Apache Declares War On Oracle Over Java

jfruhlinger writes "The Apache Software Foundation, feeling increasingly marginalized as Oracle asserts its control over the Java platform, is fighting back, trying to rally fellow members of the Java Community Process to block the next version of the language if Oracle doesn't make it available under an open license amenable to Apache. Last month's Oracle-IBM pact was a blow against the ASF, which had worked with IBM in the past, but it appears that Apache isn't giving up the fight."

Comments

Unsurprising

[JustNilt]

Everything I know about Oracle makes this absolutely unsurprising. It looks to me as though they're trying to cut out all the "competition" in order to ride out the recession.

Re:Unsurprising

[Old97]

Huh? Oracle has been evil for most of its 30 year existence. If you've ever done business with them you'd have experienced it first hand. They'd have been worse than Microsoft if given the chance.

Re:Unsurprising

[Fluffeh]

From a business point of view, it's genius.

I wouldn't go so far as to say genius, but certainly say it is simple forward planning. It is the simple result of: Where are we now, where do we want to be financially, in the marketplace and from a client base point of view in 3 years, what is the gap between where we are and where we want to be - and finally, how do we cover that gap.

In this case, it is clearly simple. We want to be in a stronger market position and to achieve that, we need to earn a higher market penetration. To do this we need to either buy, discredit or discontinue our competitor products. We have the money available to make a lot of purchases as well as the current market position to be able to drive a very large product towards the goals that will benefit us most.

The move from Apache is clearly a salvo from a company who can perceive this change and doesn't like where it is going as it will clearly impact THEIR goals negatively. If they can make enough of a stink/problem/thorn about it, then Oracle will have to realign their own thinking/planning to plan a slightly different path that avoids this big thorn/problem or account for the fallout and accept it as part of the bigger solution.

Re:Unsurprising

[Anonymous Coward]

I worked with a guy back in the 90s who was one of Oracle's first employees. He used to tell me how horrible it was to work there and how much of a complete asshole Larry Ellison was. Fortunately for him, being in at the beginning gave him a head start and he ended up making millions writing O'Reilly books covering Oracle Database topics.

Re:Unsurprising

[jd]

Not sure about the recission part, but they're definitely out to kill the competition. I fully expect the battle to get extremely bloody. Apple's sacrifice of their own Java implementation might well have been under duress, given this development.

It might be a good idea at this point to start looking at other languages. Since D is supposed to be "C# done right", it might be a language worth investigating. All you'd need is a portable virtual machine for it and you've a rival to Java that is (supposedly) superior to Java structurally. Tcl/Tk, Perl, Python and Ruby are already highly portable - although Perl largely shot itself in the foot with Perl 6 and Python did some serious self-inflicted damage with Python 3. Both should recover - after all, Python had just as much of a problem moving to Python 2 from the original form. Regardless, clearly there are potential competitors to Java if they can be mobilized.

If one or more of these can be embedded into multiple browsers (IE, Firefox, Chrome, Safari and Opera would be the obvious set and cover almost the entire browser market), Java would face some serious competition - at least at the browser end. Java applications and servlets would depend on whether the Java ABI was covered by the patents. If the ABI (in and of itself) is not IP-protected, then it would be possible to write virtual machines that run entirely differently than "native Java" VMs but which support Java objects. Bring GCJ up to Java 7 and have a backend to GCC that supports a portable virtual machine. You then have something that will handle existing Java bytecode and will allow a gradual weaking off of Java to any language GCC supports.

(Since IBM -is- permitted to contribute to GCC, this is another direction IBM might be looking into. Especially if they can get a Java bytecode frontend working for GCC. Java applications natively compiled to IBM's processors would be very appealing, especially if it didn't break any standards in the process.)

Re:Unsurprising

[sinclair44]

I think/hope that they are going to absolutely shoot themselves in the foot with this. Much of their top talent has left in droves since the Sun acquisition. They sent a recruiting email to myself and some of my friends -- some of the top students at the top CS school in the country -- asking if we were interested in coming to work on the Solaris kernel full-time; they were pretty much collectively told, "After what you did to Sun? No way." If their talented engineers are by-and-large leaving and they are by-and-large unable to hire more, they will quickly become a dying shell of a mediocre company.

Re:Unsurprising

[Eskarel]

It's a bit more complicated that that really.

One of the reasons sun failed was that despite the fact that they came up with all the Java standards, the reference implementation and industry leader for most of them elsewhere. In this specific instance we're mostly talking about Tomcat as a servlet container which just destroyed anything Sun had until the very end. There was really no reason to pay either licensing or when they went open source support fees to Sun because their product implementations sucked.

Not that Oracle aren't a bunch of bastards(they are, always have been, and always will be), but Sun's relationship with the ASF was very much against their own interests, Oracle will very much be looking to put their implementation of the next JEE container as the go to standard so they can get some money out of it.

Re:Unsurprising

[mark72005]

I had a similar conversation with someone who worked for and with the co-founder of another fortune 500 company around the time the company started. I think most of these guys end up being slave drivers and assholes because they see what can happen and how much it's worth, and it just strips away all inhibitions.

Re:Unsurprising

[Anonymous Coward]

Right a bunch of students with no work experience unilaterally turn down guaranteed full time positions with a established company in this economy.

Re:Unsurprising

[TheRaven64]

Why not, if they had other options? Given the choice between a job at Oracle or IBM, for example, I would be surprised if anyone took Oracle. If they're really at the top of their class, then they probably have a lot of options - I certainly did, although I chose to stay in academia for a bit and then work freelance so I never went through the whole 'proper job' thing.

I actually would have been quite interested in working on Solaris for Sun, but my contacts in the company put me off applying with their complaints about the poor working environment and bad management. I don't think I'd be interested in doing the same thing for Oracle. Mind you, one of my clients keeps talking about shipping a fork of OpenSolaris, so I might end up working on it after all...

Java is the new COBOL

[vlm]

Java is the new COBOL.

During the declining years of cobol, I/we watched the participants fighting to increase their portion of the pie, regardless of how much it shrunk the pie.

Re:Java is the new COBOL

[hsoftdev17]

If Java is the new COBOL, I highly recommend not telling the millions of Android developers out there, or Google for that matter. I am inclined to agree that the language formerly known as "Java" (Sun's version) may be on its way out. However, the existence of alternate compilers, alternate VMs, and extensions to the language not officially sanctioned by Sun (or Oracle) seem to indicate that Java isn't going anywhere anytime soon.

Re:Java is the new COBOL

[decipher_saint]

Let me put it this way, there are still tons of COBOL apps out in the wild. The last project I was on used a DB2 backend with a ton of COBOL stored procs. Imagine my surprise at having to learn enough COBOL to be dangerous in order to facilitate change to an application with an ASP.NET front end.

Re:Java is the new COBOL

[grouchomarxist]

I was surprised, but I recently met a COBOL programmer younger than me. Not only is COBOL still being used, new products are being created with it.

Re:It's a trap

[Enderandrew]

The are a couple problems with this theory.

The EU demanded that Microsoft open several of their standards and protocols, or else. The EU can stop the sale of Microsoft products in the EU and levy more fines.

And Microsoft has made an open patent pledge.

http://www.microsoft.com/interop/principles/osspatentpledge.mspx

If they go back on that pledge and tell the EU they refuse to cooperate with their demands on interoperability, then the EU hammer drops again.

Microsoft isn't going to do that. It makes zero sense.

Re:its on s60 as well

[accessbob]

It's a shame BlackBerry (aka RIM) haven't gone down the same route - they've tied themselves into a flavour of Java with a non-standard graphics API.

Re:It's a trap

[MCEscher]

I was at the Mono breakout session at PDC 2008. The speaker had nothing but good things to say about Microsoft and the support they have given the Mono team. It was even a Mono breakout session about developing games for the iPhone.

Re:It's a trap

[Americano]

As I just pointed out... that's exactly what they're doing by suing Android - an OS they had no hand in creating - for infringement on patents. Reading comprehension fail?

I find it difficult to see what grounds MSFT could sue a Mono user on, considering they blessed, implemented, and *released* a great deal of the source code that goes into Mono. It would be like suing your past self - "Well, one time I thought it would be cool to let other people have this stuff, so I released it to them all. But then I changed my mind, and now this court needs to take money from those people and give it to me."

It would seem that Microsoft's damages would be self-inflicted. And I'm not certain I see much legal basis for them rescinding their covenant(s) not to sue, as well. I can't imagine that "well we changed our mind" would be enough for a court to declare someone guilty of infringement, when MSFT has made a public statement that they wouldn't sue.

Blame Sun, not Oracle

[harlows_monkeys]

The policy of lying to Apache about Java was started by Sun, not Oracle.

Re:Change this to an inflammatory title

[sproketboy]

Yup. Sad that on slashdot I had scroll through a hundred stupid tin-foil-hat comments to find the only one worth anything. And of course I have no mod points....

Re:Oracle is Evil, C# Java

[msclrhd]

Parrot? That is a VM that can run a lot of different languages. You could always take one of the JavaScript engines -- V8, TraceMonkey+JaegerMonkey, JSC, etc. -- and adapt it to run python if you were so inclined. Also, if you like C# as a language, you could use Vala. And fossils C and C++ may be, but a lot of software is built with them including the major OSs, Web Browsers, Compilers and Virtual Machines/JIT engines.

Re:Oracle is Evil, C# Java

[GWBasic]

Mono should be looked at like WINE, useful to port programs to, useful to get some programs to run, but shouldn't be your language of choice if you want to get cross-platform apps.

I write ObjectCloud in C#, test on Mac with Mono, and deploy in on Ubuntu Linux with Mono. My experience with Mono is that it's fast and reliable, as long as you're sticking with the lower-level CLR APIs. IE, it's fine for servers that handle their own sockets; but it's not good for GUI applications.

Re:Oracle is Evil, C# Java

[aristotle-dude]

GP: Mono is not portable
P: Yes it is! Here is a link to its license!

Being open source doesn't make something portable.

Absolutely correct. I have tried in vain to get Monodevelop working fully on OS X but to no avail. There are a bunch of linux specific dependencies required to have it work fully. You cannot build most of the templates on OS X let alone being able to edit a GUI inside of Monodevelop.

The current state of the OS X port is an absolute joke and show how much linux is trying to copy the "windows" way of doing things.

FFS, this is bad...

[JAlexoi]

Any Java developer worth their salt, will know that anything else coming out about Oracle's plans for Java are nothing compared to this. ASF is probably the biggest source of software for Java developers. To the point that most Java software has components from ASF bundled, even if indirectly.
All of Oracle's Java based software has components from Apache. IBM's Webshpere software has components from Apache. JBoss, Spring, Google's tools... All of them...

Re:Reminds me of some bad history

[jd]

This is high-stakes poker, with the winner claiming the cross-platform system as the prize. Yielding is getting dealt-in to the game.

If they play right, they can end up dumping Oracle, leaving Oracle in the dirt.

Or maybe the stakes are higher. Oracle and IBM are foes in many markets, and many of those markets now leverage Java. Whichever one is left controlling Java is also left controlling everything else.

To not yield (be dealt in), IBM would rapidly lose ground on its servlet engine (it would have no advance knowledge of how the specs are changing and no ability to ensure the specs benefit what they want to do). It could lose ground in the database arena (controlling the JDBC standard is valuable). And so on.

But if IBM gain control, by building a better Java on the sly and ensuring all the key systems use it at just the right time, then Oracle is in that boat. They now become the ones who lose control of servlets, JDBC, etc. That would wreck many of their key products.

This is a cut-throat business and these are two experts at throat-cutting rivals.

Re:It's a trap

[FilthCatcher]

I agree with you on this point - using Mono you're pretty safe from being sued by Microsoft but there's one big issue with this whole patent issue that concerns me.

Currently there seems to be a bit of a patent arms race between a few large compaines. Most notably Microsoft and Oracle. Both these companies have a set of patents relating to VMs etc that seem to be fundamental to how these platfoms work.
The sheer number and breadth of these patents makes is look unlikely that there is nothing in Microsoft's offerings that voilates an Oracle patent and vice versa so we've got a cold-war style Mutually-Assured-Destruction stand-off in place.

The possible problem facing smaller implementations of either Java or .Net is that even if Mono gets an agreement from Microsoft mot to sue they are still vulnerable to being sued from elsewhere and they don't have their own stockpile of patents to act as a deterrant.