Few people outside their home country have heard of Tata Consultancy Services (TCS), Infosys, Wipro, HCL Technologies or Tech Mahindra, India's five biggest information technology (IT) consultancies. Yet even when enterprise software to manage marketing, production, inventory and the like comes from Oracle of America or Germany's SAP, it is often the Indian companies that install and maintain software for clients. But for all their tech nous, the Indian giants have also been unable to keep pace with technological change. The Economist (may be paywalled): Corporate software is becoming easier to use, reducing demand for their services. The lucrative legacy business of running mainframes is evaporating. Helping clients shift to the cloud makes money but not nearly as much. Despite some interesting pilot projects -- such as Tech Mahindra's use of artificial intelligence to tell apart 1,645 Indian languages or Infosys's covid-19 contact-tracing in Rhode Island -- the consultancies have not come up with a killer app, let alone powerful platforms like those of America's big tech firms.

Worse still, multinationals are increasingly reluctant to outsource their IT. Rather than hire the consultants, many are creating subsidiaries in India to do the job in-house -- sucking away both custom and workers from the consultancies. Before the pandemic India hosted more than 1,400 of these so-called "captive centres", employing a total of more than 1m people, according to an analysis by the Ken, an Indian news website; around 70% of them were owned by big American firms. Walmart Labs India, owned by the American supermarket chain, is reportedly on course to double its staff numbers to 7,000 in the next year or two. The popularity of such in-house operations has to do with the changing economics of technology. This once required armies of people, so spreading costs among many clients made sense. With falling prices of hardware and software, and more skilled workers around, a captive centre can pay for itself with just 50 employees, says Peter Bendor Samuel of the Everest Group, a research firm.

Oracle's Java magazine is celebrating the 25th anniversary of the programming language with a list of the 25 greatest Java apps ever written: From space exploration to genomics, from reverse compilers to robotic controllers, Java is at the heart of today's world. Here are a few of the countless Java apps that stand out from the crowd.

The story of Java began in 1991, at a time when Sun Microsystems sought to extend their lead in the computer workstation market into the burgeoning personal electronics market. Little did anyone know that the programming language Sun was about to create would democratize computing, inspire a worldwide community, and become the platform for an enduring software development ecosystem of languages, runtime platforms, SDKs, open source projects, and lots and lots of tools. After a few years of secret development led by James Gosling, Sun released the landmark "write once, run anywhere" Java platform in 1995, refocusing it beyond its original design for interactive television to applications for the burgeoning World Wide Web. By the turn of the century, Java was animating everything from smartcards to space vehicles.

Today, millions of developers program in Java. Although Java continues to evolve at an ever-faster pace, on the occasion of the platform's 25th anniversary, Java Magazine decided to take a look back at how Java molded our planet. What follows is a list of the 25 most ingenious and influential Java apps ever written, from Wikipedia Search to the US National Security Agency's Ghidra. The scope of these applications runs the gamut: space exploration, video games, machine learning, genomics, automotive, cybersecurity, and more.
The list includes Eclipse, Minecraft, the Maestro Mars Rover controller, and "VisibleTesla," the open source app created by an automobile enthusiast to monitor and control his Tesla Model S.

An anonymous reader quotes ADTmag: The Eclipse Foundation this week announced Jakarta EE 9 Milestone 1, the final version of the enterprise Java specification before the first Release Candidate (RC). The Jakarta EE 9 release marks the final transition away from the javax.* namespace (which Oracle refused to give up) to Eclipse's jakarta.*. This release updates all the APIs to use jakarta.* in package names. In fact, Mike Milinkovich, executive director of the Eclipse Foundation, says that transition is really what this release is all about.

"The main purpose...is to provide a release that is very similar to Java EE 8," Milinkovich told ADTmag, "with everything converted to the jakarta.* namespace. We're providing a stable technical conversion platform, so all the tools and frameworks in the ecosystem that are using, say, javax.servlet, can make the change with confidence." Giving the ecosystem solid footing for the transition from the Java EE coffee cup to the Jakarta EE sailboat is the Foundation's way of setting the stage for rapid innovation, Milinkovich said, once the transition is largely complete.

"These technologies have been around for an awfully long time," he added, "and we had to provide folks with a stable platform for the conversion. At the same time, thanks to a contribution from IBM, we have the Eclipse Transformer Project, which is going to provide runtime enablement. If someone has an application they don't want to recompile, and that application is using the javax.* namespace, they will be able to run it on top of a Jakarta-compatible app server. That's going to provide binary compatibility for apps, going forward..."

From a report: Have you ever wondered why online ads appear for things that you were just thinking about? There's no big conspiracy. Ad tech can be creepily accurate. Tech giant Oracle is one of a few companies in Silicon Valley that has near-perfected the art of tracking people across the internet. The company has spent a decade and billions of dollars buying startups to build its very own panopticon of users' web browsing data. One of those startups, BlueKai, which Oracle bought for a little over $400 million in 2014, is barely known outside marketing circles, but it amassed one of the largest banks of web tracking data outside of the federal government. BlueKai uses website cookies and other tracking tech to follow you around the web. By knowing which websites you visit and which emails you open, marketers can use this vast amount of tracking data to infer as much about you as possible -- your income, education, political views, and interests to name a few -- in order to target you with ads that should match your apparent tastes. If you click, the advertisers make money.

But for a time, that web tracking data was spilling out onto the open internet because a server was left unsecured and without a password, exposing billions of records for anyone to find. Security researcher Anurag Sen found the database and reported his finding to Oracle through an intermediary -- Roi Carthy, chief executive at cybersecurity firm Hudson Rock and former TechCrunch reporter.

Newly-elected politicians in Munich "have decided its administration needs to use open-source software, instead of proprietary products like Microsoft Office," reports ZDNet: "Where it is technologically and financially possible, the city will put emphasis on open standards and free open-source licensed software," a new coalition agreement negotiated between the recently elected Green party and the Social Democrats says. The agreement was finalized May 10 and the parties will be in power until 2026. "We will adhere to the principle of 'public money, public code'. That means that as long as there is no confidential or personal data involved, the source code of the city's software will also be made public," the agreement states...

Munich began the move away from proprietary software at the end of 2006... By 2013, 80% of desktops in the city's administration were meant to be running LiMux software. In reality, the council continued to run the two systems — Microsoft and LiMux — side by side for several years to deal with compatibility issues. As the result of a change in the city's government, a controversial decision was made in 2017 to leave LiMux and move back to Microsoft by 2020. At the time, critics of the decision blamed the mayor and deputy mayor and cast a suspicious eye on the US software giant's decision to move its headquarters to Munich. In interviews, a former Munich mayor, under whose administration the LiMux program began, has been candid about the efforts Microsoft went to to retain their contract with the city.

The migration back to Microsoft and to other proprietary software makers like Oracle and SAP, costing an estimated €86.1m ($93.1m), is still in progress today.

"We're very happy that they're taking on the points in the 'Public Money, Public Code' campaign we started two and a half years ago," Alex Sander, EU public policy manager at the Berlin-based Free Software Foundation Europe, tells ZDNet. But it's also important to note that this is just a statement in a coalition agreement outlining future plans, he says. "Nothing will change from one day to the next, and we wouldn't expect it to," Sander continued, noting that the city would also be waiting for ongoing software contracts to expire. "But the next time there is a new contract, we believe it should involve free software."

May 23rd marks the 25th anniversary of the day Sun Microsystems introduced Java to the world, notes InfoWorld.

Looking at both the present and the future, they write that currently Java remains popular "with enterprises even as a slew of rival languages, such as Python and Go, now compete for the hearts and minds of software developers." Java continues to rank among the top three programming languages in the most prominent language popularity indexes — Tiobe, RedMonk, and PyPL. Java had enjoyed a five-year stint as the top language in the Tiobe index until this month, when it was overtaken by the C language, thanks perhaps to the combination of C's wide use in medical equipment and the urgency of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Nevertheless, Java represents a huge ecosystem and source of jobs. There were an estimated nine million Java developers worldwide in 2017, according to Oracle. A recent search of jobs site Dice.com found nearly 12,000 Java-related jobs in the USA, compared to roughly 9,000 jobs in JavaScript and 7,600 in Python. Plus, Java has spawned an enormous ecosystem of tools ranging from the Spring Framework to application servers from companies such as IBM, Red Hat, and Oracle to the JavaFX rich media platform.

The developers behind Java — including Oracle and the broader OpenJDK community — have kept the platform moving forward. Released two months ago, Java 14, or Java Development Kit (JDK) 14, added capabilities including switch expressions, to simplify coding, and JDK Flight Recorder (JFR) Event Streaming, for continuous consumption of JFR data. Up next for Java is JDK 15, set to arrive as a production release in September 2020, with capabilities still being lined up for it. So far, the features expected include a preview of sealed classes, which provide more-granular control over code, and records, which provide classes that act as transparent carriers for immutable data. Also under consideration for Java is a plan dubbed Project Leyden, which would address "longterm pain points" in Java including resource footprint, startup time, and performance issues by introducing static images to the platform.

Three female employees at Oracle scored a major victory in court, gaining the right to represent thousands of others in a gender-discrimination lawsuit over pay, a legal milestone that has eluded women at other tech titans. From a report: A California state judge certified the class action Thursday, allowing the lawsuit to advance on behalf of more than 4,000 women who claim the database giant pays men more for doing the same job. "Whether the jobs at issue in this case are substantially equal or similar is a question of fact for a jury," California Superior Court Judge V. Raymond Swope in Redwood City said in the 25-page ruling, rejecting Oracle's claim that each is an individual case because people in the same job code don't perform substantially similar work. The ruling gives the women critical leverage in pursuing the case under the state's Equal Pay Act.

Zoom selected Oracle to expand its cloud on Tuesday, bypassing major cloud leaders Amazon Web Services, Alphabet's Google Cloud Platform and Microsoft's Azure Cloud. The terms of the deal were not disclosed. CNBC reports: "We recently experienced the most significant growth our business has ever seen, requiring massive increases in our service capacity. We explored multiple platforms, and Oracle Cloud Infrastructure was instrumental in helping us quickly scale our capacity and meet the needs of our new users," Zoom CEO Eric Yuan said in a press release. "We chose Oracle Cloud Infrastructure because of its industry-leading security, outstanding performance and unmatched level of support."

Zoom already uses Amazon and Microsoft's cloud services, but went with Oracle for its latest expansion. Oracle founder and chairman Larry Ellison praised Zoom earlier this month, calling it an "essential service" during the coronavirus pandemic. Oracle said in a release that Zoom chose its service for Oracle's "advantages in performance, scalability, reliability and superior cloud security." It's a surprising move from Zoom, as it chose Oracle over its larger competitors. According to research firm Canalys, Amazon had the largest cloud market share at the end of 2019 with 32.4%, followed by Microsoft, with 17.6%, and Google, with 6%.

Java "remains the world's most popular programming language," notes ZDNet, reporting on Oracle's release this week of Java Development Kit (JDK) 14, Oracle's "reference implementation of the Java 14 programming language spec." Rolling out in line with Oracle's six-monthly release schedule that began with Java 9 in 2017, JDK 14 includes enhancements that Oracle says will improve developer productivity... According to Georges Saab, Oracle vice president of development for the Java Platform, the faster six-monthly releases are helping developers adopt new features more rapidly due to regular expected changes. Java 9, for example, was released more than three years after Java 8...

Saab notes that major improvements in JDK 14 include a Foreign-Memory Access API enhancement (JEP 370), and improvements from Project Amber, another OpenJDK project, including Pattern Matching (JEP 305) and a preview of Records (JEP 359). Oracle JDK 14 will receive at least two quarterly updates in line with Oracle's critical-patch update schedule before Java 15 is released in September 2020.

Oracle is providing Java 14 as the Oracle OpenJDK release under an open-source GNU General Public License v2. It's also released under a commercial license using Oracle JDK. Most of the nearly 2,000 fixes in JDK 14 have been made by Oracle employees while 528 came from individual developers and other organizations. Some of the main contributors included Red Hat, SAP, Google, Arm, Intel, and NTT Data.

An anonymous reader quotes the Dev newsletter from Inside.com: The U.S. Supreme Court has postponed hearing oral arguments in the Google vs. Oracle copyright case and all other cases because of the coronavirus. It is the first time the Supreme Court has done so since the Spanish flu epidemic in 1918. ["The Court also shortened its argument calendars in August 1793 and August 1798 in response to yellow fever outbreaks," the announcement points out.]

"The court will examine the options for rescheduling those cases in due course in light of the developing circumstances," the announcement added.

Justices on the U.S. Supreme Court were scheduled to hear oral arguments in the Google vs. Oracle case on Tuesday, March 24, 2020, before making a decision a few months later.

The 2020 spring edition of the Pwn2Own hacking contest has come to a close today. This year's winner is Team Fluoroacetate -- made up of security researchers Amat Cama and Richard Zhu -- who won the contest after accumulating nine points across the two-day competition, which was just enough to extend their dominance and win their fourth tournament in a row. From a report: But this year's edition was a notable event for another reason. While the spring edition of the Pwn2Own hacking contest takes place at the CanSecWest cyber-security conference, held each spring in Vancouver, Canada, this year was different. Due to the ongoing coronavirus (COVID-19) outbreak and travel restrictions imposed in many countries around the globe, many security researchers couldn't attend or weren't willing to travel to Vancouver and potentially put their health at risk. Instead, this year's Pwn2Own edition has become the first-ever hacking contest that has been hosted in a virtual setting. Participants sent exploits to Pwn2Own organizers in advance, who ran the code during a live stream with all participants present. During the competition's two-day schedule, six teams managed to hack apps and operating systems like Windows, macOS, Ubuntu, Safari, Adobe Reader, and Oracle VirtualBox. All bugs exploited during the contest were immediately reported to their respective companies.

Ars Technica's senior tech reporter took a long long at Google's reimplementation of Java in Android -- and the lawsuit filed against it by Oracle in 2010. And he discovers "a possible downside" to Oracle's stance on API copyrights. If anyone should understand the importance of such copying, it's Oracle. After all, Oracle got its start in the 1970s selling a database product based on the then-new structured query language (SQL). SQL was invented by IBM. And Oracle doesn't seem to have gotten a license to use it...

Oracle's copying of SQL seems pretty similar to Google's copying of Java. But an Oracle spokeswoman disagrees. "It's an incorrect premise, comparing apples with broccoli, and being completely divorced from the facts of the case," she wrote in a Tuesday email.

America's Supreme Court will soon decide whether Google infringed on a copyright that Oracle says it holds on the APIs of Java. But this week Oracle's executive vice president also wrote a blog post arguing that Google "sought the support of outside groups to bolster its position" by using friend-of-the-court briefs to "create the impression that this case is of great import and controversy, and a ruling in Oracle's favor will impede innovation."

"Upon closer inspection, what these briefs reveal is a significantly different picture, one where Google is the outlier, with very little meaningful support outside the purview of its financial fingerprints." As we discussed in a previous post, this case is not about innovation, it is about theft. Google copied verbatim more than 11,000 lines of software code, and now attempts post hoc to change the rules in order to excuse its conduct... As those of us that have watched Google over the past few decades know, Google's view boils down to the self-absorbed position that the work it is doing is of such consequence that the rules shouldn't apply to them. The problem for Google is that very few outside of its self-generated atmosphere agree.

Let's be clear, it is not commonplace or foundational in the software industry to steal other developer's software code. Rather, what is commonplace is a confluence of interests where code is licensed to facilitate its widespread deployment, with the owner choosing the terms... Java embraced choice, with three different licensing alternatives, including a freely deployed open source license, and a commercial license designed to maintain interoperability. And it turns out that nobody except Google found it necessary to steal despite Java's enormous popularity. It is not in dispute in this matter that Google destroyed Java interoperability so it is unbelievable that many of its amici take the position that Google needs to prevail in order to protect interoperability...

Out of 26 briefs, we found:

- 7 briefs representing 13 entities that received "substantial contributions" from Google;

- 8 briefs filed by entities or individuals that have financial ties to Google through grants, dues, cy pres settlement proceeds or employment of individual amici;

- 2 briefs filed by companies with a clear commercial interest in Google prevailing;

- 1 brief filed by several former U.S. government employees all of whom worked for a small government agency run by a former Google executive, despite the U.S. government itself filing a brief in favor of Oracle;

- 4 separate briefs representing a total of 7 individuals;

- A few other briefs where Google financial ties are likely;

- 1 brief submitted by a serial copyright infringer repeatedly sanctioned by the Courts;

What masqueraded as a mass show of support for Google, may not be much more than an exercise in transactional interests.
The groups Oracle is criticizing include the American Library Association, EFF, and the Python Software Foundation, as well as a brief by 83 computer scientists which included Doug Lea, a former memeber of the executive committee of the Java Community Process. Oracle's blog post also makes the argument that besides Microsoft and IBM, "not a single brief from the other 98 of the Top 100 tech companies was filed."

There was a response on Twitter from Joshua Bloch, who worked on the Java platform at Sun before leaving in 2004 to become Google's chief Java architect for the next 8 years. He called Oracle's blog post "nonsense." For example, Doug Lea -- who is in no small measure responsible for Java's success -- accepted one small grant from Google fourteen years ago, and promptly doled it out to deserving undergrads who were testing java.util.concurrent. Have you no shame, Oracle?

We are not Google shills. We are scientists and engineers. Some of us laid the theoretical groundwork for the profession, some designed the computers you grew up on, and some wrote the software you use every day.

We depend on the right to reimplement each others' APIs, and we are truly afraid that your irresponsible lawsuit may deprive us of that right, which we've enjoyed throughout our long careers.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Veteran Silicon Valley executive Thomas Kurian surprised the tech world two years ago when he suddenly left Oracle to become CEO of Google Cloud. The reason may have just gotten a bit clearer. Kurian apparently had an unhappy tenure as head of Oracle's cloud, according to a lawsuit. He felt pressured by top management, including Oracle founder Larry Ellison. And he clashed with his people at Oracle, berating execs who reported to him for work he considered "atrocious" and "awful," the lawsuit alleges. The suit, filed on behalf of a group of investors led by Union Asset Management Holding AG, a Frankfurt-based investment firm, accused Oracle's top executives of painting an upbeat picture of the tech giant's cloud momentum in 2017 to 2018, even though they knew the company was falling behind in the cloud wars. The suit was originally filed in 2018. The amended suit, which was first reported by the Register, was filed last week. Kurian's email was part of a shareholder lawsuit before a federal court in California which claims that Oracle had misled investors on the state of its cloud business. Oracle rejected the suit's claims. "The suit has no merit and Oracle will vigorously defend against these claims," spokesperson Deborah Hellinger told Business Insider in an email. [...] The suit cited Kurian's email in which he also told Miranda that Oracle's cloud software "was considered so atrocious" that it was simply "a disgrace."

America's Justice Department "has filed a brief in support of Oracle in its Supreme Court battle against Google over whether Java should have copyright protection," reports ZDNet: The Justice Department filed its amicus brief to the Supreme Court this week, joining a mighty list of briefs from major tech companies and industry luminaries — including Scott McNealy, co-founder of Sun, which Oracle bought in 2010, acquiring Sun-built Java in the process. While Microsoft, IBM and others have backed Google's arguments in the decade-long battle, McNealy, like the Justice Department, is opposing Google. McNealy called Google's description of how it uses Java packages a "woeful mischaracterization of the artful design of the Java packages" and "an insult to the hard-working developers at Sun who made Java such a success...."

Joe Tucci, former CEO of now Dell-owned enterprise storage giant EMC, threw in his two cents against Google. "Accepting Google's invitation to upend that system by eliminating copyright protection for creative and original computer software code would not make the system better — it would instead have sweeping and harmful effects throughout the software industry," Tucci's brief reads.
Oracle is also questioning the motives of Google's allies, reports The Verge: After filing a Supreme Court statement last week, Oracle VP Ken Glueck posted a statement over the weekend assailing the motives of Microsoft, IBM, and the CCIA industry group, all of which have publicly supported Google. Glueck's post comes shortly after two groups — an interdisciplinary panel of academics and the American Conservative Union Foundation — submitted legal briefs supporting Oracle. Both groups argued that Google should be liable for copying code from the Java language for the Android operating system. The ACUF argued that protecting Oracle's code "is fundamental to a well-ordered system of private property rights and indeed the rule of law itself...."

Earlier this year, Google garnered around two dozen briefs supporting its position. But Oracle claims that in reality, "Google appears to be virtually alone — at least among the technology community." Glueck says Google's most prominent backers had ulterior motives or "parochial agendas"; either they were working closely with Google, or they had their own designs on Java...

Even if you accept Oracle's arguments wholeheartedly, there's a long list of other Google backers from the tech community. Advocacy groups like the Electronic Frontier Foundation and the Center for Democracy and Technology signed on to amicus briefs last month, as did several prominent tech pioneers, including Linux creator Linus Torvalds and Apple cofounder Steve Wozniak. The CCIA brief was signed by the Internet Association, a trade group representing many of the biggest companies in Silicon Valley. Patreon, Reddit, Etsy, the Mozilla Corporation, and other midsized tech companies also backed a brief raising "fundamental concerns" about Oracle's assertions.

kimanaw shares a report: The Trump administration urged the U.S. Supreme Court to reject an appeal by Alphabet's Google, boosting Oracle's bid to collect more than $8 billion in royalties for Google's use of copyrighted programming code in the Android operating system. The administration weighed in on the high-stakes case on the same day that President Donald Trump attended a re-election campaign fundraiser in California hosted by Oracle's co-founder, billionaire Larry Ellison. Ellison hosted a golf outing and photos with Trump. The event cost a minimum of $100,000 per couple to attend, with a higher ticket price of $250,000 for those who wanted to participate in a policy roundtable with the president, the Palm Springs Desert Sun reported. Google is challenging an appeals court ruling that it violated Oracle copyrights when it included some Oracle-owned Java programming code in Android. The dispute has split Silicon Valley, pitting developers of software code against companies that use the code to create programs. Google's "verbatim copying" of Oracle's code into a competing product wasn't necessary to foster innovation, the U.S. Solicitor General Noel Francisco said Wednesday in a filing with the court.

A judge ordered Thursday a temporary block on the JEDI cloud contract in response to a suit filed by Amazon. From a report: A court notice announcing the injunction was filed on Thursday, but wasn't public. It's unclear why the documents were sealed. In April, the Defense Department announced that Amazon and Microsoft were the two finalists to provide the contract, ruling out other contenders like IBM and Oracle. Then in July, President Donald Trump said he was looking into the contract after IBM and other companies protested the bidding process. Microsoft was awarded the contract on Oct. 25. Amazon has been protesting the move, saying that it was driven in part by President Trump's bias against the company. Trump often criticizes Amazon and its CEO Jeff Bezos, who also owns The Washington Post, claiming the newspaper unfairly covers his administration. Last month, Amazon's cloud-computing arm AWS filed a formal motion asking the court to pause Microsoft's work on the JEDI cloud contract, claiming the evaluation process included "clear deficiencies, errors and unmistakable bias." The court granted that motion on Thursday.

Tech pundit Robert X. Cringely has been sharing technology predictions every January for over two decades -- and he made another big one on Friday: IBM has three divisions — Global Technology Services (GTS), Global Business Services (GBS), and Red Hat. GTS is the legacy IT business, GBS is the professional services business invented by Lou Gerstner to save IBM the last time it was in huge trouble, and Red Hat is Linux. GTS — that part of IBM most of us still think of as IBM — will probably be sold by summer. Either it will go to private equity (depends on the total debt load) or it will be sold to HPE or maybe to Oracle. Either way, it's not a likely success story, but [current CEO Ginni] Rometty has no real choice. IBM is, at this point, smoke, mirrors, and buybacks. The GTS windfall will land in Ginni's final quarter, juicing her payout, which might be the major point of the deal...

IBM's new CEO is Arvind Krishna, formerly head of the Cognitive Computing unit — IBM's cloud guy. Except Cognitive Computing was never really cloud. Cognitive has been a mishmash of cloud, supported by revenue streams that are anything but cloud. It's cloud in name only and will be the part that goes next summer, possibly with Mr. Krishna still at its head.

The next chairman of IBM after Rometty will be current Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst. If Whitehurst is as smart as I think he is, he started yesterday looking for a new job. It's not that he really intends to leave, but as the next savior of IBM, Ginni et al will pay anything to keep him. Cut your new deal now, Jim, while demand is greatest....Whitehurst will turn IBM into Red Hat, which will take HQ to North Carolina and mean most of the remaining GBS staff will be gone in a year...

It still won't save IBM. They'll go down in the coming year or two along with the rest of the industry we used to call IT...

Let's just say that IBM's loss is AWS's gain.

Ars Technica recently ran a rebuttal by author, podcaster, coder, and "mercenary sysadmin" Jim Salter to some comments Linus Torvalds made last week about ZFS.

While it's reasonable for Torvalds to oppose integrating the CDDL-licensed ZFS into the kernel, Salter argues, he believes Torvalds' characterization of the filesystem was "inaccurate and damaging."
Torvalds dips into his own impressions of ZFS itself, both as a project and a filesystem. This is where things go badly off the rails, as Torvalds states, "Don't use ZFS. It's that simple. It was always more of a buzzword than anything else, I feel... [the] benchmarks I've seen do not make ZFS look all that great. And as far as I can tell, it has no real maintenance behind it any more..."

This jaw-dropping statement makes me wonder whether Torvalds has ever actually used or seriously investigated ZFS. Keep in mind, he's not merely making this statement about ZFS now, he's making it about ZFS for the last 15 years -- and is relegating everything from atomic snapshots to rapid replication to on-disk compression to per-block checksumming to automatic data repair and more to the status of "just buzzwords."

[The 2,300-word article goes on to describe ZFS features like per-block checksumming, automatic data repair, rapid replication and atomic snapshots -- as well as "performance wins" including its Adaptive Replacement caching algorithm and its inline compression (which allows datasets to be live-compressed with algorithms.]

The TL;DR here is that it's not really accurate to make blanket statements about ZFS performance, absent a very particular, well-understood workload to measure that performance on. But more importantly, quibbling about the fastest possible benchmark rather loses the main point of ZFS. This filesystem is meant to provide an eminently scalable filesystem that's extremely resistant to data loss; those are points Torvalds notably never so much as touches on....

Meanwhile, OpenZFS is actively consumed, developed, and in some cases commercially supported by organizations ranging from the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (where OpenZFS is the underpinning of some of the world's largest supercomputers) through Datto, Delphix, Joyent, ixSystems, Proxmox, Canonical, and more...

It's possible to not have a personal need for ZFS. But to write it off as "more of a buzzword than anything else" seems to expose massive ignorance on the subject... Torvalds' status within the Linux community grants his words an impact that can be entirely out of proportion to Torvalds' own knowledge of a given topic -- and this was clearly one of those topics.

Monday Red Hat and IBM jointly filed their own amicus brief with the U.S. Supreme Court in the "Google vs. Oracle" case, arguing that APIs cannot be copyrighted.

"That simple, yet powerful principle has been a cornerstone of technological and economic growth for over sixty years. When published (as has been common industry practice for over three decades) or lawfully reverse engineered, they have spurred innovation through competition, increased productivity and economic efficiency, and connected the world in a way that has benefited commercial enterprises and consumers alike."

An anonymous reader quotes Red Hat's announcement of the brief: "The Federal Circuit's unduly narrow construction of 17 U.S.C. 102(b) is harmful to progress, competition, and innovation in the field of software development," Red Hat stated in the brief. "IBM and Red Hat urge the Court to reverse the decision below on the basis that 17 U.S.C. 102(b) excludes software interfaces from copyright protection...."

The lower court incorrectly extended copyright protection to software interfaces. If left uncorrected, the lower court rulings could harm software compatibility and interoperability and have a chilling effect on the innovation represented by the open source community... Red Hat's significant involvement with Java development over the last 20 years has included extensive contributions to OpenJDK, an open source implementation of the Java platform, and the development of Red Hat Middleware, a suite of Java-based middleware solutions to build, integrate, automate and deploy enterprise applications. As an open source leader, Red Hat has a stake in the consistent and correct determination of the scope of copyright protection that applies to interfaces of computer programs, including the Java platform interface at stake in this case.

Open source software development relies on the availability of and unencumbered access to software interfaces, including products that are compatible with or interoperate with other computer products, platforms, and services...