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

Finally

[Yvan256]

Now we know who launched that missile!

Re:Finally

[Anonymous Coward]

Was it a tomahawk?

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

[mark72005]

There should be a top ten list of rising stars among evil companies.

(But who would hold slots #2-10?)

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

[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

[Gazzonyx]

There should be a top ten list of rising stars among evil companies. (But who would hold slots #2-10?)

Oracle.

Re:Unsurprising

[illtud]

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."

Unfortunately, I guess that your insightful feedback won't make it up the chain. All that Oracle HR will report is the number of new hires (and there will be some) that campaign made. They won't be top-class, on the whole (my opinon for the same reason you gave for flipping them the bird), and the Sun exodus will continue...

Please, if there's anybody out there who's considering sticking with Sun (ie the Sun products continued within Oracle) please speak up - I really need some pros to even make it worth while totting up the increasing number of cons.

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.

Time for...

[markov_chain]

Geronimooooooo!

" Apache Declares War On Oracle Over Java"

[RevWaldo]

Injuns, soothsayers, and volcanoes? Sounds like one hella cool game! When'll the demo be available?

.

The Oracle at Delphi, Indigenous Tribes, Coffee

[Oxford_Comma_Lover]

> Apache Declares War On Oracle Over Java

Sometimes it seems like the world hasn't changed much in the last two thousand years.

Nokia went for Python

[accessbob]

Nokia went for Python on Maemo. Looks like they knew what they were doing.

Re:Nokia went for Python

[Tester]

They went for C/C++. There is nothing in Python on the base Maemo platform.

For Meego, all UIs and higher-level stuff is in Qt so it's using C++

Re:Oracle is Evil, C# Java

[iONiUM]

That's a little dramatic, isn't it? Mono is the open source implementation of .NET, which is a very solid framework I might add, though clearly MS did wield it to further Windows (I don't deny that). Mono is released under GPL, LGPL, and MIT licenses http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mono_(software).

I mean, facts are facts, so why do you have to be so dramatic about it? Or I mean.. did it.. where did Mono touch you? You can tell me.

Re:Oracle is Evil, C# Java

[farnsworth]

Too bad Oracle now owns the BEA implementation of java too

BEA never wrote a JVM. They bought JRocket shortly before being acquired by Oracle.

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

[Rich0]

No - there weren't millions of computers to develop on back then.

However, cobol was the only way to develop anything that mattered on any computers that mattered. I wouldn't be surprised if the NYSE is still running on cobol and cics...

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

[idontgno]

At one time, COBOL was the only way to develop on tens of thousands of computers. Very expensive computers with very expensive maintenance and licensing contracts. There was a lot of money in this, measured in hundreds of thousands of dollars per year per site. That's probably an order of magnitude or two lower than the money at stake in the mobile software universe, but it's also probably a larger percentage of the overall market at the time.

There is a common but entirely mistaken belief that the great issues and controversies of this time are unique, unprecedented, and never-before seen. But license and market-control conflict is ancient in this industry. Almost every hassle you may see today has been seen by some earlier generation of dinosaurs.

Re:Java is the new COBOL

[Pharmboy]

FORTRAN? While scientific computing is no longer the largest sector of computing, it is certainly something that traditionally "matters". And it was here before COBOL.

Re:Oracle is Evil, C# Java

[Darkness404]

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.

It's a trap

[rsborg]

Mono is a trap, and solely exists at Microsoft's pleasure. Once MS decides the want to kill it, out go the patent infringement lawsuits and anyone using Mono is on shaky ground unless they donate to Microsoft's coffers.

The fact that it hasn't happened yet is no insurance. Copyright/left is one thing, patents are another and I don't trust Microsoft.

Re:It's a trap

[Americano]

It's released under LGPL, GPL, and MIT licenses... how would Microsoft ever "kill" it? They may decide to no longer officially support it, certainly, and they could stop contributing future changes to the open source implementation... but serious question:

Once it's been released under GPL, how exactly could they sue someone for using it, or forking it and continuing to work on a parallel implementation? That seems like it wouldn't stand up for a single moment in a court.

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:It's a trap

[h4rr4r]

You sue them over patents. Look at what MS is doing to folks build android handsets.

Re:It's a trap

[h4rr4r]

if You make or use such software outside the scope of creating such software code, You do not benefit from this promise for such distribution or for these other activities.

Create all the software you like, but if anyone uses it they reserve the right to sue them.

Re:It's a trap

[amiga3D]

It's not paranoia if they're really out to get you.

Re:It's a trap

[harlows_monkeys]

If only Microsoft would make a legally binding promise not to sue the standardized parts of Mono for patents. If only they would release many of the other parts under an open source license with a strong patent grant, like the Apache 2 license. If only they would take actions that would set up a very strong estoppel defense against suits over the rest...

Oh wait, they did all this. Go troll elsewhere.

Re:It's a trap

[penix1]

Judge: "Well, Microsoft released all this code, actively supported the open source implementation of this product, and then changed their minds. I'll have to aware billions of dollars in damages for infringement to Microsoft because..."

It's that "because..." I'm having trouble filling in here.

You are having trouble because you are confusing copyright law with patent law. That is a common mistake caused by all those attorneys who refer to both as "intellectual Property". To break it down to you, copyright != patent. Patent rights can be asserted any time by the patent holder regardless of their involvement with others. A patent holder can grant or withdraw licenses to use the patented technology at their whim. Currently, Microsoft only has a promise not to sue those developers that they can withdraw at any time.

The "patent pledge" Microsoft made with the mono developers can evaporate in the wink of an eye and then the whole project, and anyone using it, are at risk of patent infringement. The only reason they made that pledge is because of the multiple suits both here in the US and in Europe regarding interoperability. Once the scrutiny dies down, they can revoke that promise. And don't think they won't if it means they can make easy profits on threatening patent suits (which they can).

Worse, if Microsoft were to sell that patent to some other troll out there, nothing is binding that troll to the promise Microsoft made.

In short, you need to look up "torpedo patent".

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.

Re:It's a trap

[Americano]

The principle of estoppel would seem to apply here however:

Microsoft has promised not to sue, and stated so publicly, in writing. The Mono developers (and users) have proceeded under the assumption that commitment was made in good faith; Even if Microsoft reverses their decision, they cannot then sue for infringement of the *patents they already agreed not to sue* over. Estoppel would kick in, protecting the devs & users.

If the terms of the licensing arrangement change (at MSFT's decision, or because the project was spun off and sold to a patent troll), that might prevent me from *continuing to develop* the software and prevent me from using new releases because those new versions would not be covered by the patent covenant, but they'd have no legal basis for claiming damages on my 'infringement' on a patent which MSFT had publicly declared they would not sue over.

Such a change to licensing terms would likely kill Mono, and it would severely disrupt my business if I had strategic plans that included relying on Mono for the foreseeable future - i'm not arguing that reliance on Mono is a good thing, but I don't see how it approaches the level of "poisoning the well" of open source that the original poster suggested.

Re:It's a trap

[Requiem18th]

How to break your legally binding promises -- the legal way:

1. Never outright license.
2. Only promise not to sue...
2.1. Over patents you control.
3. Sell patents to patent troll and/or puppet company.
3.1. Voilà you no longer control the patents
4. Set us up the patent bomb.
5. Profit

There not even a fucking mystery "????" here.

Re:Oracle is Evil, C# Java

[h4rr4r]

The license is not the issue, the patents are the issue.

If it gains traction rest assured MS will come seeking rent like they trying to do with android now.

Change this to an inflammatory title

[VGPowerlord]

If you wanted to make this headline more sensational, you could change it to "Apache says GPLv2 license not good enough." which is what OpenJDK7 is licensed under.

Yeah, Apache may be at war with Oracle now, but this has the potential for much more widespread damage. It also puts the Free Software Foundation in an... interesting position, as this technically is the first salvo from Apache in a license war between GPL and Apache License.

Re:Change this to an inflammatory title

[Homburg]

I don't think that's right; this isn't about GPL vs. the Apache license. The issue isn't the licensing of OpenJDK itself, but about the licensing of the Java Technology Compatibility Kit (the JCK), which is used to test if an implementation is compatible with a given version of the Java spec. The JCK isn't available under an open source license at all. If the JCK were under the GPL, or even if it were under a license that didn't permit you to modify it, but only permitted anyone to run it, then Apache could use it to test their Java implementation, which is what they want to do.

Re:Change this to an inflammatory title

[Anonymous Coward]

You don't know what you're talking about.

The problem is that to be a compatible Java implementation you must pass the TCK. To get a hold of the TCK you must agree that your Java implementation has a limited field of use, namely desktop computers. That means you have to add a clause to your licence that tells your users where they can use the software - no such clause exists in any open source licence I'm aware of.

Sure you can use the OpenJDK, you can even fork it, but therein lies the problem... you can't, because if you do and you want to claim it's a compatible implementation you have to pass the TCK. So you have to licence the TCK, then you have to add a field of use restriction to your licence, but that's incompatible with the GPL that the OpenJDK GPL requires you to licence under.

End result, you can have Oracle Java or 'Open'JDK

The ASF don't have a political axe to grind with the GPL, aren't firing a salvo in some imaginary war based on their view of free; It's about a contractual obligation Oracle has to release the TCK to the ASF. An obligation Sun had and failed to meet and that Oracle continues to fail to meet.

The ASF was re-elected to the JCP with 95% of the vote. No other elected member had anywhere near that. The members spoke with their vote and consequently the ASF leaving the JCP would be big news in a war with Oracle, nobody else. The ASF is outside core Java and the work of the JCP probably the biggest single contributor to the Java ecosystem. Their threat to leave the JCP would seriously damage it and Oracle's commitment to opensource's credibility.

Re:Change this to an inflammatory title

[jonwil]

Oracle (and Sun before them) said "if you build an implementation of Java that passes the JCK, you get a license to the Java patents". Then they said "we will license the JCK for testing on any implementation excpet for those that are designed for mobile devices"

Oracle of course wont give in to Apache on this.
Hell will freeze over before Larry will allow ANY implementation of anything that even vaguely resembles Java to run on anything vaguely reselmbling a mobile phone device unless the vendor shipping that implementation pays Oracle per-unit royalties for every device they ship.

No WaY!

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Re:Reminds me of some bad history

[jd]

Oracle wants to reduce the competition and to "leverage" IBM's expertise. Once that expertise has fixed the issues with OpenJDK and Harmony has died, IBM becomes disposable to Oracle.

IBM is most unlikely to stop all work on Harmony, they're just not going to distribute it. Oracle's implementation of Java will suffer performance and reliability problems. IBM already has its own compiler (Jikes) and IBM already has a Java distribution. Once IBM has the certification toolkit, it can internally continue to develop Harmony and upgrade Jikes to v7 Java. Remember, this is just a repeat of IBM's experience with Microsoft regarding OS/2 - only Oracle hasn't the muscle of Microsoft. Once IBM is satisfied, they dump Oracle, release their Java as standard on all IBM hardware and, because they have better ties with Linux than Oracle, on many Linux distros, and they'll likely be able to convince the courts that they don't infringe on any patents because they are officially licensed to be able to use whatever the technology is.

Again, though, IBM won't want too much competition in the Open Source community. They can't rob Oracle of power over Java if they aren't the de-facto controllers of Java. For now, they'll be best of enemies. Going back to the OS/2 fiasco, they learned the hard way that in such partnerships the first one to dump the other will be the winner. The partner left in the dirt WILL be trampled over, no matter how much better their product might be technically. And IBM will want to be the winner in this. Mind you, so will Oracle. Oracle will also be familiar with this process and will want to pull a Microsoft, killing IBM's Java work, forcing IBM to either sacrifice all they've spent or to sell it to Oracle at bargain-basement prices.

I was about to say

[blair1q]

I was about to say "how the hell is Sun still in business?" for about the thousandth time.

Then I remembered...

Dramatic fits the context of this article

[pizzach]

Most people never thought Java would become a hot potato to be careful with. No one thought that Oracle would be going after people over patents. Sun put Java under the GPL2.

Can you tell me how Mono is more safe being under the GPL/LGPL/MIT when it is using tech directly from a company that is in many ways a direct competitor and has outwardly stated it thinks of open source as "communism"? Microsoft does have patents on specific things used in Mono. Mono is also under the GPL2. Coincidence? I think not.

It's called a can of worms. It's just we have a lot of slashdotters who refuse to believe it now for whatever reason.

Re:The Oracle at Delphi, Indigenous Tribe, Islands

[H0p313ss]

The Apache Indian in North America would go to war with the Athenian Oracle at Delphi over the island of Java in the South Pacific.

Sounds like a game of FreeCiv

OpenSolaris Board commits seppuku redux

[khb]

Apache to Oracle: Do what we say or we'll resign!
Oracle to Apache: Sayanora

I don't know that they should stay, but if they want to have any influence working with Oracle, aligned along Oracle's self interest is the only way to have impact.

Declaring "war" and making threats is highly unlikely to cause any useful change in Oracle's direction.

Surely the OpenSolaris experience illustrates just how Oracle behaves w.r.t. threats.

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:FFS, this is bad...

[fishbowl]

A lot of the people who comment on the subject seem to be familiar with the Java language itself, but not so much with the significance of the frameworks and libraries that are out there. In these threads, I don't usually get the sense that some of the posters are very aware of just how much business software has been built in Java in the past decade. Whenever I see comments dismissing Java based on stuff like applet or Swing performance, it just drives the point home that some people simply don't understand where the Java code is. (Hint, it's not in the end-user GUI or the 2D or 3D animation.)

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.

Good job, Oracle

[Arancaytar]

- Apache Software Foundation: Check
- OpenOffice.org/Open Document Foundation: Check
- MySQL: Check

At this rate, you'll have pissed off the entire world of free software before the year is over. Maybe go for Linux next. Or the Mozilla Foundation, but I don't remember if Sun was involved there in a major way.

python is on by default

[Kludge]

Python is included in the distn by default. Java is not.
Developers can develop in C or Python without adding a run time to the system.