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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."
I'm a little surprised that people don't understand how Google is riding free on Sun's efforts, so I'll try to explain this better.
Sun spent more than a decade doing R&D on virtual machines, which has helped the whole industry. Microsoft's CLR borrowed heavily from this, and many other interpreted languages have taken ideas from Java.
Yes, the Java API that Harmony has is a clean room implementation of the Sun ones, so the implementation is not a copyright infringement, but it's still an implementation of a spec that someone else designed and refined and improved over the years. It's a lot easier to construct a house when you're given blue prints than to build it completely from scratch.
The Java language itself is a carefully crafted balance between the power of C++ and the simplicity that history has taught us is necessary for beginner and intermediate programmers. There have been countless features that people have complained are not in Java, and there have been countless bugs that have not been written due to its simplicity.
All the R&D, the marketing, and the prioritisation of Java, throughout a decade of people saying it would fail, due to the incumbents of C/C++, VB, Perl, Win32. After the dot com bust, when Sun continued to invest in it, when more quarterly profit oriented companies might have quit.
No wonder efforts to open Java stalled out a couple years ago, because along comes Google, who's willing to leverage every strength of Java, borne on Sun's back, and take it away without giving back, by walking some fine line of the letter of the law, while ignoring the spirit of the law, which is that if a company drops billions of dollars into a technology, and is trying to sell it (JavaME), they should be compensated. Why didn't Google simply make their own technology from the ground up? Because they received tremendous value from taking it. Was that not worth some compensation?
When it was Microsoft, everyone called for their blood. But it's now Google, so every fan boy here is playing a different tune.