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Oracle Android Java The Courts

Oracle: Google Has "Destroyed" the Market For Java 457

itwbennett writes: Oracle made a request late last month to broaden its case against Android. Now, claiming that 'Android has now irreversibly destroyed Java's fundamental value proposition as a potential mobile device operating system,' Oracle on Wednesday filed a supplemental complaint in San Francisco district court that encompasses the six Android versions that have come out since Oracle originally filed its case back in 2010: Gingerbread, Honeycomb, Ice Cream Sandwich, Jelly Bean, Kit Kat and Lollipop.
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Oracle: Google Has "Destroyed" the Market For Java

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  • by linuxrocks123 ( 905424 ) on Thursday August 13, 2015 @07:28PM (#50313139) Homepage Journal

    It's a shame Pamela Jones shuttered Groklaw ... her insight into this case would have been invaluable.

    We need to stop the dangerous idea that interfaces can be copyrighted before it becomes as much a bane on software as software patents were before Alice vs. CLS Bank.

    • I don't see what alice has to do with this.

    • by phantomfive ( 622387 ) on Thursday August 13, 2015 @08:56PM (#50313571) Journal

      We need to stop the dangerous idea that interfaces can be copyrighted

      I miss Groklaw too, but it's really too late for that. The Supreme Court upheld the earlier court's decision that interfaces can be copyrighted (or more specifically, declined to hear an appeal).

      It's not the end of the world. Use of an interface for purposes of interoperability has been declared fair use. The Google vs Oracle case is still in court, trying to decide if Google's use of Java is fair use.

      Of course, Java is under the GPL, so in most cases this is not even an issue.

      • by flink ( 18449 ) on Thursday August 13, 2015 @10:51PM (#50314021)

        It's not the end of the world. Use of an interface for purposes of interoperability has been declared fair use. The Google vs Oracle case is still in court, trying to decide if Google's use of Java is fair use.

        It's a serious blow to interoperability and to open source in general. Fair use is and affirmative defense, not an absolute right. It's very subjective. In order to even assert fair use, you have to be sued, refuse to settle, go to court, and convince a judge that the fair use defense applies... and then you have to actually litigate the case, with the risk you will lose, be out potentially millions in your own legal costs, plus damages, plus maybe paying the plaintiff's costs. This is a huge burden for anyone but a massive corporation to meet.

        It is impossible to write a non-trivial Java application without extending or overriding some API "owned" by Sun/Oracle. This means that basically every Java application and by extension, every program that implements a public, non-open-source API or is written in a proprietary language exists at the sufference of the API/language creator. Maybe you could go to court and try to assert "fair use", but good luck doing that if you are not Google.

    • Copyrighting interfaces is indeed a really bad idea, however I'm not so sure it's quite the bane you're thinking.

      In Google's case, their problem was that they had already settled on using Java long before the troubles with Oracle came up, so it wasn't exactly feasible for them to switch to something else. They had already invested in Android, Dalvik, etc., so changing course midstream just wasn't worth it. However, suppose Google knew this was going to happen; instead of basing Dalvik on Java, interfaces

  • by Great Big Bird ( 1751616 ) on Thursday August 13, 2015 @07:31PM (#50313151)

    Oracle (then Sun) could have created an operating system for mobile phones based around Java. But since Google did, they want to profit off of it? They should go to hell.

    • I don't get it -- isn't Android programming primarily Java, with things like C relegated to support library status?

      Sounds stronger than ever.

    • by swb ( 14022 )

      Maybe that's the unintended consequence of a write once, run anywhere language -- they were supposed to transcend the operating system. They never made a Java operating system because of that concept, and Sun really wanted to sell Solaris, too.

  • Fuck Oracle (Score:5, Insightful)

    by binarylarry ( 1338699 ) on Thursday August 13, 2015 @07:34PM (#50313175)

    Java was never useful on phones until Google built something decent.

    Sun/Oracle could never build a decent phone with Java, no matter how much money they pumped into it.

    If you work somewhere that uses Oracle products or is considering an Oracle product, fight to the bone to get their shitware tossed out.

    We need to end this company, it's a tumor in the software ecosystem.

    • Don't you mean until Google bought something decent? Android does not originate with Google.

    • Java was never useful on phones until Google built something decent.

      Sun/Oracle could never build a decent phone with Java, no matter how much money they pumped into it.

      If you work somewhere that uses Oracle products or is considering an Oracle product, fight to the bone to get their shitware tossed out.

      We need to end this company, it's a tumor in the software ecosystem.

      Imagine an Oracle smartphone...

  • by GigaplexNZ ( 1233886 ) on Thursday August 13, 2015 @07:35PM (#50313191)

    irreversibly destroyed Java's fundamental value proposition as a potential mobile device operating system

    Well there's the problem. Oracle thinks the language and runtime are a complete operating system. There's nothing stopping Oracle making a different OS that uses Java. In fact, the vast amount of libraries for Android out there should be easy to port. Next we'll hear how Microsoft destroyed the value of C as used to build an OS.

    • That's an interesting idea.

      Could Bell Labs and Bjarne Stroupstroup take Oracle to court for using C/C++ without a copyright license in their products? Perhaps they use an implemention from a vendor that isn't the original one and thus don't have a license from the original author.

      Think of the Billion$ they could make at Oracle's expense!

    • Well there's the problem. Oracle thinks the language and runtime are a complete operating system.

      Yeah! I demand they call it "GNU/Java"!

  • JAVA FTW (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 13, 2015 @07:35PM (#50313193)

    Java...[garbage collection] is the .[garbage collection] best .[garbage collection] programming .[garbage collection].[garbage collection] language for .[garbage collection] mobile devices .[garbage collection] .[garbage collection] because it is .[garbage collection] faster .[garbage collection] then C++ and .[garbage collection] more .[garbage collection].[garbage collection].[garbage collection] deterministic and .[garbage collection] .[garbage collection] .[garbage collection] nev .[garbage collection] er .[garbage collection] drops .[garbage collection].[garbage collection].[garbage collection] user .[garbage collection].[garbage collection] input.

    I like Java .[garbage collection] becuase .[garbage collection].[garbage collection] it's write .[garbage collection].[garbage collection] once, .[garbage collection].[garbage collection].[garbage collection] and it runs .[garbage collection] .[garbage collection].[garbage collection] provided you have all .[garbage collection].[garbage collection].[garbage collection] the libraries, the .[garbage collection].[garbage collection].[garbage collection] correct java interpreter .[garbage collection].[garbage collection].[garbage collection] and enough .[garbage collection].[garbage collection]

    javax.servlet.ServletException: Something bad happened
    at com.example.myproject.OpenSessionInViewFilter.doFilter(OpenSessionInViewFilter.java:60)
    at org.mortbay.jetty.servlet.ServletHandler$CachedChain.doFilter(ServletHandler.java:1157)
    at com.example.myproject.ExceptionHandlerFilter.doFilter(ExceptionHandlerFilter.java:28)
    at org.mortbay.jetty.servlet.ServletHandler$CachedChain.doFilter(ServletHandler.java:1157)
    at com.example.myproject.OutputBufferFilter.doFilter(OutputBufferFilter.java:33)
    at org.mortbay.jetty.servlet.ServletHandler$CachedChain.doFilter(ServletHandler.java:1157)
    at org.mortbay.jetty.servlet.ServletHandler.handle(ServletHandler.java:388)
    at org.mortbay.jetty.security.SecurityHandler.handle(SecurityHandler.java:216)
    at org.mortbay.jetty.servlet.SessionHandler.handle(SessionHandler.java:182)
    at org.mortbay.jetty.handler.ContextHandler.handle(ContextHandler.java:765)
    at org.mortbay.jetty.webapp.WebAppContext.handle(WebAppContext.java:418)
    at org.mortbay.jetty.handler.HandlerWrapper.handle(HandlerWrapper.java:152)
    at org.mortbay.jetty.Server.handle(Server.java:326)
    at org.mortbay.jetty.HttpConnection.handleRequest(HttpConnection.java:542)
    at org.mortbay.jetty.HttpConnection$RequestHandler.content(HttpConnection.java:943)
    at org.mortbay.jetty.HttpParser.parseNext(HttpParser.java:756)
    at org.mortbay.jetty.HttpParser.parseAvailable(HttpParser.java:218)
    at org.mortbay.jetty.HttpConnection.handle(HttpConnection.java:404)
    at org.mortbay.jetty.bio.SocketConnector$Connection.run(SocketConnector.java:228)
    at org.mortbay.thread.QueuedThreadPool$PoolThread.run(QueuedThreadPool.java:582)
    Caused by: com.example.myproject.MyProjectServletException

    • that's NOTHING. I can get even more spew at COMPILE TIME with C++, bee-yatch!!

      • Re:JAVA FTW (Score:5, Informative)

        by The Evil Atheist ( 2484676 ) on Thursday August 13, 2015 @08:23PM (#50313433)
        Which is where you'd want most error messages to happen.
        • or one could use a non-obtuse language that doesn't have Turing complete preprocessor macro system, and make less errors from the start

      • Re:JAVA FTW (Score:5, Insightful)

        by Chris Katko ( 2923353 ) on Thursday August 13, 2015 @10:48PM (#50314009)
        Actually, it's pretty pathetic that C++ doesn't give you a stack trace for exceptions.

        Though, as an aside, that just reminded me of the equally-as-pathetic amount of Stockholm Syndrome exhibited by C++ programmers on Stack Overflow:

        http://stackoverflow.com/quest... [stackoverflow.com]

        You don't need it! They're useless! If you use it you're not a good programmer! Why would you want C++ to be like other languages?!
    • by Xyrus ( 755017 )

      1997 called. They want their overused Java meme back.

      • by 0123456 ( 636235 )

        1997 called. They want their overused Java meme back.

        I take it you've never used Eclipse?

        Some days I'm lucky to be able to type three characters before it goes off and spends 30 seconds garbage collecting again.

      • Java still has memory problems.
        On a mobile device, garbage collection is fast, unless you are using up more than ~60% of RAM. Then it starts to get slow. So you have two options, either have unused RAM, or wait around for slow garbage collection.

        On a larger server (like, ~30GB of RAM, not uncommon these days), garbage collection can take up to 10 minutes. A lot of people with clusters of Java servers have automated processes to detect and remove boxes from clusters while they are doing garbage collectio
    • by Luthair ( 847766 )
      Have 4 bytes, aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa [buffer overrun]
    • It looks like most of your stack trace is from a third party library and not actually java. gg
    • Preview of Java for Windows 10:

      javax.servlet.ServletException: Something happened

  • People are reverse engineering their shit, and Google is destroying value. This is a pretty sure sign that Oracle is going down.

  • by gnunick ( 701343 ) on Thursday August 13, 2015 @07:36PM (#50313203) Homepage

    At first, I read that as "Oracle Has 'Destroyed' the Market For Java"... which, of course, seemed quite plausible.

    RIP SUN

    • by garyisabusyguy ( 732330 ) on Thursday August 13, 2015 @08:24PM (#50313439)

      Yes, I had a couple of Sparc Stations in the 90's and admined SunOS and Solaris on those and some enterprise server systems, but

      Fuck Sun, they favored proprietary server systems that lined their sales-reps' pockets with cash while the world changed around them and then sold all of their knowledge lock stock and barrel to Oracle, simply because Oracle users were their largest remaining customer base

      I feel the same way about DEC, who flushed thirty years of Alpha architectural superiority down the drain because they couldn't sell their way out of a wet paper sack

      We get what we deserve because we let the free market reign supreme where the most cut throated business-people win and the rest go down the drain

    • by hey! ( 33014 )

      At first, I read that as "Oracle Has 'Destroyed' the Market For Java"... which, of course, seemed quite plausible.

      Too late. Sun already did that -- at least if we're talking about Java as a mobile platform. I spent years tracking J2ME as a potential target for our apps. Java may not have been all things to all people, but back in the day (late 90s early 00s) personal basis profile would have been ideal for what we were doing. Even MIDP would have been a good match.

      The problem is that there never was *a* standard J2ME implementation; J2ME was only a set of specifications. Implementations came from third parties and the

  • Really??? (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 13, 2015 @07:36PM (#50313205)
    Does anybody feel sorry for Oracle???
  • by JPyObjC Dude ( 772176 ) on Thursday August 13, 2015 @07:43PM (#50313249)

    The contenders for biggest enemies of Java are:

    1) Micro$oft - Effectively killed the JavaBean web plugin market with their own lackluster JVM via EEE (Embrace, Extend, Extinguish).

    JavaBeans is the technology that has the biggest negative view on the net and rightly so. If Microsoft had not done such a good job killing it, Java would likely be in a different light today as more energy would have been spent making JavaBean libraries better while the real engineers at Sun still had control of the source.

    2) Oracle - They just do not get open source or anything that came from Sun.

    Google has popularized Java way more than Oracle could ever imagine.

    "You don't anthropomorphize your lawnmower, the lawnmower just mows the lawn, you stick your hand in there and it'll chop it off, the end" - B. Cantrill

  • Quick message to Oracle: Between the security officer coming off as, at best, a self-entitled, over-inflated executive believing her services are better than her customers deserve, and now the company claiming they have a "right" to market share, I think the psychology of the company is becoming quite clear. It isn't that their products are poor (which they are not), it is that they seem to believe that they deserve their piece of the market by divine providence.

    Please note, this is opinion, and only my own

  • Cry me a river (Score:5, Interesting)

    by chromaexcursion ( 2047080 ) on Thursday August 13, 2015 @08:07PM (#50313357)
    Sun destroyed the market for Java.
    Sun wanted to sell hardware, and they designed Java to run well with their hardware. Sun's ideal was the network is the computer. Java is/was a client language that could run on a lot of platforms, with in Sun's mind a Sun server at the other end. Didn't quite work out that way. Sun was going belly up, Oracle bought the carcass. Sun gave Java away. You can't put the jinni back in the bottle.
    Java was worthless when Oracle bought Sun. They're engaged in revisionist history trying to milk a dead cow.
    • Uh most of the world's business and web software ran on Java when Oracle bought Sun.

      It was a huge reason why Oracle bought Sun in the first place, gave them some leverage over IBM, Google and other companies.

      • Re:Cry me a river (Score:4, Interesting)

        by MouseR ( 3264 ) on Thursday August 13, 2015 @08:38PM (#50313505) Homepage

        Oracle had (and still have) much reliance on Java and Sun hardware for their server & middleware tiers. They simply could NOT let it die along with Sun or, worse yet, let it pass to a competitor.

        Disclaimer: that's as far as I will comment on that issue, as I am an Oracle employee. Though I have nothing to do with the Java or Sun group, the native mobile apps I develop eventually touches Java code, server side. It's everywhere.

  • by Nyder ( 754090 ) on Thursday August 13, 2015 @08:10PM (#50313369) Journal

    The tech industry, just like every industry, improves as people discover new and better ways to do things. If you can't keep up Oracle, you fall behind. And since you've chosen to litigate instead of innovate, you have fallen behind.

    No one is guaranteed profit.

  • Oracle ... Now, claiming that 'Android has now irreversibly destroyed Java's fundamental value proposition as a potential mobile device operating system, ...

    ... for profit.

  • I wonder if I can use the Oracle for Android app to keep up to date on the lawsuit against Android...

    http://www.appszoom.com/androi... [appszoom.com]

  • by Morgaine ( 4316 ) on Thursday August 13, 2015 @09:42PM (#50313749)

    'Android has now irreversibly destroyed Java 's fundamental value proposition as a potential mobile device operating system ,'

    Java is a programming language, not an operating system. Examples of operating systems are Linux and Unix.

    Nothing could have "destroyed Java's fundamental value proposition as a potential mobile device operating system" because the value proposition of Java as an operating system is zero, and always has been. It's like the value proposition of an orange to be an apple.

    Oracle's nonsensical claim might be merely a case of lawyers or managers showing their ignorance of the computing subject domain or just being sloppy with their terminology, which is not uncommon. However, it gets worse.

    A proprietary software package may have a calculated expectation of market share and profit if there is no competition, but this is not the case with programming languages because they always have competition from countless other languages. It is especially not the case with open source programming languages because they typically enjoy multiple implementations, and these make captive markets almost impossible to maintain.

    It seems therefore that Oracle's market expectations were based on a flawed analysis.

    That mistake would have made any market expectations unsafe, but any expectations were dealt a further blow by Oracle's highly abusive attempt to copyright SSO in their litigation against Google. This must have alienated practically everybody who knows anything about programming, and the likelihood is high that many Java programmers who had other languages available must have abandoned Java like the plague to avoid potential SSO copyright liability.

    In other words, if anyone killed off interest in Java, it was probably Oracle themselves.

  • by jfdavis668 ( 1414919 ) on Thursday August 13, 2015 @10:09PM (#50313869)
    IBM will finally find a use for OS/2, as a mobile OS to replace Android!
  • by viperidaenz ( 2515578 ) on Thursday August 13, 2015 @11:13PM (#50314089)

    I don't see how this argument is any different than "Apple's used of an operating system has destroyed the market..."

    BTW Oracle, the Android OS is not built in Java. At it's core it is a Linux kernel. There just happens to be a Java-like API and VM for running applications.

  • by BrendaEM ( 871664 ) on Friday August 14, 2015 @02:06AM (#50314529) Homepage

    If Java was profitable, wouldn't Sun been profitable in the first place?

  • by BrendaEM ( 871664 ) on Friday August 14, 2015 @02:09AM (#50314531) Homepage

    If there was a good market for Java, wouldn't Sun have been been profitable in the first place?
    (Let's see if that title is acceptable for the filters.)

  • by DrXym ( 126579 ) on Friday August 14, 2015 @03:23AM (#50314713)
    They managed to do it all by themselves. I used to program set top boxes with J2ME and dear god was it awful. J2ME was so stripped down that it simply wasn't fit for purpose by the end. It didn't even contain fundamental classes that had been in Java since 1.2 like ArrayList! And it was very expensive to licence too.

    So we ended up using another VM called Skelmir which was a clean room Java, roughly analogous to Java 1.5 SE albeit missing some stuff mostly in the javax & sun namespaces. Performance was better, it was cheaper and it was possible to develop normal Java code with a reasonable expectation it would work on the STB. I'm sure the same sentiment was felt everywhere. Companies resented being charging an arm and a leg for a piece of shit runtime which was barely fit for purpose.

    As for why Google succeeded where Oracle failed... It's because they offered more or less a full Java SE API and a rich mobile API that allowed developers to write apps without making compromises. It didn't really matter that the byte code was compiled into something else because they also provided excellent tools that integrated with Eclipse to take care of all that.

    I don't believe for a second that if Google hadn't used Java as their API that Oracle would have triumphed. Not in the slightest. If anything Google did Oracle a favour by using their language and therefore keeping it relevant for portable devices.

  • by SpaghettiPattern ( 609814 ) on Friday August 14, 2015 @05:34AM (#50314993)

    Java fanboy here.

    Java is the new COBOL. that's a status very few general purpose languages have reached. It runs everywhere, can do crazy stuff and banks have embraced it. I'll not jump ship for a long time.

    But calling Java "a potential mobile device operating system" is bat shit crazy.

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