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The basementcoders interviewed Perry this week and Perry explained why he forked Growl and what happened: http://basementcoders.com/2011/10/episode-47-fork-you-growl-interview-with-perry-metzger/

Go for scala

I suggest you listen to episode #44 of the Basement Coders Podcast : http://basementcoders.com/2011/09/episode-44-david-pollak-scalas-not-for-the-proletariat-hp-touchpad-is-resurrected-rss-is-poisonous-javaone-winner/

nope. wrong. sorry. un-curl the corner of the C# carpet and you'll see Java.

from http://www.basementcoders.com/transcripts/James_Gosling_Transcript.html
Gosling's interview concerning Oracle's takeover of Sun.

James Gosling: ...I'm sure they were looking at the license fees they were getting from Microsoft. Microsoft .NET just smears over a huge pile of Sun patents. When they did the .NET design, they basically cut and pasted from the Java spec. The way that they did CLR, you know they swizzled the way the instruction set went but the way this thing really operated, they exercised essentially no creativity when coming up with .NET. They've done some things since then that have been kind of good but as part of the various court cases we ended up with this rather odd patent deal with them that involved them paying us fairly tasty amounts of money. And I'm sure that the lawyers looked at the Microsoft numbers and said, yeah I want that from Google

Your ISO standard is C# 2.0, not the current version - or did you expect better from Microsoft? I guess you did, more fool you.

The magic happens in the byte code to byte code recompilation. Basically this means Android uses java's byte code as an object format. So unless there is something magical about providing interoperability and compatibility, which are absolutely, legally allowed, I'm not sure what Oracle is complaining about.

From what I understand, Google's patent infringements do not relate to the use of Java as a language or Java byte code to Dalvik conversion, but mostly relate to the general use and implementation of a virtual machine in general. .NET and its CLR do not use the Java language or require byte code conversion from Java yet Sun/Oracle still collect licence fees Microsoft due to patent infringements. To quote James Gosling from a recent interview:

Microsoft .NET just smears over a huge pile of Sun patents. When they did the .NET design, they basically cut and pasted from the Java spec. The way that they did CLR, you know they swizzled the way the instruction set went but the way this thing really operated, they exercised essentially no creativity when coming up with .NET. They've done some things since then that have been kind of good but as part of the various court cases we ended up with this rather odd patent deal with them that involved them paying us fairly tasty amounts of money. And I'm sure that the lawyers looked at the Microsoft numbers and said, yeah I want that from Google.

Forgive the layman here, but why can't Android simply switch Java platforms as well? Open is Open, no?

Oracle is trying to claim that Dalvik, Android's virtual machine infringes on mobile java patents. Mobile java was not included when Java received it's current "open" licensing.

And James Gosling had this to say:

James Gosling: It's all about money. There's nothing else in there. At Sun we'd done an analysis and yeah, there's a bunch of patents violated here.

Given his history of speaking truth, Google's going to lose.

And it's not about "freedom" or "FOSS" or anything else but money, despite what Google would have you believe.

Umm... What about the fact that the Android SDK includes compatible implementations of the Java class library, using EXACTLY the same names and APIs? How can you both include core APIs named, for example, java.lang.Object while at the same time claim that it has nothing to do with Java? The Android SDK documentation has specific portions that describe what the specific differences are between it and a full Java implementation.

In the end, though, I believe that none of this has ANY bearing on weither Google is violating Oracle/Sun patents that are used in Java or not. As previously discussed, MS ran afoul of Sun's patents on Java while implementing a different API and VM from scratch. Sun put a huge amount of work into what has become an excellent VM that amazingly rivals the performance of a lot of C/C++ code. It did so by having a whole lot of clever people write a whole lot of clever code. Clever ideas are what patents were intended for. I have no doubt that Google as well as ANY other modern VM implementors have ran afoul of these patents, accidentally or otherwise. Google is a large target with deep pockets, as was Microsoft. It's hardly a surprise that Oracle is grabbing for this revenue stream, even though it appears to be a risky long-term strategic move to arouse Google's wrath.

Incidentally, James Gosling has a very clear opinion on the Google/Oracle patent issue, while having no love of Oracle. His opinion is that Google is unquestionably violating Oracle's patents. You can read that directly here: http://www.basementcoders.com/transcripts/James_Gosling_Transcript.html

As an aside, I still feel that software patents are a bad idea in general.

Totally shameless plug for our podcast where we just talked about how much school really matters. Of course the episode was totally biased (all university guys) so we naturally came to the conclusion that we didn't waste our money on our fancy degrees.

I know for programmers there are a lot of "theoretical" topics you learn in university that you never think you'll need, but when you do, you'll be thankful you have it. For example, algorithm performance, compiler construction, or database theory are actually quite applicable in most jobs, just not everyday. When you do utilize it, you (and hopefully your team) really appreciate the knowledge.

http://basementcoders.com/