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Oracle Asks Apache To Rethink Java Committee Exit 266

Posted by kdawson from the with-sugar-on-top dept.
CWmike writes "Oracle has asked the Apache Software Foundation to reconsider its decision to quit the Java SE/EE Executive Committee, and is also acknowledging the ASF's importance to Java's future. In a message released late Thursday, an Oracle executive made conciliatory gestures to Apache. At least for now, the ASF doesn't seem eager to rejoin the committee. 'Give us a reason why the ASF should reconsider other than "please,"' ASF president Jim Jagielski said in a Twitter post on Thursday. The Java Community Process is 'dead,' Jagielski said in a blog post, also on Thursday. 'All that remains is a zombie, walking the streets of the Java ecosystem, looking for brains.'"
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Oracle Asks Apache To Rethink Java Committee Exit More

Oracle Asks Apache To Rethink Java Committee Exit

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  • They reconsidered (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Arancaytar ( 966377 ) <arancaytar.ilyaran@gmail.com> on Friday December 10, 2010 @04:07PM (#34518098) Homepage

    Answer is still no.

    • I'm wondering what Oracle's angle is on this. They haven't been particularly concerned with developers walking out in a mass exodus. Or is it just a matter of it looking really bad for them to lose that support?

      • Re:They reconsidered (Score:5, Interesting)

        by SerpentMage ( 13390 ) on Friday December 10, 2010 @04:18PM (#34518212)

        Look at Oracle's head honcho Larry Ellison... A macho alpha male that MUST under all circumstances have control. The moment Ellison leaves Oracle will collapse since corporations like his do very badly with their hallowed leader.

        Once you see that you see the angle of Oracle. Oracle I think really doesn't give a flying f**k and they are now starting to understand the jello nature of Open Source. By jello I mean you squeeze jello hard and all you get is ooze coming out between your fingers. I would be really surprised if Oracle caved in. I bet Ellison is thinking, "no f***g way some open source hippies are going to make me bend, me a billionaire"

        If you think I am being harsh, look at Ellison when he takes "time off" like sailing! This is not a guy I would ever want to hang out with. At least with Bill Gates I could play cards...

        • What's wrong with sailing? If you had said "no holds barred bloodsport" that might have fit your argument a little more.

          • Re:They reconsidered (Score:5, Informative)

            by PCM2 ( 4486 ) on Friday December 10, 2010 @04:42PM (#34518462) Homepage

            I don't think the GP's point is that there's something wrong with sailing. More that when most people "take time off," they do so to go bird watching, or to take the kids to Disneyland, or just to lie around on a beach getting tanned. Ellison "takes time off" to command the crew of a multimillion-dollar racing yacht that's the fastest in the world.

            • I spend 25 weeks every summer racing sailboats, 3-4 times a week.

              And ellison's boat isn't the fastest in the world, but it is among them. The fastest went 55 knots in 25 knots of wind.

              • Re:They reconsidered (Score:5, Funny)

                by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 10, 2010 @05:18PM (#34518826)

                I spend 25 weeks every summer racing sailboats, 3-4 times a week.

                And ellison's boat isn't the fastest in the world, but it is among them. The fastest went 55 knots in 25 knots of wind.

                What planet?

                • Re: (Score:2, Informative)

                  by david_thornley ( 598059 )

                  Earth, of course. On most wind angles, the sails provide propulsion by being airfoils, not things for the wind to push against. Further, when sailing nearly upwind, the speed of the wind across the sails is the wind speed plus most of the boat speed, so it's possible to get a very high speed of wind over airfoil.

                  It's complicated, and you don't need to understand the mechanics unless you like sailboats, but, yes, it is possible to move faster than the wind speed. If you have a chance, watch iceboat rac

                  • Look at the bolded text in the post you replied to.

                    He was wondering on what planet summers were 25 weeks long. Not on what planet you could do 55 knots with a 25 knot wind.

                    • Planets with two hemispheres? I know snowboarders who chase winter around the world for half of the year.

                • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

                  by StikyPad ( 445176 )

                  Good question. Based on his statement, we're probably looking for a planet with two hemispheres, an axial tilt, and a period of ~365.25 days or so... Let me know if you come up with anything.

            • Thanks for clearing that up. Yeah that is exactly what I meant.

            • The days of gentlemen skippers are long gone. America's cup teams now use professional crews and professional skippers. USA 17 (the current cup holder) was helmed by Russell Coutts. Larry didn't "command the crew", Russell did. Larry's most important task was to support Russell financially and organizationally.

              I don't mean to take away from Larry's abilities as a sailor, but simply to point out the commitment required of sailors at the top levels of competition. It's no longer the hobby it was 30 years ago.

      • Re:They reconsidered (Score:4, Interesting)

        by 0100010001010011 ( 652467 ) on Friday December 10, 2010 @04:19PM (#34518224)

        What the CEO thinks is a bunch of basement dwellers tinkering with OpenSolaris and OpenOffice vs "The" webserver for the internet (even if it's those same set of people tinkering with it).

        Apache is a big enough name that hopefully the IT guys heard they were leaving and flipped out a bit.

         

      • I don't think Oracle is particularly concerned with anything other than its core products and profit-making from those. I think the philosophy has emerged there that it's becoming less important to do things that may have nebulous or down-the-road benefit in favor of only putting effort into things from which you can draw a straight line to profit.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by nigelo ( 30096 )

          ...less important to do things that may have nebulous or down-the-road benefit in favor of only putting effort into things from which you can draw a straight line to profit.

          Which has been Oracle's apparent MO since the beginning, I would say.

        • I don't think Oracle is particularly concerned with anything other than its core products and profit-making from those.

          What?

          Oracle has been acquiring companies up the vertical* for many years.

          I think the philosophy has emerged there that it's becoming less important to do things that may have nebulous or down-the-road benefit in favor of only putting effort into things from which you can draw a straight line to profit.

          I think they've been trying to avoid corporate bloat while still making acquisitions that

      • Re:They reconsidered (Score:5, Insightful)

        by erroneus ( 253617 ) on Friday December 10, 2010 @04:36PM (#34518398) Homepage

        Oracle uses a bully business model. With their database product, they charge and are paid unbelievable amounts of money and can demand prices based on the hardware you run their software on. (You can afford to buy a big beefy server, so you much also be able to afford a big beefy price for the SAME software you had before you upgraded your hardware!)

        They have been successful with their ridiculous model. So it stands to reason that when they bought Sun, they can just step right up and start bullying some more and continue to get their way. They failed to factor in the fact that users have pre-existing expectations of "free" and "open" that is simply not a part of Oracle mindset. So their newly acquired "free stuff" is rapidly losing value due to the new ownership and management.

        Already, The Document Foundation has abandoned Oracle's ship and took LibreOffice with them. Now ASF has left the ship as well. What's next? Will VirtualBox OSE become something else soon? What about MySQL?

        In this case, whatever Oracle touches is turning to dust because they do not have a pure heart.

        • Re:They reconsidered (Score:5, Insightful)

          by SplashMyBandit ( 1543257 ) on Friday December 10, 2010 @06:00PM (#34519190)

          Its is not the "free stuff" that is valuable, or "rapidly losing value". What is of value is the "goose that lays the golden egg" - ecosystem of developers (paid and casual) and users that use the stuff, improve it, and especially *provide support to others* (which is what everyone really wants - from client companies to Stallman). Oracle sees the value as the software, but the greatest value is in having the 'mind share' of an active community (something Microsoft are famous for recognizing, even if they treat their users all like criminals). With a big community you can make money, since companies will pay for support and customizations of widely used stuff (eg. market leaders such as Apache HTTP and Tomcat) but you need a 'light hand on the tiller'.

          Oracle may deride Sun for messing up sales (yes, it was unnecessarily hard to buy stuff from Sun due to their crap sales process) but Oracle are just as clueless when it comes to maintaining a valuable established ecosystem. The Oracle management are destroying shareholder value by totally misreading where the value in Sun's assets really lies (dinosaurs! but that is typical of chief executive management, what made you successful a decade ago may ot be required anymore when the world outside your walls has evolved).

      • I'm wondering what Oracle's angle is on this. They haven't been particularly concerned with developers walking out in a mass exodus. Or is it just a matter of it looking really bad for them to lose that support?

        And they're still not particularly concerned. It doesn't cost them anything to say "please come back". If they really wanted Apache back, they'd give them what they want, which is the compatibility kit licensing.

      • I'm wondering what Oracle's angle is on this. They haven't been particularly concerned with developers walking out in a mass exodus. Or is it just a matter of it looking really bad for them to lose that support?

        They probably see ASF as a big community player and want them on board; but unless ASF can put Harmony through and gain 100% acceptance as a Java implementer without the conditions that Sun/Oracle have imposed then there is no reason for them to stay in the JCP.

        If they really want to bring ASF back, they'll let Harmony use the test kit as ASF desires without limitation. That's probably all it would take.

    • If Oracle's attitude toward the Java community is still an overlord over serfs, what's to consider? Christ, what's the upside for the ASF in staying:? Seriously.

  • Best quote ever. (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Pharmboy ( 216950 ) on Friday December 10, 2010 @04:10PM (#34518128) Journal

    'All that remains is a zombie, walking the streets of the Java ecosystem, looking for brains.'

    Best quote ever. Hopefully, Oracle will get the clue and realize that you have play nice, even when you own the toys. Otherwise, you play alone.

    • Re:Best quote ever. (Score:5, Insightful)

      by SerpentMage ( 13390 ) on Friday December 10, 2010 @04:21PM (#34518262)

      I would really be surprised if Oracle reconsiders. Oracle and Ellison himself are alpha males with no compromise. Oracle revolves around Ellison and I doubt he cares. He probably just thinks, "screw off I am here to make money not be an open source hippie!"

      Larry Ellison believes in growth by acquisition. He does not do it organically and so he really does not care about Java other than he has control and is able to sell it to the enterprise. He does not care about third parties! He only cares about how Oracle can make more money. It would not surprise me if Larry is thinking of taking Java private to f**k over IBM and everybody else. But hey I think IBM just signed a deal with Oracle...

  • King Midas (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 10, 2010 @04:13PM (#34518174)

    Oracle has the Midas Touch. Everything they touch turns into a profitable venture--I mean, if you don't count the ones that became completely useless as a result.

    • Oracle has the Midas Touch. Everything they touch turns into a profitable venture--I mean, if you don't count the ones that became completely useless as a result.

      You have completely misunderstood. There is no better way to make a profitable venture than selling something that is useless. The trick how you succeed in the selling, but once you have done that, the opportunities for consulting are endless.

    • "not a Midas touch of Gold, but a Midas touch of death"

  • Cynical but true... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 10, 2010 @04:36PM (#34518402)

    I'm sure even Larry and Company realize the importance of not angering every single one of your customers. If you drive absolutely everyone off your ubiquitous application platform, and no one wants to develop for it anymore, you don't get the opportunity to lock them into your products.

    Granted, every single Sun customer I've talked to (including myself) is running away from Solaris and SPARC as fast as they can. SPARC hardware was great, the OS was good for an enterprisey Unix, but everyone's scared to death of Oracle quadrupling the price for next year's service contract and making a mess of support.

    When it comes to hardware and Solaris, Oracle doesn't give a damn. What they do care about is their application platforms. Almost every CS program in the country is pumping out Java coders, many enterprisey applications have been written in Java/J2EE over the past 10 years, etc. Keeping developers interested in the Java/J2EE ecosystem is important long-term. Even if they don't want to support non-Oracle apps on Java, having a critical mass of Java coders means they have someone to maintain the disasters that they have to integrate like PeopleSoft, JD Edwards and other Oracle-developed products. If people stop writing for the platform, and Oracle doesn't at least maintain the illusion of an open standard, the platform goes away, as does the lock-in opportunity.

    Although, I've never seen an acquiring company come down so hard on acquired customers before. Friends have been telling stories of their Oracle reps coming in and trying to double the price of their service contracts since the takeover. The entire secondary/hobbyist market for Solaris OS and SPARC hardware is toast because you can't even get firmware updates for hardware without Oracle service contracts. Maybe someone is realizing that they need to lighten up a little?? Nah...

    • Re:Cynical but true... (Score:4, Interesting)

      by rudy_wayne ( 414635 ) on Friday December 10, 2010 @05:26PM (#34518888)

      Although, I've never seen an acquiring company come down so hard on acquired customers before. Friends have been telling stories of their Oracle reps coming in and trying to double the price of their service contracts since the takeover. The entire secondary/hobbyist market for Solaris OS and SPARC hardware is toast because you can't even get firmware updates for hardware without Oracle service contracts. Maybe someone is realizing that they need to lighten up a little?? Nah...

      Recently, someone analyzed Oracle's latest financial reports and discovered something interesting. Although Oracle appears to be very profitable, it all comes from maintenance contracts. Take away the maintenance revenue and they lost money. This means that Oracle probably doesn't give a rat's ass about Java or who they alienate, as long as they can continue to milk the cash cow of maintenance revenue.

      • Then, why did they invest a pile of money on Sun again? Just to kill a competitor (and turn people into a superior free option at the same time)?

    • but everyone's scared to death of Oracle quadrupling the price for next year's service contract and making a mess of support.

      True. And while I don't know the exact details (wrt is it factor of 4 or something else), I do know that support contract costs have already risen; and this is big part of why my employer is urgently working on moving systems that still run on Solaris boxes (minority) to run on linux systems (which is already majority). Likewise there are projects to move DBs off of Oracle; althou

      • Shame you use MySQL, it's worth looking at Postgresql.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by sqlrob ( 173498 )

        Have you looked at the commercial licensing costs for MySQL, also owned by Oracle?

      • Even if you can't migrate to PostgreSQL because no one may be selling support for your area, there a plenty of comercial MySQL forks. Dumping Oracle for another Oracle product is quite... illogic.

    • Re:Cynical but true... (Score:5, Interesting)

      by ozbird ( 127571 ) on Friday December 10, 2010 @06:04PM (#34519236)
      I attended the InSync10 conference earlier this year. One of the presentations described - in colourful language - all of the ways that Oracle will "f**k you over" - if you let them. The only way to deal with Oracle is to fight back; migrating away from their products is one way to negotiate with the PFYs in sales (who apart from being under unrealistic quotas, probably view Larry as a god.)

      • I have to do this anonymously (Score:5, Informative)

        by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 10, 2010 @08:55PM (#34520620)

        I work with Oracle quite a bit and they're pretty bad.

        I worked with Sun and their reps for 20 years. They were clueless in a good way. They were just regular guys who would try to help you. Yeah, the company was dysfunctional, but they actually wanted to please you. I could call them weekends and get quotes for stuff, they'd go out of their way to write special deals and do whatever it takes to get the business at a price you could afford.

        Oracle, by contrast has a good cop/bad cop approach. Its a way to screw you and charge you extra, but the sales rep keeps his hands clean.

        Here's how it works. You get an an account rep, who acts like a regular guy, except he's not. He'll do stuff like "give you a free guy to help you" whose job it is to count licenses, servers, and applications secretly while "helping" you. He then passes that info back to the "inside sales rep". The inside rep (who will be a mystery to you) will say stuff like "Hey, I heard you got a new bigger server with a lot of new processors, is that right?". If you say "yes", he's got you. If you say "no", he'll keep calling until you admit it.

        Meanwhile as you're planning on going live, they know the dates, they call the CIO and say "Dude, you're out of compliance. You go live, you owe us another $1M->a zillion dollars". Meanwhile, their licenses is so opaque that you have no idea what you owe them, and they count different licenses different ways, and even if you're a lawyer and a DBMS expert, you can't tell if you're in compliance or not.

        The only way to deal with them is refuse their help, whenever the account rep comes in, accuse him of treating him poorly and throw him out. And when the inside sales rep calls you have to say things like "New server? I have no idea. I know the CIO was talking about getting rid of Oracle or something, but I'm not sure. What did you say you do for Oracle again? New application...ha, they never tell me anything. Did you know we already have an account rep here?"

        That completely screws with the inside sales rep. Then when the account rep comes calling, say things like "Hey, my budget has been cut 10%, I need you to figure out a way to cut my maintenance bill by 10% or the CIO wants to throw you guys out. I know its crazy, but he's really mad at you". Then you never hear from the account rep again.

        I've said this about Oracle for years: Nothing good comes from dealing with them. The only reason, the ONLY reason they stay in businesses is because they have software OEMs who will only support either MS SQL Server or Oracle as their RDBMS. Anybody who willingly gets into bed with Oracle is a fool. If you do get into bed with them, wear a condom.

        And I'm not making up a f*ck*ng thing about any of this.

    • If Mono were more mature and available on non-x86 hardware, I think .Net would be giving J2EE a serious run for the money over the next few months or a couple years.

      Having coded for both, I can attest that .Net is a much cleaner library design, and far quicker to learn. Most importantly, it doesn't introduce drastic architectural changes with each dot update.

    • I'm sure even Larry and Company realize the importance of not angering every single one of your customers. If you drive absolutely everyone off your ubiquitous application platform, and no one wants to develop for it anymore, you don't get the opportunity to lock them into your products.

      Hey, it's always worked for Intuit.

    • "Almost every CS program in the country is pumping out Java coders"

      Back in the day, a computer science degree had very little to do with coding.

  • Looking at the bigger picture (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Bruce Perens ( 3872 ) <bruce@perens.com> on Friday December 10, 2010 @04:41PM (#34518450) Homepage Journal

    Was it ever a good idea for Apache to participate in Java in the first place, knowing that the exact situation that they are complaining about today existed when they started, and has existed for the entire time they've been developing?

    When we're finished with this one, we can think about Open Source projects and .NET .

    Bruce

    • Re:Looking at the bigger picture (Score:5, Insightful)

      by inode_buddha ( 576844 ) on Friday December 10, 2010 @05:01PM (#34518646) Journal

      I don't know the answer to that, but I do know this: there is a *lot* of Java out there, being served by Apache based servers. From a strictly business standpoint, Apache is in a good position to know what devs want. And by extension, they know what businesses want. Oracle would be foolish to lose that expertise and insight, to what is a huge market.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by abigor ( 540274 )

        This debate has nothing whatsoever to do with the Apache webserver.

      • I don't know the answer to that, but I do know this: there is a *lot* of Java out there, being served by Apache based servers. From a strictly business standpoint, Apache is in a good position to know what devs want. And by extension, they know what businesses want. Oracle would be foolish to lose that expertise and insight, to what is a huge market.

        Really, what kind of relationship does Apache have with its customers? I think the assumption that Apache knows what businesses want is not based on sound reasoning. It's in the same vein as say for example .. "Linus knows what businesses want because most of them use Linux" which is provably crap.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by asc99c ( 938635 )

      It isn't black and white - but the shade of grey has been getting darker since the Oracle takeover. I'd say they've taken a pragmatic view that Java had a lot going for it, despite not being 100% open. It seemed to me the shine had been coming off Java for a while before the Oracle takeover anyway - there are plenty of gems in there, but getting useful stuff done still seems a bit cumbersome.

    • Re:Looking at the bigger picture (Score:5, Interesting)

      by eln ( 21727 ) on Friday December 10, 2010 @05:02PM (#34518666)
      This is what really puzzles me about this whole thing. Now that Sun has been acquired by the Evil Empire (tm), everybody acts like Sun was some paragon of Open Source virtue. Sun always approached open source very timidly, and only ever seemed to make the bare minimum gestures toward open source, just enough to generate some good press about it. None of Sun's "open source" licenses have been anywhere near what most people would consider really "open". Open Source has always been more about marketing than philosophy with Sun.

      Given this, all Oracle has really done so far is explicitly state some of the restrictions on the software that were basically already in place, just not actually in writing, with Sun. However, since Sun was a "good" company and Oracle is a "bad" company, everyone is suddenly abandoning ship. Oracle is likely to keep all of this software, especially Java, just as "open" as it ever was (that being not very open at all). However, since Sun was a techie darling and Oracle has long been seen as a villain within the community, everyone is acting like everything's changed even though very little actually has.

      • Re:Looking at the bigger picture (Score:4, Interesting)

        by fwarren ( 579763 ) on Friday December 10, 2010 @05:21PM (#34518856) Homepage

        Not much has changed? Programmers have forked OpenSolaris, programmers have forked OpenOffice, and now Apache is forking "Open" Java.

        It reminds me of a joke where a Jewish guy is so impressed by visiting a Catholic church he becomes a Catholic. So he tries calling his wife, son and daughter to tell them the news. All three are to busy to listen and hang up on him. The punchline is essentially "I have only been a gentile for 10 minutes and I have already found 3 Jews I don't like."

        Only this is sort of the opposite. Sun, since converting to Oracle has been so obnoxious that they have already alienated 3 of their open source communities in less than 1 year.

        With claiming ownership over others codes by threatening any who would host code someplace else, and by begging 3 communities to fork their code. Oracle is doing some outstanding work here.

        Usually when one buys a company, you sell off everything of value before you destroy what ever is left. They seem to think they can skip step 3 ???? and go stright for 4. profit.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by eln ( 21727 )
          That's sort of the point though. All of these forks have happened based mostly on fears of what *might* happen and a general lack of communication from Oracle. People feared what Oracle would do, and since Oracle has, to this point, done nothing to either confirm or deny those fears, people are deciding those fears were well-founded and jumping ship, even though Oracle has not done anything much different than Sun did before.

          One wonders what would have happened if, say, RedHat had bought Sun (leaving a
      • Actually the CDDL, just like the BSD license, is considered by "most people" to be MORE open than the GPL. A corporation should have the right to produce closed-source software and link with other closed-source software, as well as make changes to the code, without having to share it. Restricting their ability to do so is not more free, or more open.
        • You are trolling right? The GPL has nothing to say about your "right to produce closed-source software and link with other closed-source software". It just isn't involved at all.
          • Really? So you can take GPL code, link it with your own, modify it, distribute it, and you don't have to re-release the source (taking it closed source)? Ya, I'm trolling.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by Xtifr ( 1323 )

          Actually the CDDL, just like the BSD license, is considered by "most people" to be MORE open than the GPL.

          Most people? Where do you get your stats? The Institute of Asspullery? I doubt if most people know or care about the difference. In fact, most people probably think that closed-source freeware is basically the same as public domain.

          In any case, you're committing the logical fallacy known as argumentum ad populum [wikipedia.org]. It doesn't matter how many people consider one or the other license to be "MORE open". What matters is the facts. And the facts ain't so strong for either side of this debate. (Which is w

      • Except Solaris, what else was under CDDL? Some other pieces of software were under the GPL if I remember correctly.

      • "However, since Sun was a techie darling and Oracle has long been seen as a villain within the community..."

        Rarely a worldwide community agrees on an opinion about something without a cause. Just think about it for a while.

    • Was it ever a good idea for Apache to participate in Java in the first place, knowing that the exact situation that they are complaining about today existed when they started, and has existed for the entire time they've been developing?

      Possibly. Certainly, the fact that Oracle is publicly appealing for them to return demonstrates that by participating, they have achieved an important role that even Oracle recognizes. Clearly, that influence wasn't enough to resolve their problems without leaving (perhaps be

    • I suspect it was neither good nor bad that Apache participated. One good outcome is a ton of AL-licensed core java code implementations, the copyrights of which are not owned by Oracle, and not under their control, easily integrated into most any OSS licensed language.

      One bad outcome of the many worthwhile contributions to OpenJDK is that Oracle owns them, they are copyright assigned, and clearly Oracle is not being a good actor in adoption of that code. The whole GPLv2+classpath exception, overloaded wit

    • +1 Funny. Bruce you've done a lot of good things and written a lot of good things but that statement is plain crazy talk. I won't even start about all the myriad of reasons why .NET is simply not an option for many Java developers - it's been flogged to death. The eventual successor to Java is not .NET, to many strings and too platform specific (disagree? well write something with WPF and see how many platforms you get it on, and there is no way the general Windows .NET developer will use Gtk+ bindings).

    • So build something better.

      Ok, so we have Java-- not open source friendly. We have C#-- not open source friendly. But at the same time, both are hugely popular. There's a gigantic demand for those types of environments here that isn't being met by anything in the open source community right now.

      So bitch and moan about "oh we should move off Java, and we should move off C#", but there has to be something there to move *to*. Right now, there's jack.

      And, frankly, until there's a as-good-or-better solution out t

      • Google's "Go" language is interesting. But I don't see any explicit rights release from Google regarding it. Maybe we should nudge them for one.

        • Google's "Go" language is interesting.

          Go might be a good start from a language perspective, but it needs huge amounts work before it even comes close to the level of C# and Java.

          If you're going to replace Java, for God's sake, replace it with something that can build a decent GUI. Enough people have suffered over the decades from shitty Java GUIs, let's not subject them to any more.

          Plus, Go is compiled, so it kind of misses the entire point. (I suppose the theory is that you ship your program with a just-in

          • Go is compiled, so it kind of misses the entire point.

            Well, this would have been an important point if we were running Java on clients. On servers, all of the energy spent on JIT and so on is useless, because we can compile the code and IMO should.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by HiThere ( 15173 )

        Two options to consider are Vala and Go. Neither is quite ripe yet, but both are quite interesting.

        If you're doing a different kind of application, think about Python. But Python is slow compared to Java, while Vala is fast. Go ... I'm not sure. The documentation is a bit impermeable. And the Vala documentation seems to assume that you already know all about using GObject. Sigh. Nothing's perfect.

    • Re:Looking at the bigger picture (Score:4, Interesting)

      by ChunderDownunder ( 709234 ) on Friday December 10, 2010 @06:37PM (#34519562)

      Apache should have known very well what it was getting into when it commenced the Harmony project. The TCK for the Java platform as a whole (excluding individual JSRs) was *never* free but rather licensed by IBM, Apple and others for a considerable sum. Apache maintains Sun changed the terms but I'm not convinced that beneath all the legal mumbo-jumbo regarding the JCP that there was clear agreement on a royalty-free TCK for Java SE.

      I'm not condoning the actions of Sun/Oracle but the position should have been clarified and a specific perpetual binding agreement reached before a single line of code was written. Instead, development ploughed on *for several years* without an agreement - hoping Sun would 'come around' eventually.

      Now the corporate backing has dried up, any independent contributors have the right to feel aggrieved. But aggrieved with whom? Did IBM and others ever negotiate with Sun on Apache's behalf for TCK-licensing before commencing development? If not, was it a wise decision for the Apache board to endorse a second clean-room implementation when GNU Classpath was well on the way, albeit with a non-Apache license?

  • ...IN YOUR FACE! Sorry, but that is very on topic, and it is not very often that I can put in your face in all caps. Good Show ASF, good show indeed

  • You can always run your Java stuff from WebSphere.

  • Its the old joke (Score:4, Interesting)

    by mlwmohawk ( 801821 ) on Friday December 10, 2010 @04:59PM (#34518624)

    What's the difference between God and Larry Ellison? God doesn't think he's Larry Ellison.

    Seriously, Oracle is an arrogant blood sucking company with its fangs in the fortune 500 markets and government organizations. Oracle DBAs demand a high price, and make sure you can't really escape the vendor lock.

    Its a house of cards, really. Oracle on a single system doesn't scale much better (if even) than PostgreSQL on a single system. Oracle's cluster solution is nice, but the expense is crazy. Only fortune 500s and governments can waste that kind of money. I don't know of any "new" business that chooses Oracle.

    They are trying to kill MySQL, and while I hope it dies a quick but painful death, PostgreSQL offers far more features and equivalent performance for free. What they are doing with Java is crazy. They don't even know what they have or how to capitalize on it. This isn't like MySQL where it is a direct competitor to their cash-cow, this is a key infrastructure piece that gives them a solid foot-hold in the industry. By suing Google and the actions they are taking now, it just tips the scales a bit more toward other languages and environments and weakens their position.

    But, Larry is an idiot. Periodic flashes of brilliance, followed by long periods of narcissistic retardation disorder.

    • "But, Larry is an idiot. Periodic flashes of brilliance, followed by long periods of narcissistic retardation disorder."

      Well.... I have a hard time equating people who have made their fortunes the way Ellison has with idiocy. On the other hand, he did build himself a samurai castle for a house...

      • My response to that is this:

        If you want to know what god thinks about money, look at the people he gives it too.

        • And my response to that is if you are intent on appealing to mythological beings as models for human behavior analysis then you at least should have the honesty within your self to first realize that anything you can imagine you think you might understand about omnipotent behavior is more than likely very wrong; if such beings existed they would be so far out of your experience there's nothing you'd be able to say about them that would even approximate reality. Even if the Bible were some kind of cosmic "Be
          • Lol, yet you venerate Ellison. Sure he's no idiot, but he's not a genius either. Just an alpha male going hard and canny enough to reinforce his circumstances ('luck' by another name). This is neither and exceptional, unique, nor rare talent (although being born in the US at the right time helps a lot - which accounts for some of the scarcity).
          • Bravo!

          • And my response to that is if you are intent on appealing to mythological beings as models for human behavior analysis then you at least should have the honesty within your self to first realize that anything you can imagine you think you might understand about omnipotent behavior is more than likely very wrong; if such beings existed they would be so far out of your experience there's nothing you'd be able to say about them that would even approximate reality. Even if the Bible were some kind of cosmic "Be back later" note. In all likely hood the note would be written on some kind of formless interstellar plasma that would impart the wisdom of the universe to all who touched it. Not start an argument that most humans seem to feel compelled to solve with a knife.

            So lets put the religious theories away, shall we?

            As a long term atheist, maybe a subtle religious analogy escapes people.

            "god" or any sufficiently important mythological figure can often serve as a metaphor. Like the expression "The devil is in the details," there is no explicit belief in any mythological devil. The devil represents evil and disputes.

            Similarly, "god" in my post is nothing more than a metaphor for the source of money.

            So, in case you missed the point, let me be a little less subtle.

            There are many more geniuses who are poor than there are th

          • Nice repartee, John Kerry.

        • If you want to know what god thinks about money, look at the people he gives it too.

          Ok; I give. Who is God giving money to?

          Does he give out cash or checks? Or maybe bank transfers, I suppose being omnipotent he'd have hooks into that system too.

      • Ellison was good, but most importantly *lucky* - as are all the billionaires out there. Fortune smiled on him and not on all the other, smarter, just as talented, and people with as good or better competing products. It is hindsight and historical editing that assumes that Ellison has some 'magical' quality that allowd him to get where he was. Sure he's good, but so are many others, and they happened to fall by the wayside due to accidents of history (eg. maybe missing out on the right contracts by a day, o

      • Some people are smart only up to the time they become rich. Then, they slowly discover they don't need to think anymore, and forget about that thinking thing.

        That normaly happens to arrogant people. (the ones that are arrogant after becoming rich, it doesn't matter what they tought when poor.)

    • Times like these make me wish IBM had bought Sun instead. At least they're a services company, so they know how that ecosystem works, and their existing investment in Java would've been better for us all...

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by ozbird ( 127571 )
      Oracle DBAs demand a high price because they have to put up with this shit on a daily basis. Frankly, you couldn't pay me enough to deal with Oracle licensing - I'm all for migrating to PostgreSQL on Linux if it will scale and is stable enough.

    • Google did not deliver a JVM. They pilfered the Java syntax to compile for a different machine. No sympathy.

    • Two new business examples choosing Oracle... (not really disagreeing, more FYI)

      1) Startup that is bankrolled by VC funding. The VC bring in experienced managers, used to working in a big corporate environment and they immediately start trying to recreate a similar environment in the startup. That's across the whole board, DR/BCP, HR forms, etc. not just Oracle.

      2) Small company starts to move from data is not important to data is important and the IT guy has no open source experience. He compares the pric

      • Oh, and one point I would disagree on. I think MySQL's existence is good for Postgres. MySQL strongly focuses on ease of setup / use by beginners and I think that that competition is good for encouraging Postgres to cater for beginners.

        I have to disagree with the ease of use statement. I am mystified that *anyone* thinks that MySQL is easier to set up than PostgreSQL.

        I mean, jeez

        initdb -D /databasepath
        pg_ctl -D /databasepath start

        Is MySQL even close?

    • Java Fork (Score:2)

      by emil ( 695 )

      It does not appear that Java can be reimplemented because of U.S. software patents, but perhaps it could be forked.

      As I understand it, Oracle(Sun) holds patents on Java. However, Oracle has placed the OpenJDK under (some version of) the GPL, granting free use of their patents to anyone working in that environment.

      Apache chose not to work with the OpenJDK, but reimplemented the Java standard (in a "clean room" manner?) with the Dalvik virtual machine. Thus, the patent protection of the OpenJDK does not apply

  • Can someone thats more involved in Java development give us some insite into what this means for large Java projects that are already well underway? I've got some vested interest in a few software packages based on Java and am slightly concerned about their future.

    • Re:Question (Score:5, Informative)

      by M. Baranczak ( 726671 ) on Friday December 10, 2010 @06:17PM (#34519362)

      In the short term: not much will change. The JDK will continue to be available. The developers will keep working on Tomcat, Hibernate, Spring and so on.

      In the medium term, things might get weird. Apache will release Harmony with or without Larry's blessing, the only question is how compatible it will be with Oracle Java. Larry might decide to start charging money for Java. Java will definitely be around, but it's hard to tell in what form.

      In the long term, we all die.

    • Java is not going away, ever, so do not fear. It is GPL-ed so no one can take it away. Oracle can steer it towards its own interests but then Apache makes a package that works for your interests.

      If you don't like Oracle then use the IBM equivalent. If you don't like IBM then use one of the Open Source equivalents. This is one of the many strengths of Java relative to its 'competitors' (they don't actually compete, since they either don't have as many features (eg. non-standard/poor multithreading in C++) or

      • There are more issues than code copyright. There are patent issues that the GPL does not make go away. Oracle _can_ take it away.

  • Fine Oracle, give Apache a JCK already !
    Do that and they will have a reason to care about the future of Java.

  • It's really, stupidly, simple... (Score:5, Informative)

    by thehossman ( 198379 ) on Friday December 10, 2010 @07:23PM (#34520004)

    Bruno Borges said it the most succinctly...

    "There is no point helping to write specifications that you aren't allowed to implement"

    http://twitter.com/#!/brunoborges/status/13058930657730560 [twitter.com]

    And Brian McCallister explained the full ramifications most clearly...

    http://skife.org/java/jcp/2010/12/07/the-tck-trap.html [skife.org]

  • In Other News (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Z_A_Commando ( 991404 ) on Friday December 10, 2010 @08:35PM (#34520502)
    Lucy Asks Charlie Brown to Kick Football...Again

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