[curious_man]

Thank you for your perspective.

Let me recap the issue as I understand it so far: Oracle filed a lawsuit against Google regarding patents infringement for their use of Dalvik in Android. This is a big problem for Google and for every other alternative JVM (especially open-source) because even for a clean-room implementation you need to be licensed by Oracle.

But as far as I can see this is not so interesting to general application developers since, I think, the majority of them targets the official JVM (open or not) anyway. The same goes for other JVM based languages, since they can generally run well in the OpenJDK.

However the general consent that I see is that this is a bad move for the innovation of the JVM platform and a move that will likely reduce the trust of the industry in this technology.

Maybe new projects will be developed upon another and more open platform, but the vast majority of application-level projects (such as the myriad of enterprise webapps) won't be so interested.

What do you think?

Disclosure: I'm interested in alternative JVM languages because in my company (who is J[ava/VM] centric) we're evaluating technologies to rewrite one of our products from scratch. Aside from my personal interest in new languages obviously.

[mhd]

It's too soon to say what the general consent on that issue is. The next few days will be very interesting in that respect. I wonder what IBM will say. If I'm not mistaken, their current java products (they've got their own branch of the JDK) are covered by license agreements, probably made in the Sun era. So it's unlikely that they're in immediate legal danger. Still, they might hedge their bets differently for the long term. I wouldn't really count on it, though, considering that there's no decent alternative right now, and generally IBM takes a long while to wake up.

Most of the industry doesn't exactly mess with the JVM, so they don't really care whether it's free-as-in-beer, free-as-in-speech or something in between. I think that this includes academia (where Scala is from) and consulting agencies (where Clojure is from). There's no real hard-core GNU free software crowd behind them.

I hope that I'm wrong, but I think apart from a small flock of hackers, nobody will care too much. I do think that the efforts to port both Scala and Clojure to other platforms (CLR / LLVM) will increase a bit.

A lot also depends on what Google will do. If they throw down the gauntlet and put lots of effort and money into a migration towards a different language, then the whole IT market will look quite different. But I think that's too much money wasted, to there'll be some underhanded deals and Google and Oracle will become fast friends again. If Google doesn't want to loose face by settling de jure, Oracle might drop the case and there'll be a de facto settlement.

So to summarize: From my limited knowledge right now, I don't see big practical reasons to avoid JVM-based languages. People were quite content using Java, even before Sun made their Open Source initiative. We'll just regress to that state.