Can Android Without Dalvik Avoid Oracle's Wrath? 264
jfruhlinger writes "Despite the fact that Oracle is suing Google over claims that Android violates Java IP, Android is roaring ahead in the marketplace. Still, some groups are wondering if they can implement Android without incurring Oracle's current or future wrath by avoiding the Dalvik VM. A project called IcedRobot aims to create a GNU-compatible version of Android, and rumors abound that RIM is planning on putting an OpenJDK-version of Android on its upcoming PlayBook tablets."
Re:Consistent Enforcement (Score:5, Informative)
Re:meatspace implications (Score:3, Informative)
Way to go in not knowing anything about what this year's crop of SoCs is capable of. Full-screen hardware accelerated video and flash is already here. The quad-core ones coming out later this year are capable of WAY more than that - MULTIPLE streams of hardware accelerated HD video, resolutions up to 2560x1600 and more. Sims and Second Life and full screen HD video are all very easy to accomplish on mobile SoCs by the end of this year. Get with the program.
Re:Consistent Enforcement (Score:2, Informative)
Sun sued Microsoft (and won) over Java twice.
Besides MS and Google most companies have actually played nice with Sun/Oracle's terms.
Both MS cases were rather high profile, the second one was what killed off Microsoft's JVM (for the opposite reason Google is being sued over Dalvik; the MS JVM was being called Java, but had all kinds of hooks to the underlying OS which made it and applications written for it incompatible with Java - whereas Dalvik looks like Java, smells like Java, tastes like Java and even acts like Java,a and for all intents and purposes IS Java, but Google isn't calling it Java, and worse they're insisting that it isn't Java, presumably to get around having to license Java ME, which unlike Java SE and EE is NOT open.
I agree that something smells fishy, but it's coming from Google's end. They could have avoided all of this by either simply licensing Java Mobile or using something OpenJDK-based (with the caveat being that while JME is designed for mobile devices, the JDK is not).
Comment removed (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Moot (Score:4, Informative)
> In what universe is that not enough?
Any universe where Netbeans, Visual Studio, Eclipse, Microsoft Word (for anything more complicated than a single-page business letter that could be done via email), video editing, video encoding (something that can bring even the mightiest i7 to its knees; try multipass h.264 sometime...), or 3D rendering occurs. In other words, the desktop of anybody who's a content creator instead of a mere content consumer.
Back when you first started college, "video editing" involved 720x480 or 720x540 interlaced 50 or 60hz video. Now it involves 1920x1080 progressive video. Today, you could literally fill a terrabyte hard drive with an hour or two of raw, pre-encoded video. Modern DSLRs with HDR take pictures that are individually bigger (in bytes) than most CF cards that existed prior to ~7 years ago. Try editing a 12 megapixel HDR image on a PC using Photoshop on a PC with only a gig or two of ram. It's not fun.
As for people who "just want email and internet", well... Flash. Enough said.
The most high-end, hacked and rooted Android phones existing today can *barely* handle Flash in its raw, undigested, real PC form without gagging. "Works" is not the same as "runs well". Hardware-wise, a current top of the line Android phone is roughly comparable to a 500MHz Pentium 3 with 512mb, Windows 2000, and a $12 piece of shit videocard that somehow managed to have onboard MPEG-2 video acceleration anyway.
> the AGC used on the Apollo missions was considered a "real computer", and today's phones could emulate that entire system without breaking a sweat...
The difference is, the AGC made use of lots of ballistics data that was precomputed offline by mainframes and carried onboard via Hopi-woven core memory -- more megabits on a single mission, in one place at one time, than the sum total that had ever previously existed on earth. An i7 could calculate it on the fly. Had Apollo run into really, truly novel problems requiring realtime navigation that deviated significantly from the original plan (assuming it had enough fuel to allow it), the astronauts would have been fucked, because their computers wouldn't have been able to handle that use case at all.