The shit finally hits the fan....(James Gosling on Oracle vs Google)

[noonespecial]

I... I only carried it for protection! To scare off the bad guys. I never meant for anyone to get shot!

[patentavoidance]

At my previous company, we had a patent lawyer who would always ask around if anything we developers did were patentable. I would always downplay what I was doing and come up with things that might be prior-art.

My thinking is this: Even though the company would only use it for "defensive purposes" (which I believe), you never know who owns the company tomorrow. And you are not going to work there tomorrow either, so you might be the one being sued.

Instead, I would try to get permission to blog about it, so it is available for everyone -- including my future self.

I recommend everyone else do the same!

(Throw-away account - I'm not sure future employers want this)

[jcromartie]

That's what happens when you sell your hacker company to a bunch of douchebags.

[bonzoesc]

That's what happens when your hacker company runs out of money and sells to a business with money and customers.

[ericd]

Not that it needed the help, but Oracle just became an even less attractive place to work, as a programmer.

[aaronbrethorst]

Saying Oracle could be less attractive for developers is like saying there's a -1 Kelvin ;-)

[OoTheNigerian]

I am not a programmer so permit my probably naive questions.

1. How difficult will it be for Google to 're do" Android and base it on another language say Objective C/UNIX like iOS? 2. Do you guys think this will affect Symbian? 3. What other OS's will this affect? 4. Is MYSQL next?

[dagw]

The answer to 1 is probably "very, but not impossible". They'd basically have to rewrite everything above kernel (which is Linux) from scratch. More importantly it would be a PR nightmare. Who wants to base their product on a platform where the platform owners are happy to throw away all your hard work and make you start from scratch every once in a while.

As to 2 and 3, this probably won't affect anybody else. Symbian (and everybody else) use an officially licensed JVM from Sun(now Oracle) and as such should be safe. The reason Google is in trouble is that the wrote their own VM rather than licensing the VM from Oracle.

As to 4. Well that's anyone's guess.

[S_A_P]

The long and short of question 1 is that there will likely be a large cash transfer from google to oracle some PR spin about how googles vm is now "official" and life/litigation moves on.

[akshayubhat]

I think Google will hit Oracle with a counter lawsuit. Google posses a lot of patents in area of Information Systems. Or they can cross license using patents like Map-Reduce, E.g. Google allowed ASF to use MR patent for Hadoop, however if tomorrow Oracle comes up with a proprietary solution for MapReduce, Google might not be so generous.

[nadam]

"it on another language say Objective C"

Maybe they could use Go for this purpose. (This would be a nice opportunity for Go.)

http://code.google.com/p/go/

[baxter]

This is not my area of expertise but in answer to question 1: Really hard.

[forgottenpaswrd]

1- I expect Google to support python on Android better and better. Is something they can control, hey Guido works there!. And I would love (but don't expect) they supporting c/c++ better.

4-Yes, MySQL competes with Oracle, so... they will let it die slowly. They want db systems to be expensive, not cheap.

[ergo98]

Many of the patents that Oracle is suing over could as easily be targeted to .NET. Of course Oracle isn't dumb enough to target Microsoft (having a much deeper portfolio of superficial but deadly patents). In fact they could as easily target many other virtual machine runtimes.

[alanh]

“With Oracle, everything is always about money. It is the only metric they know.”

— Gosling, comment on linked article.

[bonzoesc]

Oracle (NASDAQ: ORCL) is a public company, so… duh?

"So say goodbye to the NAACP award […] But I'll just take the "I Got A Lot Of Cheese" award"

— Kanye West, "Everything I Am"

[fno]

Could someone be so kind to explain why this is bad for Java instead being bad for patents? I guess we all agree that software patents are bad. This issue seems to be just about them. Why is Java dragged into this? (Genuine curiosity.)

[sgift]

I'll try: Decisions for one "platform" (it's not just Java, it's J2EE etc.) are based on many factors, but one of the most important factors is trust. Examples:

  * Companies (more specially: Enterprises) must trust you or they won't use your technology
  * Library makers must have trust in you or they will not continue building libraries for your platform

Only two examples, but I think they highlight the point: Nobody will invest in a technology/platform/programming language they do not trust. And starting patent lawsuits against companies that use your platform is a great way to loose trust. While Android/Davik technically is not a Java VM that is not what most people will see. Most people will see "Oracle starts lawsuits against companies using Java"

[wazoox]

Because people will use something else instead of Java to avoid being sued by Oracle. Just like they stopped using OpenSolaris to avoid being sued by NetApp (like CoRaid). One by one, the open Sun technologies will fall into irrelevance.

[Nelson69]

It's just more anti-java noise. There are a lot of anti-java folks out there and I don't see how this isn't more ammunition.

All things being equal, Oracle suing somebody and doing it in part because of "java" does have to make you take notice if you do anything with it. It's not like there is some open standard for Java and 10 different yet fairly equal implementations to choose from like it is with a C compiler. For serious java work, there still are maybe 3 implementations (Sun's, IBM's and maybe OpenJDK?) and they share some common components and ancestry.

Time will tell though, we'll see what happens. The java haters will continue to hate it, the java lovers will continue to love it and then those in the middle will have a raised eye brow and sort of pay attention.

[mhd]

I guess somewhere RMS is grinning from ear to ear.

[stuff4ben]

I don't know; he's been warning people about shit like this for years and no one seems to care. If anything I'd bet he's feeling a little like Sarah Conner before Skynet goes sentient.

[doki_pen]

Why? Rms has endorsed java since it went gpl. Goggles jvm is not gpl. If the used the gpl java then they might have less problems. I'm guessing Rms does not support either party here.

[bigmac]

I wonder if you're right... To the casual observer this seems to undermine the GPL.

[JoachimSchipper]

This sort of things makes me think that http://www.illumos.org/ (formerly OpenSolaris) could run into trouble sooner rather than later...

[wazoox]

They don't even need Oracle for that. NetApp already flexed muscles and made clear they'll go after anyone daring using OpenSolaris and most probably anything sporting ZFS (including *BSD), in a storage oriented product. Frankly, I don't see any reason to use OpenSolaris if not for ZFS.

IMHO OpenSolaris won't represent much more than NetBSD pretty soon.

[jacquesm]

This week seems to be particularly bad for Big Names and their stance on such things as Net Neutrality and Software Patents, first Vint Cerf (who after Jon Postel was my internet hero #2) and now James Gosling, who seems to imply prior knowledge that this one was in the cards.

So, if he saw their eyes sparkle that means that he is saying that he had an inkling that they were going to use that patent, and then he says "I hope to avoid getting dragged into the fray".

Great guy, not only does he sell a cocked gun to a company that is well known for using guns, on top of that he hopes that he's not even going to have to testify.

[davidw]

I don't think it was his decision to sell. He was forced out/quit/whatever soon after the acquisition anyway.

[waterlesscloud]

Wait, has Cerf said something on the Google/Verizon thing?

[carterschonwald]

for those who can't see the page, heres the coral cache link http://nighthacks.com.nyud.net/roller/jag/entry/the_shit_fin...

[Aegean]

OK but, did google not really think about this possibility? I think it was a very obvious risk and I would think they probably had a plan for this.

[cookiecaper]

It probably seemed relatively remote when Sun was still around, as Schwartz and Sun had a history of being very friendly to open-source philosophies. Most viewed Sun's patents as defensive. Schwartz has written about how the patents kept Sun out of this mess before -- Microsoft came and said "Cough up because OpenOffice violates our patents" and Schwartz countered with "O RLY, well, while we're at it, why don't we discuss licensing for our Java-related patents re: .NET", etc. But now what used to be Sun is the aggressor.

Oracle bought Sun and everyone was concerned because Oracle is very evil.

[tocomment]

Dumb question, isn't Java free and open source now? What are they suing about?

[dagw]

Google didn't use Sun's open sourced version of Java as the base for their VM. They implemented their own VM from scratch and are thus not covered by the patent protection offered by the open source license.

[bmm6o]

It seems like there's something missing from the story. I don't see how Google wouldn't have known they were infringing on Sun's patents. How could they release Android without a licensing agreement? It would be insane.

[alanh]

In the filing Oracle claims Google knows this because it hired Java programmers away from Sun years ago.

[smokinn]

There has to be more behind this. They can't be suing Google just because they wrote their own embedded Java VM because if they were they'd be suing RIM too.

And they certainly know RIM develops its own since they say so right on their own site: http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/systems/index-139239.html

RIM's support for J2ME includes development of its own Java virtual machine (JVM) 1, which supports the Connected Limited Device Configuration (CLDC) and the Mobile Information Device Profile (MIDP).

[X-Istence]

"RIM's support for J2ME [...]"

The gist of the matter is right there. Since RIM supports J2ME, it means they have paid Sun, now Oracle for a J2ME license. That was one of the things that Google bypassed by writing their own implementation.

See this comment on the other discussion: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1599834

[cwp]

The crux of the matter is that Dalvik is not a JVM. It cannot run Java bytecode. Google supplies a tool to convert Java bytecode to Dalvik bytecode.

I won't even pretend to understand Sun's ownership of the JVM IP, the licensing agreements it had with JVM implementors, patents etc. But my view from afar is that Google tried to route around all that by using a different VM architecture, but (possibly) exposed its self to a different set of legal vulnerabilities.

[peripitea]

Text for anyone who can't see it due to site being down:

Oracle finally filed a patent lawsuit against Google. Not a big surprise. During the integration meetings between Sun and Oracle where we were being grilled about the patent situation between Sun and Google, we could see the Oracle lawyer's eyes sparkle. Filing patent suits was never in Sun's genetic code. Alas....

I hope to avoid getting dragged into the fray: they only picked one of my patents (RE38,104) to sue over.

[mhd]

Okay, at least now I don't have to think about what language to learn next, Clojure or Erlang…

[jimm]

I'd say Clojure, but it runs on the JVM.

[reneky]

Sun poured billions into Java; is it so bad to ask for one of the biggest benefitors to share the profits?

[mojuba]

"Asking" doesn't mean suing first thing in the morning.

[weavejester]

Oracle are not suing Google because they've made a profit from Java. They are suing Google for making a competing VM which allegedly infringes some of Oracle's patents.

[zyb09]

Well they could have just gone with python if they had known this was coming. They probably picked Java on the basis that it is free to use and fits into the open-source community.

[jc-denton]

They start arguing about it instead of improving it :(