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."

Comments

android can easily ship with the full JDK.

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

How much of Java does it actually use?

[shutdown -p now]

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.

Re:Why?

[jfruhlinger]

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.)

Re:Check, But Not Mate

[mldi]

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.