikely affect the current Android runtime. The trial is still about Google's Java API implementation based on the Apache Harmony implementation which Google used until 2016. With Android 7, Google switched to the openJDK version of the Java API which Sun licensed under GPL+classpath exception which essentially is equivalent to the LGPL (which means that apps on the Play Store can be closed source). So whatever happens with the current trial, it will cover damages up to Android 6 which is on the way out. By the time there will be any type of resolution, Oracle might get some damages for past infringement, but this would unlikely extend to any current versions of the Android app runtime.

3) Google cares about the Google Play apps - this is where all the network effects are. It doesn't matter whether this is running on Android kernel or Chrome OS. So why Chrome OS? First of all, there might be some technical reasons since it's a very secure design. But the main reason might be that Chrome OS cannot be modified by manufacturers: it's meant to be shipped and updated centrally by Google - much like Apple does with iOS. 

In 2008, when the first Android phones came out, the Android market (precursor of the Play store) had no apps - Google had no bargaining power and had to allow manufacturers to modify the kernel and skin the OS.

However, now Google built a large app store that can run on any kernel. It makes sense to leverage this by slowing abandoning Android and instead have future versions of Google Play run on Chrome OS and Fuchsia OS where Google controls the user experience completely. Google has enough influence now thanks to the Play store that it can slowly push OEMs to Chrome OS.

Google has every reason to prefer Chrome OS tablets over Android tablets - there is no fragmentation in Chrome OS, no skins, no pesky Samsungs that duplicate all of Google's services etc.

Maybe Samsung will soon have to develop Android on its own to keep up with new versions of the Play store - but given Samsung's poor record with software they would probably mess it up, and apps would run unreliably. 

tmay said:

franklinjackcon said:

tmay said:

franklinjackcon said:

Meanwhile, in the real world, Google is setting the standard for autonomous cars, has the best assistant on the market, and keeps making advances in photos. It's still early days for all AI but to suggest they've squandered their lead is plain silly.

I think that the point of the article is that it isn't innovation if you aren't making money at it, and almost without fail, Apple, with a small share of the smartphone market is grabbing most of the revenue and profits comparative to Android OEM'a and developers.

Google itself is doing fine, excepting the scrutiny given it's near monopoly in search, and privacy issues, and it's persistent inability to generate much revenue off of consumer hardware. Google has noticeable leads in services and technologies that the OEM's and developers have, for the most part, been unable to leverage to enhance revenue and profit, and Google I/O doesn't appear to have accelerated that.

If that is the point of the article then I disagree with it. Google makes its money in advertising - much of it on mobile - and uses the profits to fund innovative technologies that won't be profitable in the R&D stage. 

How are the OEM's doing? Which "innovative technologies" has Google released that have generated any income other than from search or advertising?

Google technologies generate a lot of social surplus even if the benefit does not go always to Google.

Kubernetes is the standard for container orchestration and was donated by Google to an open source foundation. It's the standard now for everyone including azure, aws, even Oracle cloud.

Tensorflow is the most popular ml framework both in production and for teaching. Donated by Google.

Hadoop and all its countless derivatives are built a set of papers from 2005 on MapReduce that essentially tool Google's system as a blueprint.

Angular is one of the most popular web dev frameworks. By Google.

Go is a fast growing system programming language. Also by Google.

This is an eclectic list which is easy to continue. Google has been great about open sourcing high quality frameworks or published enough about their production systems so that others could copy it.

Apple also did great things such as webkit. Microsoft has been fantastic recently as well.

There is no reason to view this as a zero sum game. We live in great times where many companies produce great tech that is open sourced from the start. 

DanielEran said:

gatorguy said:

Of course you wouldn't want to code around the agreement. You'd code around the patented part of the technology to try and avoid infringing if you don't want to pay the inventor, and I'm sure that's what you've done before if you've been at it very long. No matter how you get there you're building on someone else's hard work while refusing the originator profit for it.

How many times have you seen some good, inventive and hopefully profitable 3rd party feature "copied" in essence by Apple or whoever and integrated into their own software while the person/company with the original idea withers away on the vine? All quite legal as long as the surgery is good.

Your whataboutism and both-sidesing are phony distractions from the fact that:

Google stole significant Java code available under the GPL, then distributed it in violation of that license to make money without paying a licensing fee for Java, without following Suns' licensing rules for Java (stealing control of Sun's platform), and also without respect for the GPL. 

Apple didn't steal code, it didn't steal somebody else's platform, and it didn't violate the GPL just because it might have been convenient for a large company wanting to run things without doing the work to earn or acquire ownership. 

Google also stole content from Yelp, stole content from authors, stole content from news sites, etc and then repressed lawsuits until it achieved monopolistic control over advertising on the web, and everyone just had to agree that it was okay Google scraped their work because they were being given traffic by Google. 

Google also helped its licensees steal clearly patented ideas from iOS, and only escaped there because it was giving away the support of its theft. 

When Apple acquired former Palm talent to build its notification system (which Google had simply ripped off for Android), Android fans accused Apple of taking Google's (unprotected) ideas. But that wasn't true, Google had no ownership, and Apple had been working on it for just as long.

Apple didn't steal code from Android. It didn't steal Unix code, and it worked to make sure its implementation of BSD was legitimate. Apple has had IP disagreements with Nokia, Qualcomm and many others, but those didn't result from Apple deciding to steal their work and just not pay for it because it was a larger company. Further, Apple has shown a willingness to pay the licensing costs of agreements, even when they are not exactly fair. 

Google's culture is all about stealing. It stole its first business model, stole its primary platform, attempted to steal iPhone and iPad, and it steals content with abandon. That's because it's made up largely of Microsoft people, which shared the same steal first, pay later ethos. 

Your consistent, slavish support for Google reflects the same sort of amorality that often takes the shape of hypocrisy as you try to paint Google as perfectly righteous and (at the same time) the rest of the world as "just as criminal." 

This is fanboy propaganda in the same way that the article deliberately blurred the distinction between Apis and implementing code.

Google didn't use the Java API to save time developing Android (they could have easily renamed function names and changed them slightly) but in order to make it easy for third party to develop for the platform. It's not clear why an API developer should own the human capital that stored in form of muscle memory in the heads of thousands of developers if they profited handsomely already from these developers writing code for them.

Finally, Apple stands on the shoulder of Giants like anyone else. Objective c is based on c and it's standard is heavily influenced by the c library. Swift's library is also obviously based on the countless libraries that came before. This is taken for granted: I have never seen the creators of C go around and Sue anyone I sight for repurpursing their libraries.

Sure, Google "only steals". I guess that's why these hadoop companies reimplemented MapReduce and the Google file system from the seminal 2005 paper and created Hadoop out of it. That's the reason why kubernetes (developed by Google) has become the container orchestrator of choice. That's why tensor flow is opensourced by google and the tool of choice for deep learning. That's why Node uses the V8 JavaScript engine to develop a huge ecosystem around it. That's why countless academics use syntaxnet (Google too) for creating syntactic parse trees. Etc. Etc.

Bending your mind like a pretzel to write stuff that fits your anti Google crusade isn't healthy.