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Oracle's Newest Move To Undermine Android
GMGruman writes "Oracle's decision to shift focus from the Harmony Java open source project to OpenJDK seems innocuous enough — but InfoWorld's Josh Fruhlinger explains it's part of an effort to derail Google's mobile Android OS by gutting the open source project that Android has been driven by. IBM has signed on, apparently in return for getting the Java Community Process reactivated, leaving Google in a bind."
Forgive the layman here, but why can't Android simply switch Java platforms as well? Open is Open, no?
avoid the fees B.S. and just ship the 100 meg java SDK with android and be done with it. it even has a patent cross licensing clause. yes its bloated. yes developers might not use any of its features. who the fuck cares ? just ship the damn thing and keep the JVM compatible. if a nokia dumbphone from 5 years ago can ship with j2me so can an android smartphone.
We already know that Dalvik VM itself isn't like JVM. It can be mapped one-to-one (at least going from JVM bytecode to Dalvik bytecode), but the basic architecture is different.
Android also has its own rich class library, while retaining some stock fundamental Java classes. Of those some are inherently implemented mostly by the VM (Object, String...), so presumably they are also Dalvik-specific, while others have Java implementation - collections, for example. I assume the latter is what is taken from Harmony. The obvious question, then, is - how much code is that? Somehow, I suspect that it's not all that big, and so Google could just take over those bits it needs - rather than Harmony as a whole - without having to contribute significant resources to it.
Google collects a license fee from Java ME installs. Android isn't a Java ME implmenetation, obviously, and you can argue that Android is hindering the adoption of Java ME in the next generation smartphone world by absorbing the energies of the huge pool of Java programmers who might want to do mobile development. (You could also argue that Java ME was failing to catch on quite well on its own before Android showed up due to its own limitations.)
If you're interested in the background, here's an article I wrote about it a couple of months ago. (I'm the guy who wrote the article that got slashdotted, for what it's worth.)
Sergey vs. Larry.
Unix, an obscure operating system developed by bored researchers in an attempt to get a better game playing experience.
Google is famous for building a piece of cool software to version .8 or so and then releasing it under open source and letting everyone else finish the work.
I call your bluff: Show source control logs that demonstrate that any significant Google open source release (of which there are many) has more than a trivial percentage of non-Google contributions. For full credit, you must show that these non-Google contributors were somehow not working in their self interest by contributing to the project.
On that latter point... Last I checked, "open source volunteer sweatshop" was still equal to the empty set. I.e. no one is forced to contribute to any particular piece of open source code. The deal for all OSS projects is essentially the same: "hey, I made something cool, come help out if you like!" Whether "I" is a corporation or one or more independent volunteers is irrelevant. Any external contributors to a project do so for their own reasons, reasons which have been extensively discussed elsewhere.
No, IBM did.
This article is largely about Oracle offering IBM concessions regarding the management JCP process so that IBM would drop involvement with Harmony in favor of dedicating resources to OpenJDK and the Java Community Process.
I'm not an expert on Android internals or anything, but I think this story is being significantly overblown.
Seriously understated... The problem with Oracle and Google is simply licensing. If Google had licensed Java like every other company doing a port like Android perhaps Sun would still be a viable company today. Perhaps it is unfortunate that Sun did not want to litigate, but you can't expect Oracle to drop the same ball.
...except that it's not a "port", and any company that licensed Java VM has used a Java VM that was licensable. Google isn't using one of those VMs. Nobody dropped the ball here. It's just another frivolous lawsuit trying to ride the coattails of somebody else's success.
If you aren't suspicious of your government's actions, you aren't doing your job as a responsible citizen.
Seems like Python would be the obvious second language to be compiled to Dalvik bytecode.
See this thread from back in 2008 before Android even shipped.
Linked at the bottom of that thread are the Dalkvik VM docs (link updated to head).
Also is a Stack Overflow post that links to many methods for Python and scripting languages to create Android apps. (Though some methods like Jython are still using Java.)