Google, Sun Headed for Showdown Over Android

narramissic writes "There may be trouble brewing between Google and Sun. Google has written its own virtual machine for Android, 'most likely as a way to get around licensing issues with Sun.' If Google used any of Sun's intellectual property to build Dalvik, Sun could sue Google for patent infringement. But here's where it gets interesting - Sun is a vocal advocate for open source and it would 'hardly appease the open source community to sue Google over an open source software stack.'"

Comments

To put it bluntly.

[LWATCDR]

So reporter thinks that Sun might sue Google for forking Java all the while over looking the fact that Sun has GPLed Java and that other groups have produced versions of Java with out getting sued. Google and Sun both are saying that they are working together.
In other words a none story.

Re:To put it bluntly.

[Actually, I do RTFA]

GuI interfaces are usually done horribly in Java, because its easy to screw them up. The unresponsive Gui (see zend framework) often makes people think that Java is slow.

Unresponsive is slow. From a user's (and my) POV, I don't care if code executes in 10ms or 299ms if the GUI refreshes every 300ms. Why, because I use a program to do things, not to marvel at the effiency of the algorithim (unless I'm examining the code).

Additionally, a lack of progress bars leads to killing processes and restarting them, making them slower in reality.

nothing to see here

[doktorjayd]

FTA:

While Sun declined to comment directly for this story, it pointed to some public statements from company executives. Jonathan Schwartz, president and CEO of Sun, wrote a blog post congratulating Google on the day of Android's launch. Notably, he refers to Android as a "Java/Linux" platform

where is the trouble? the article is pure beat-up.

the reason for dalvik is entirely technical. check out the youtube presentations, it makes it pretty clear that you develop in pretty much pure java, but the runtime needed a little more than the standard jme could provide.

move on..

Slashdot is being sensational

[bogaboga]

The article that Slashdot links to is headed: "Google and Sun may butt heads over Android." Key word: "May".

Then Slashdot modifies the headline to say: "Google, Sun Headed for Showdown Over Android."

Question is: Does anyone of these reporters work for either company in order to have this seemingly serious situation? I doubt it.

Re:Does Sun make any money from Java on phones?

[mhall119]

Sun has or is in the process of open-sourcing their implementations of JavaSE, JavaME and JavaEE, as well as their JVM and Java compiler.

Sun does make money licensing their Java code to third parties, but that isn't a requirement for providing Java support. The Java language specification is freely available, anybody can create their own implementation, but for most companies it is cheaper to reuse Sun's implementation than make their own. Sun even provides financial assistance for small businesses or open-source projects to take the Java compatibility test. Heck, they've even open-sources the test harness for the compatibility test.

Re:Does Sun make any money from Java on phones?

[ricegf]

I don't know for sure, but since it's Slashdot, I'll happily speculate. ;-)

Java is GPLed. A manufacturer is free to tweak Java for his machine and ship it... with the source code. Or, he can pay Sun a nominal fee for a non-GPL license and tweak to his heart's content, and keep his tweaks to himself.

This is precisely the dual-license model used for QT, and it works pretty well. Free software gets to use the technology for free. Proprietary software pays for a proprietary license, but they're charging their customers anyway. Everybody's happy. Well, except for BSD advocates... ;-) ;-)