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The names of the parameters are also part of the specification as published in the javadocs. Furthermore the coding style guidelines for the Java language, are fairly strict with regards to brace placement, brackets, variable names and so on. Therefore it is not inconceivable that large pieces of Google's implementation will be identical to Oracle's one if they are using the same coding style guidelines.

Java's class libraries are split into two sections. The first is the public API, as documented online.

The second part is the native implementation classes. On Sun's JVM, those are the sun.* and com.sun.* packages.

The real question is... which is Oracle referring to in this lawsuit? The former should be considered the interface (to an extent) and not copyrighted under US law. The latter is the implementation and should be covered by US Copyright law.

There's one additional wrinkle in this: If the code was copied from OpenJDK, that means Android would have to be GPL or be in violation of the GPL license. Android is currently licensed under the Apache 2.0 license.

I'm not made out of money

You are aware that you can download, install, use for development / test and even PROD the free version of Oracle (Oracle 10g Express Edition) - correct?
Check it out here.

And if that's not enough to float your business, you can also download and use in your (dev / test / prod) environments the free Sybase 15.5 ASE Express Edition (certain hardware limits apply - single CPU, 2G of RAM, database is limited to 5Gigs of data.)

SSL can be delegated to a PCI-e crypto accelerator board.
Perhap the same would work for privacy violation?

Oracle DB is available for OS X? That's news to me? Link to download please?

An oldie but a goodie... here ya go.

Look for that to change. Red Hat told us a year ago that Xen was dead and being phased out. If Oracle wishes to continue to use RHEL code with tweaks they will be moving to KVM. I doubt they want to go through the bother of messing with Xen if it's removed in RHEL.

Oracle has had their own independent Xen implementation that they ship as Oracle VM.
And Sun's Xen uses Solaris as the dom0.
No Red Hat Xen.

Actually, they are. Basically, they're taking what's ready, or close to ready, and releasing that as Java 7, and then releasing the stuff that won't be ready for more than a year as Java 8.

These are Oracle's plans for Java:
http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/articles/java/java-platform-2010-174690.html?msgid=3-2517886426txt

These are Oracle's plans for Java:
http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/articles/java/java-platform-2010-174690.html?msgid=3-2517886426txt

These are Oracle's plans for Java:
http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/articles/java/java-platform-2010-174690.html?msgid=3-2517886426txt

If you download Java (JRE or JDK) via the developer site, the installer doesn't have any toolbars or crapware embedded in it. Only the java.com-hosted installer has a toolbar "offer" during install. This is why I always download from java.sun.com (I suppose now it's http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/java/javase/downloads/index.html).

You don't have to be vulnerable. The listed exploits were patched in Update 22, last spring.

Ummm, no. JRE 6 Update 22 was released last week, October 2010.

http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/topics/security/javacpuoct2010-176258.html

There aren't any business databases available for either OS.

Oough...
these guys beg to differ with you.

When Oracle moves OOo into paid tiers

What do you mean moves into paid tiers...?

Although I'm certain the person designing the SAN had a blast doing so and did an excellent job, it still seems it would have been faster/easier to go with a pre-existing SAN/DB system such as Oracle's exadata2

I've personally witnessed the exadata2 process close to the advertised 1,000,000 iops(well it was in a controlled demo environment done by oracle, but still, it was impressive).

I'd also be curious in how much the second SAN would cost. If the first one costs $1, will the second one be cheaper and thus justifying developing the system in house?

New security update for Java today: 6u22, critical so you now get Carbonite slamware instead of Bing!

For your convenience, here's a spam-free win32 Java installer: Deep link to jre-6u22-windows-i586.exe or start clicking here for other platforms (last page before the cookiewall).

Now that Java is officially owned by pure evil , and installs quickstarters all over your OS and browser, consider it deprecated.

New security update for Java today: 6u22, critical so you now get Carbonite slamware instead of Bing!

For your convenience, here's a spam-free win32 Java installer: Deep link to jre-6u22-windows-i586.exe or start clicking here for other platforms (last page before the cookiewall).

Now that Java is officially owned by pure evil , and installs quickstarters all over your OS and browser, consider it deprecated.

Tell them Open Office comes from Oracle.

honestly it has made things a little easier for me trying to get it in use - although the BIGEST hurdle is the lacking of a mail client/server combo that is comparable to outlook/exchange.

If you're looking for an Oracle solution, Oracle itself uses Oracle Beehive[free download] for email/calendaring/file sharing/conferencing/chat, with Thunderbird/Lightning or the included Zimbra web interface as the main clients. Any IMAP/CalDAV/WebDav/XMPP clients will work though. A single instance supports more than 100,000 accounts.

Which products are those? Oracle bought Peoplesoft, InnoDB, Berkeley DB, and is still supporting those, AFAIK:

http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/database/berkeleydb/index.html

http://www.oracle.com/peoplesoft/index.html

Not to mention MySQL, Java, etc. Oracle hasn't even canceled NetBeans, even though they had they own JDeveloper IDE.

Which products are those? Oracle bought Peoplesoft, InnoDB, Berkeley DB, and is still supporting those, AFAIK:

http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/database/berkeleydb/index.html

http://www.oracle.com/peoplesoft/index.html

Not to mention MySQL, Java, etc. Oracle hasn't even canceled NetBeans, even though they had they own JDeveloper IDE.

All computers are PCs

So these are personal computers?

http://www.oracle.com/us/products/servers-storage/servers/sparc-enterprise/t-series/sparc-t3-171613.html

Last episode of Javaposse was past that scenario.

All hail Walmart .

And guess what? With near linear scaling.

These have 512.

These have 256.

Appears to be a Linux problem.

And guess what? With near linear scaling.

These have 512.

These have 256.

Appears to be a Linux problem.

When you do a google search for "Oracle Open Office", you get this:

http://www.oracle.com/us/products/applications/open-office/index.html

Yes, they renamed StarOffice to Oracle Open Office. If you didn't know better, you would expect that OOo and OOO are the same thing, and that you have to pay for it. I would think if they didn't own the rights to the name "Open Office", that they could not call it "Oracle Open Office". I am not well-versed enough in trademark law to say for sure.

By replacing the kernel it is no longer (even close to) RHEL 5 so ISV certifications are shot. Making oracle's linux unsupported by any 3rd party software other than what oracle itself has certified.

They are still shipping the Red Hat kernel along with their newer one so your theory is shot.

The type of businesses that [need to] run ISV applications alongside Oracle DB, on Oracle's OS(s) can simply ask for it to be certified on OEL.

http://www.oracle.com/us/corporate/press/173450
Oracle seems to have the ISVs that are relevant to a kernel change lined up for this.

"Fine tuning" could be anything from tweaking some compiler settings to actually patching things in the kernel.

They patched quite a few things, but at the same time thought it important to be as close to mainline as possible. Here's the lowdown from Chris Mason over at LWN:

Hi everyone,

One of the goals of this kernel was to stay as close to 2.6.32.stable as we could. The sources are here in git, they won't be rebased:

http://oss.oracle.com/git/?p=linux-2.6-unbreakable.git;a=...
git://oss.oracle.com/git/linux-2.6-unbreakable.git
The main differences from mainline:

*) semtimedop optimizations. I posted these to the list a while ago, and Manfred took things in a less complex direction. He was waiting for me to fully benchmark the less complex version, but we ran out of time in the release cycle and had to focus on other things. Oracle hammers on the IPC lock, so these made a big difference, and now I finally have time to properly benchmark his approach against mine.

*) Ocfs2
*) Small lock contention fixes
*) Receive packet steering
*) A large update to RDS (this is in a different package)
*) A patch to list msi irqs for each device in sysfs. A modified irqbalance uses this to keep irqs on numa local cpus.

There are other bits and pieces, but we resisted the urge to pile things in.

The solid state disk access number came on a huge machine, and the improvements came from getting rid a lock in the driver and enabling it for softirq affinity code without taking any of the request locks.

Over the next 12 months we'll be getting an update prepared to a new mainline version, and trying to hammer on upstream kernels as much as we can to reduce our patch count even more.

-chris

Do you really get a pinquin with an armour for free with that 1400 dollar a year support?

Really? Are they uh.. well I didn't know, that they were so close. Married, as it were. I guess when two companies love each other..

It got to me an ugly threesome when Oracle took Sun into the family home though. HP was no longer the manufacturer of the prestige exadata server.

There have been some interesting developments in VMs, automated deployment, managing the systems, network virtualization, etc. that make the whole process much easier. Just read up on Eucalyptus.

The problem is that Oracle is dedicated to the MS model of breaking open source. Take a look at what they have done to the license for Sun Grid Engine. The previous version was 6.2u5 and was open source. The latest is not, in 6.2u6 they have added the following license terms: "You may evaluate the software internally for a period of 90 days from your first use.". The bastards have taken a very useful cloud tool and broken it. See the links here

Aren't you basically talking about a materialized view? (This FAQ item has a simpler explanation than you'll get digging through the documentation above)

I haven't worked with materialized views, but if you want notification when the data changes, usually you can set up a trigger...

You didn't hear of Sun Unified Storage yet? Controller redundancy is available out of the box on certain NASes, otherwise you can add it.

In particular, they tend to lack things like controller redundancy,

Usually if you need this, you, well, put two HBAs in.

All you need is an external JBOD array your NAS appliance attaches to using a pair of SAS HBAs, with dual-ported SAS drives. Controller redundancy is a function of the attachment bits, not your management software. And this way your head node also doesn't have to be a single point of failure (cluster with two nodes).

Netscape-based browsers don't tend to have process redundancy, by the way. If your browser crashes, you are still down for a while, while you have to try to restart the browser, and then try to get back to the site you were at. Meanwhile, IE has process isolation...

FC connectivity, 10G ethernet,

Many of them have these connectivity options, or they can be easily added. If you haven't seen them available, then you probably aren't looking very hard.

By the way, Netscape-based solutions don't tend to come with any Ad Blocking tools, Popup blocker, Malware site blacklisting, Anti-Phish, or any of the connectivity options you'd expect in an Enterprise class web browser, sometimes you even have to install it yourself, or seek out third party software or plugins... Oh the humanity...

vendor support and certification with third party products (eg: VMware).

When was the last time you saw a Netscape-based browser having vendor support and certification with third party products (eg: Microsoft Windows, Google.com, Windows Update) ?

Also, I don't think Mozilla Thunderbird is certified to be used with Microsoft Exchange's POP3 service. Thunderbird also has not been certified in its ability to be used to read Viagra spam, which seems enterprise critical because 90% or more of all e-mail is Viagra spam.

Did that ever make all Netscape/Mozilla originating browsers irrelevent or useless as a 'mid range to high-end Enterprise Web Browser' / Mail Readers ?

Are we supposed to believe that a shiny 'certified for X' seal, that the hardware manufacturer paid X millions of dollars or did horsetrading to get, actually successfully makes sure the thing is a better product or work better with X? Yes, that's what they want you to think, and that might be where some big marketing bucks go, but that doesn't make it accurate.

Hint: "certification" is largely a farce. Can't count the number of times i've seen products that were certified to go to each other melt, and just because 'officially' something is supported, doesn't mean support personnel won't tell you otherwise, and refuse to help, when you finally need the support.

There are almost always caveats to "certification" and discrete arbitrary requirements, for example X and Y work together, as long as feature B is turned off on X, or burdensome/expensive conditions Q,R, and S, are true.

If there is no such caveat, they'll make one up in response to your support request, anything to get to tell you 'No dice, sorry, it's vendor Y's problem'

Other Hint: 3rd party "support" of supposed "high end" storage, software, and computer hardware sucks most of the time

I would like to know where you are buying your Oracle licenses 'cause I'm paying something like £20000 anually for my Enterprise license (for a quad core, single socket server)

I've never bought an Oracle product, but correct me if this isn't a valid way of purchasing said software?

Either way, my point still stands. £20,000 is a lot less than the cost of retraining your entire development team to a new database system, so if Oracle is what you're familiar with, Oracle is what you should be using. The costs virtually disappear when compared with staff costs.

x86-64 is where the action is.

That will go down fantastically well with Oracle's female employees I suspect.

Especially this one.

I can just imagine her going down .....

That will go down fantastically well with Oracle's female employees I suspect.

Especially this one.

Having a good reputation among the slashdot crowd may be more important than you think. Oracle's name is quickly becoming mud in the minds of of a lot of developers, and while in the short term that may mean little to them, it will probably bite them in the ass down the road.

Developers dont make decisions about the use of Oracle's money stream products, of which Java is not among them.

Its the IT guys that make those decisions, and they pick Oracle because Oracles solutions are some of the best in the business. Oracle's revenue stream is in the same league as Google, Microsoft, Apple, IBM, Cisco, etc.. not a household name like some of them, but their revenue stream is testimonial to the quality of their products and the loyalty of those who do make purchasing decisions relevant to Oracle.

Oracle did not buy Sun for Java. Java was just a bonus. Sun was a direct competitor with some unique IP in the storage solutions space that Oracle was and will continue to be the #1 player in. You see Sun Server prominent on that products/services page, while Java is relegated to only footnote status in the "Related Technologies" section.

Java is a fine language for what its primarily used for, and Oracle certainly uses a lot of Java code, but they barely marketing Java itself. They couldn't give a rats ass as to what developers feel about Java. They sell solutions, not platforms.

Was that, ahem, "Unbreakable Linux" that broke?

The ITU cannot fix this problem. In charge is the "International Committee for Weights and Measures" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Committee_for_Weights_and_Measures which is older than the ITU. The software should reflect the time defined by the committee. The whole discussion is ridiculous, you only need a table with the number of leap seconds defined and a function fixing the 24 exceptions to the unleaped time http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leap_second
If we would not have fixed it, the deviation would sum up to nearly half a minute. How want you fix that? In an effort similar to the Y2K bug problem. Painful nonsense.
If a database crashes you should fix the code starting with the underlying operating system and programming languages. By the way the definition of Time in most languages should be corrected, because f.e. http://download.oracle.com/javase/1.4.2/docs/api/java/sql/Time.html#Time(int, int, int) It is wrong that a minute can have only 60 seconds. It could also have 59 (not yet happened) or 61 seconds. If the ITU makes the change, time in GPS announced and real time will deviate. This is nonsense.

Oracle doesn't care about cool. They care about big business.

By purchasing Sun, Oracle can now offer a complete solution for both database and web application servers:
Hardware: Oracle SPARC
OS: Oracle Solaris
Software: Oracle Database or Oracle WebLogic (using either Oracle JRockit or Oracle JRE)

Oracle also sells licenses for JavaME to mobile phone manufacturers. Strangely, despite using the Java language on their mobile, Google isn't paying Oracle a license fee. Which prompted this whole suit.

No doubt, Oracle is angling that Google will think it's cheaper to settle out of court (paying Oracle for a license) than to fight this lawsuit.

Oracle doesn't care about cool. They care about big business.

By purchasing Sun, Oracle can now offer a complete solution for both database and web application servers:
Hardware: Oracle SPARC
OS: Oracle Solaris
Software: Oracle Database or Oracle WebLogic (using either Oracle JRockit or Oracle JRE)

Oracle also sells licenses for JavaME to mobile phone manufacturers. Strangely, despite using the Java language on their mobile, Google isn't paying Oracle a license fee. Which prompted this whole suit.

No doubt, Oracle is angling that Google will think it's cheaper to settle out of court (paying Oracle for a license) than to fight this lawsuit.

Not trying to troll here, but how about this?

http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/indexes/documentation/index.html

The way I did it:

To learn Java: http://download.oracle.com/javase/tutorial/reallybigindex.html
To learn PHP: http://www.php.net/manual/en/ (start with the simple tutorial)
To learn Perl: SAMS Teach Yourself Perl in 21 days, http://www.amazon.com/Sams-Teach-Yourself-Perl-Days/dp/0672320355/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1280710004&sr=8-1

I don't recall where/how I learned HTML/CSS. w3schools.com might have helped--it certainly helped with Javascript--but beware, particularly with Javascript, that not everything there is portable or even right. Once you have the feel for HTML and CSS, just go to w3.org where the specs are fairly readable.

I'm not near my usual machine so can't write any proper code, however, take a look here, the relevant parts seem to be:

System.getProperty ( "java.version" ) - Java Runtime version
System.getProperty ( "java.vendor" ) - Java Runtime vendor
System.getProperty ( "java.specification.version" ) - Java Runtime specification version
System.getProperty ( "java.specification.vendor" ) - Java Runtime specification vendor
System.getProperty ( "java.specification.name" ) - Java Runtime specification name
System.getProperty ( "java.vm.version" ) - Java VM version
System.getProperty ( "java.vm.vendor" ) - Java VM vendor
System.getProperty ( "java.vm.specification.version" ) - Java VM specification version
System.getProperty ( "java.vm.specification.vendor" ) - Java VM specification vendor
System.getProperty ( "java.vm.specification.name" ) - Java VM specification name

I'd guess that the VM versions are more relevant for Eclipse, though the VM specification may be the best bet since (I assume, I haven't actually researched that bit), it will likely uniquely identify the Sun/Oracle VM better than the vendor string. Of course, this way means there is more work involved maintaining a database of VMs and their required tweaks.

This kind of stuff isn't publicised well as well as I would hope, but is by no means super-secret hidden knowledge meant only for the elite. Given that I hunted it out when creating a cross-platform (Solaris/AIX/Linux/Windows) utility at my last job just last year, and a quick check here shows it's been in Java since JDK 1.0, I find it utterly unbelievable that nobody on the Eclipse dev team realised there was a better way to get the JVM vendor information.

Oracle's pet linux is branded "Unbreakable"...

No it's not.
It's called "Oracle Enterprise Linux", which gets updates from the "Oracle Unbreakable Network" as part of "Oracle Unbreakable Support" contracts.

And yet their website and press releases use "Unbreakable Linux".

And yes, you can ask the JVM if any of the Java interfaces are supported, so switching on the name of the company that produced them is unnecessary. The company name is neither a necessary nor a sufficient test for anything. For those kinds of tests you use this reflective thingie they invented...

--dave

Interesting, how would you query the java vm (before calling it's binary), whether it supports -XX:MaxPermSize? I'd say you could execute "java -X" to see the -X parameters that are supported, but -XX: seems to be out of control. Those are documented at http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/java/javase/tech/vmoptions-jsp-140102.html and maybe it was dumb of the eclipse staff to try detect a sun vm by looking for the company name... I'd even say the eclipse launcher is a complete hack, but necessary. JAR-Files are not sufficient as directly executable files, because launching a jar often needs to be done with the correct settings for the java vm executable, like in this case to set memory or permgenspace (or on osx, -XstartOnFirstThread for any SWT app). That completely fucks up distribution of java software as JARs.

1. OpenJDK is GPL'd, so I don't know where you get that. And both Sun and openjdk are available via Ubuntu's package manager.

2. So what?

3. You clearly don't understand why Oracle cares about Java. It's not about the compiler any more than Microsoft Visual Studio is about the compiler. It's about all the other shit Oracle has that runs on Java -- here's an example. I don't particularly like these products (having been forced to work with Oracle ADF over the summer), but they all cost large amounts of money, and they all run on Java.

Given that, Oracle needs Java to work. And given that, open source or not, they need key Java people.

> I thought go-oo also required copyright assigned to them when
> submitting patches (I agree they're not as retarded as Sun when
> it comes to accepting patches).

I did not know that. I've never submitted a patch. It sounds ironic, and I see no mention of it on the site:
http://go-oo.org/developers/

Can you tell me where you found that info?

> Why is Oracle making an even bigger mess of it? By attaching it's
> name to the project?

I actually like the Oracle name. But they've reassigned OOo engineers from bug fixing (I am in contact with Oracle for licensing so long as Issue #5556 gets fixed) and they've taken the MS Office ODF compatibility plugin and started charging for it:
https://shop.oracle.com/pls/ostore/f?p=ostore:product:8843910539649667::::P3_PPI,P3_LPI,P3_METRIC,P3_TERM:3710062267511641485310,3760869190131631757316,Application%20User,_Perpetual

> And what exactly did Novell do different than Red Hat that
> makes Suse such a 'dog'?

I never called Suse a dog.

It is a free (to develop, deploy and distribute) database.

There are some limitations; "Oracle Database XE can be installed on any size host machine with any number of CPUs (one database per machine), but XE will store up to 4GB of user data, use up to 1GB of memory, and use one CPU on the host machine."
http://www.oracle.com/technology/products/database/xe/index.html

IMHO, it is vastly superior to Access, and because I am familiar with pl/sql and DBA actions, it is much simpler to me than either MySQL or PostgresSQL

If you are really comfortable with Access's data modeling capability, you can also download (and 'evaluate') Oracle Designer, which can generate table create statements and appplications based on data you enter through BPM and ERD diagrams

Did you know that Oracle already allows free downloading of any software the customer licensed, and a lot of Oracle's software can be downloaded by anybody for use in development and testing? That's the full version, not a crippled or time-bombed version.

I don't know about the auditing - I'm not an Oracle customer. I'm an Oracle employee, posting AC because I'm not authorized to speak on behalf of the company.