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Oracle Asks Apache To Rethink Java Committee Exit
CWmike writes "Oracle has asked the Apache Software Foundation to reconsider its decision to quit the Java SE/EE Executive Committee, and is also acknowledging the ASF's importance to Java's future. In a message released late Thursday, an Oracle executive made conciliatory gestures to Apache. At least for now, the ASF doesn't seem eager to rejoin the committee. 'Give us a reason why the ASF should reconsider other than "please,"' ASF president Jim Jagielski said in a Twitter post on Thursday. The Java Community Process is 'dead,' Jagielski said in a blog post, also on Thursday. 'All that remains is a zombie, walking the streets of the Java ecosystem, looking for brains.'"
Answer is still no.
'All that remains is a zombie, walking the streets of the Java ecosystem, looking for brains.'
Best quote ever. Hopefully, Oracle will get the clue and realize that you have play nice, even when you own the toys. Otherwise, you play alone.
Tequila: It's not just for breakfast anymore!
Oracle has the Midas Touch. Everything they touch turns into a profitable venture--I mean, if you don't count the ones that became completely useless as a result.
I'm sure even Larry and Company realize the importance of not angering every single one of your customers. If you drive absolutely everyone off your ubiquitous application platform, and no one wants to develop for it anymore, you don't get the opportunity to lock them into your products.
Granted, every single Sun customer I've talked to (including myself) is running away from Solaris and SPARC as fast as they can. SPARC hardware was great, the OS was good for an enterprisey Unix, but everyone's scared to death of Oracle quadrupling the price for next year's service contract and making a mess of support.
When it comes to hardware and Solaris, Oracle doesn't give a damn. What they do care about is their application platforms. Almost every CS program in the country is pumping out Java coders, many enterprisey applications have been written in Java/J2EE over the past 10 years, etc. Keeping developers interested in the Java/J2EE ecosystem is important long-term. Even if they don't want to support non-Oracle apps on Java, having a critical mass of Java coders means they have someone to maintain the disasters that they have to integrate like PeopleSoft, JD Edwards and other Oracle-developed products. If people stop writing for the platform, and Oracle doesn't at least maintain the illusion of an open standard, the platform goes away, as does the lock-in opportunity.
Although, I've never seen an acquiring company come down so hard on acquired customers before. Friends have been telling stories of their Oracle reps coming in and trying to double the price of their service contracts since the takeover. The entire secondary/hobbyist market for Solaris OS and SPARC hardware is toast because you can't even get firmware updates for hardware without Oracle service contracts. Maybe someone is realizing that they need to lighten up a little?? Nah...
Was it ever a good idea for Apache to participate in Java in the first place, knowing that the exact situation that they are complaining about today existed when they started, and has existed for the entire time they've been developing?
When we're finished with this one, we can think about Open Source projects and .NET .
Bruce
Bruce Perens.
What's the difference between God and Larry Ellison? God doesn't think he's Larry Ellison.
Seriously, Oracle is an arrogant blood sucking company with its fangs in the fortune 500 markets and government organizations. Oracle DBAs demand a high price, and make sure you can't really escape the vendor lock.
Its a house of cards, really. Oracle on a single system doesn't scale much better (if even) than PostgreSQL on a single system. Oracle's cluster solution is nice, but the expense is crazy. Only fortune 500s and governments can waste that kind of money. I don't know of any "new" business that chooses Oracle.
They are trying to kill MySQL, and while I hope it dies a quick but painful death, PostgreSQL offers far more features and equivalent performance for free. What they are doing with Java is crazy. They don't even know what they have or how to capitalize on it. This isn't like MySQL where it is a direct competitor to their cash-cow, this is a key infrastructure piece that gives them a solid foot-hold in the industry. By suing Google and the actions they are taking now, it just tips the scales a bit more toward other languages and environments and weakens their position.
But, Larry is an idiot. Periodic flashes of brilliance, followed by long periods of narcissistic retardation disorder.
I suspect it was neither good nor bad that Apache participated. One good outcome is a ton of AL-licensed core java code implementations, the copyrights of which are not owned by Oracle, and not under their control, easily integrated into most any OSS licensed language.
One bad outcome of the many worthwhile contributions to OpenJDK is that Oracle owns them, they are copyright assigned, and clearly Oracle is not being a good actor in adoption of that code. The whole GPLv2+classpath exception, overloaded with a bevy of patent threats and outright ownership of the code, leaves something to be desired for anyone who champions reuse.
If one were to create the Joe language tomorrow, syntactically different enough from Java and dodging Oracle's patent troves, it would be trivial to adopt all of those AL .jars and extend the language immediately. Not so with the GPLv2 OpenJDK code, forking to borrow the patents is highly suspect, and the code can never be brought up even to GPLv3 and its patent assertions without the owners/copyright holders direct consent.
I sort of view this as a massive failure to the freedom of software perpetrated by Oracle, but no less by the FSF itself, and share my sympathies with all the non-employee contributors to OpenJDK who agreed to copyright assignment. Trusting a foundation such as the FSF with your copyright is one thing, but entrusting it to a for-profit to protect your code for public reuse is a bone headed move.
Of course, all assurances were made by Sun prior to the ASF embarking on Harmony (there was no FoU considerations at that time, that was injected much later in flagrant violation of the JSPA), and prior to their contributing Tomcat to the ASF, that they were moving forwards. Staying with it prior to the Oracle acquisition was questionable, but staying long enough to determine that Sun had polluted Oracle's earlier positions *against Sun* seemed sensible enough. Now that all of this has played out, and the OSS universes of Java, OpenOffice and MySQL all implode, it seems like Apache chose just the right time to exit stage right.
Agreed that .NET is interesting, once all threats of RAND are completely stripped away. MS would be wise to revisit their patent pledges at this time and address their criticisms, it could score them some serious open source credibility in this environment. Especially if they were to contrast themselves to Oracle's JVM ownership. Perhaps the Outercurve Foundation will help to win some of the necessary assurances. Clearly much of the future of computing will exist on portable and multivendor/multi-OSS project VMs.
In the short term: not much will change. The JDK will continue to be available. The developers will keep working on Tomcat, Hibernate, Spring and so on.
In the medium term, things might get weird. Apache will release Harmony with or without Larry's blessing, the only question is how compatible it will be with Oracle Java. Larry might decide to start charging money for Java. Java will definitely be around, but it's hard to tell in what form.
In the long term, we all die.
Bruno Borges said it the most succinctly...
"There is no point helping to write specifications that you aren't allowed to implement"
http://twitter.com/#!/brunoborges/status/13058930657730560
And Brian McCallister explained the full ramifications most clearly...
http://skife.org/java/jcp/2010/12/07/the-tck-trap.html
-- The Hoss Man
Lucy Asks Charlie Brown to Kick Football...Again
I work with Oracle quite a bit and they're pretty bad.
I worked with Sun and their reps for 20 years. They were clueless in a good way. They were just regular guys who would try to help you. Yeah, the company was dysfunctional, but they actually wanted to please you. I could call them weekends and get quotes for stuff, they'd go out of their way to write special deals and do whatever it takes to get the business at a price you could afford.
Oracle, by contrast has a good cop/bad cop approach. Its a way to screw you and charge you extra, but the sales rep keeps his hands clean.
Here's how it works. You get an an account rep, who acts like a regular guy, except he's not. He'll do stuff like "give you a free guy to help you" whose job it is to count licenses, servers, and applications secretly while "helping" you. He then passes that info back to the "inside sales rep". The inside rep (who will be a mystery to you) will say stuff like "Hey, I heard you got a new bigger server with a lot of new processors, is that right?". If you say "yes", he's got you. If you say "no", he'll keep calling until you admit it.
Meanwhile as you're planning on going live, they know the dates, they call the CIO and say "Dude, you're out of compliance. You go live, you owe us another $1M->a zillion dollars". Meanwhile, their licenses is so opaque that you have no idea what you owe them, and they count different licenses different ways, and even if you're a lawyer and a DBMS expert, you can't tell if you're in compliance or not.
The only way to deal with them is refuse their help, whenever the account rep comes in, accuse him of treating him poorly and throw him out. And when the inside sales rep calls you have to say things like "New server? I have no idea. I know the CIO was talking about getting rid of Oracle or something, but I'm not sure. What did you say you do for Oracle again? New application...ha, they never tell me anything. Did you know we already have an account rep here?"
That completely screws with the inside sales rep. Then when the account rep comes calling, say things like "Hey, my budget has been cut 10%, I need you to figure out a way to cut my maintenance bill by 10% or the CIO wants to throw you guys out. I know its crazy, but he's really mad at you". Then you never hear from the account rep again.
I've said this about Oracle for years: Nothing good comes from dealing with them. The only reason, the ONLY reason they stay in businesses is because they have software OEMs who will only support either MS SQL Server or Oracle as their RDBMS. Anybody who willingly gets into bed with Oracle is a fool. If you do get into bed with them, wear a condom.
And I'm not making up a f*ck*ng thing about any of this.