cloudguy

Why is this a headline? I thought it was:

A. common knowledge

and

B. standard business practice

Before people say "but Google" ... when did YouTube, Gmail, Chrome, Google Maps etc. get released on Windows Phone again? Or even in the Windows Store so that they can be installed on Microsoft's various attempts to compete with ChromeOS (Windows Education, Windows 10S and soon Windows 10X)? Microsoft fans to this day grumble that Google's refusing to release Windows Mobile apps for their services killed any chance that it had to survive. (What they leave out was that Microsoft's locking out Google services from their mobile platforms is what caused Google to create Android in the first place. A decision that Microsoft surely regrets to this day.)

As usual, this article ignores that Samsung created a very similar product for a third party company years ago. And they launched their own version of that product months ago. This is the third iteration of the same idea by Samsung, with the only difference is that 3.0 uses UWB where 1.0 and 2.0 used bluetooth.

But you folks are going to believe what you choose to anyway.

auxio said:

There is no doubt that Google's copying of Java without paying licensing fees gave them an unfair advantage over competitors who were paying those same licensing fees at the time.  It essentially gained them a mature app development platform and community of developers which Sun had invested a lot of money to build, without them paying a cent.  Which, in turn, made it easy for those developers to port their existing apps to Android and build a rich app ecosystem to compete with Apple (who had actually invested in their own app development platform).

The fact that there aren't laws to protect companies which invest heavily in R&D against those which simply look for ways to work around licensing agreements is a sad state of affairs.

1. No one was paying Sun licensing fees. Sun was giving Java away for free to anyone and everyone who wanted it because they wanted Java to be the basis of an open Internet platform that Microsoft was desperately trying to use IIS and .Net to lock down for themselves. 
2. There are laws to protect companies. Sun didn't avail themselves of those laws because they didn't want to. Sun actually had an OpenJDK version of Java the whole time. Had Google copied the practically identical OpenJDK APIs instead of the "licensed but everyone uses for free anyway" Sun JDK APIs there never would have been a case. Google switched from the Sun JDK APIs to the OpenJDK ones as soon as Oracle filed their ridiculous suit, and it took 6 months tops.
3. Didn't you pay attention to the trial? Sun's own CEO got on the stand and said the exact same thing. Oracle's counterargument was that they weren't obliged to heed Sun's FOSS stance retroactively. Which is actually true from a legal standpoint by the way. But that is totally different from what you are claiming. 
4. Sun's own mobile platform was a failure. The only big customer they got for it was Amazon to make the original Kindle e-readers, plus a couple of companies who used it to make feature phones. Oracle's claim that Google stole Android and destroyed Java's mobile platform was false to begin with.

Had Java not been free and open from day one, no one would have used it. Everyone would have used .NET instead, which is exactly what Sun didn't want. Good grief ...

Please recall that the original judge to rule on this case was a former programmer - as a hobby - and he called out Oracle's nonsense for what it was. Had the subsequent judges, juries etc. been required to take an online programming course Oracle's years long attempt to profit off Google's hard work would have been avoided. Keep in mind: Oracle was the same company who spent years claiming that the cloud would fail. Now Azure and Amazon both are making a mint on tools that will convert Oracle's byzantine legacy database into a much more modern cloud database for free. 

Oracle bought Sun - who agreed to let Google use the APIs and stated so in the trial - because they thought that they could make hundreds of billions of Java licenses. They didn't know - because I guess all their programmers were still using PL/1 and COBOL - that virtually none of the people who used Java paid for it. Sun gave Java away to nearly everyone for free because they wanted to create a standard Internet programming platform for front end, middleware and backend. Legacy companies like Microsoft, Oracle and Apple couldn't wrap their heads around the need for such a thing at the time. Even though they wanted to get paid and licensed, they were fine with Google not paying them because Sun wanted Android to succeed too. Yes, Sun wanted Android to succeed as an open mobile platform because their alternative as an open mobile platform had already failed. If Android wasn't going to succeed then mobile would have been split between proprietary incompatible platforms by Apple, Microsoft and Nokia. 

Oracle made a bad purchase and tried to sue Google in order to recoup some of their bad investment. Didn't work. Plus, software development has moved on anyway. Java is now a legacy platform. The MEAN stack - MongoDB and Javascript frameworks Express, Angular and NodeJS - has replaced the LAMP (Linux, Apache, MongoDB and Python/Perl) stack. Also the people who would have been learning Java 10 years ago are now learning Python, Golang and Rust. Even Google has essentially replaced Java on Android with Kotlin (Javascript that compiles to the JVM). 

Google delayed ARM on ChromeOS because they didn't want Oracle to cite it as a talking point. Now they are moving full steam ahead, licensing ChromeOS on Qualcomm (before it was only available on MediaTek) and also designing their own ARM SOC for use with ChromeOS and Android. They knew after the Supreme Court argument that Oracle was going to lose. All Oracle did with this nonsense was enrich their lawyers. Instead of wasting 8 years suing Google they should have spent that time and money developing their own next generation cloud database and programming language platform. Instead they bought formerly open source MySQL instead, resulting in pretty much everyone who used MySQL dumping it for any alternative they could find.

@The_New_tonton and @GeorgeBMac:

Enough of the self-serving narratives from people who don't buy or use Android phones. Here is the truth: LG was a bizarre combination of arrogant and cowardly.

They were cowardly because - similar to Sony - they refused to advertise. It is amazing: both Sony and LG were willing to spend tons advertising their legacy products like video, audio, appliances etc. But the next ad that I see for a Sony or LG smartphone or tablet will be the first. Well I take that back: LG aired a series of weird ads a few years ago that didn't even show their phones.

As for the arrogant part: they were unwilling to go the route of HMD Global (Nokia), Motorola, ZTE and the rest by focusing on compelling midrange and cheap devices. It is simple: offer a basically unmodified version of Android, ditch your custom apps and services (which are costly to make and maintain but only lose money) and better yet get Microsoft, Amazon or someone else to pay you to put their apps and skin (an Android skin is a custom UX/UI to replace the generic one that Google ships that everybody hates) on your device. You can then either put the latest Qualcomm CPU in a device with last year's tech - like OnePlus once did - or put either last year's Qualcomm CPU or the latest MediaTek CPU in a device with this year's tech. You wind up with a very good device that costs half what a Samsung Galaxy S or iPhone costs. 

That - and offering "gaming phones" that actually exceed Samsung flagship specs and performance that are made primarily for the Asian market - are what the other Android companies are doing now. LG refused because "they're a big global brand." Yeah, but what is the point of being "a big global brand" if you aren't going to advertise? If you are going to be like the other bargain brands and not advertise then you need to adopt the bargain strategy that they do. You especially don't try to be a premium brand with flagship devices while shipping your own buggy customized version of Android that makes the hardware perform worse and for which you never push updates. Good grief.

All LG needed to do was cut the side deal with Microsoft that Samsung has now. Of course Samsung retains their own One UI skin - formerly TouchWiz - because people actually like it. (Much of it has been incorporated in Google stock Android.) But Microsoft is paying Samsung hundreds of millions a year to put their apps and services on their devices and they promote/sell Samsung's phones in the Microsoft store right along side their own hardware. (Microsoft fans are ... ambivalent about this.) LG should have beaten Samsung to the punch. They could have given Microsoft the responsibility of designing the skin (Microsoft already has a launcher - a skin as an app - and turning it into a formal skin merely means adding the app code to the default Google code) and providing regular OS and security updates. They could have been the ones to promote Office 365, OneDrive, xCloud etc. and even launched a global advertising campaign with Microsoft declaring their phones and tablets as "work/play devices." 

But they were too proud on one hand and too risk averse on the other to pursue it. While Samsung was taking risks by working on foldable phones - and even put up with getting laughed at when their first gen foldable phone device had to be recalled - LG just added a snapon case that functions as a second screen that didn't even have UI support. (Again, cut a deal with Microsoft and the same excellent second screen support that Microsoft implemented for the Duo could have been on LG phones years ago.) 

Sony is the same. They spend tons of money promoting a PlayStation device that they have admitted loses them money for each they sell. And they only sell about 25 million PlayStations in a good year. They could sell 50-100 million midrange Android phones and tablets a year for what a PlayStation costs and actually make money on them. They could actually take any number of the Android PS2 and PS3 emulators that people already download from the Play Store, fix the bugs and give them cloud features and use them to sell old PlayStation games through their own storefront! Why they didn't do this? Funny story actually ... because Sony didn't want their phones and tablets to compete with their Playstation handhelds. But the handhelds didn't sell anyway - because people were buying iPhones, iPads and Galaxy devices to game on - and Sony wound up pulling them. (Facepalm.)

LG and Sony. So much potential but were killed off by a combination of arrogance, risk aversion and parochialism. The funny thing: LG and Sony were both considered superior brands before the smartphone boom. Samsung was considered a bulk supplier of appliances and generic electronics and not a player in computing or high tech at all. Maybe it was precisely because they were considered second class that they were willing to take the risks and do the things that LG and Sony considered beneath them. Ah well, who needs those hundreds of billions in profits anyway? The worst part is that thanks to the halo of their smartphone business, Samsung's electronics and appliances are now far better regarded also. Just a complete and total disaster. Sony had just better hope that Apple doesn't make a serious move into video gaming. Because if they do, Samsung will copy it and the competition from Apple, Microsoft and Samsung won't leave anything left for PlayStation.