Slashdot Mirror
Oracle's Java Policies Are Destroying the Community
snydeq writes "Neil McAllister sees Oracle's buggy Java SE 7 release as only the latest misstep in a mounting litany of bad behavior. 'Who was the first to alert the Java community? The Apache Foundation. Oh, the irony. This is the same Apache Foundation that resigned from the Java Community Process executive committee in protest after Oracle repeatedly refused to give it access to the Java Technology Compatibility Kit,' McAllister writes. 'It seems as if Oracle would like nothing better than to stomp Apache and its open source Java efforts clean out of existence.'"
We have the last Java 7 preview (GPL).
Fork the darn thing and see who lives.
It seems as if Oracle would like nothing better than to stomp Apache and its open source Java efforts clean out of existence.
Also in the news. It seems that water makes things wet.
Java is not dead. Maybe it's not the hip language anymore, but it definitely is not dead.
It seem strange that Oracle would push people away from Java, especially since Sun spent a great deal of time getting people to adopt it. Now Microsoft seems to have gone soft on .NET which was that technology to compete with Java. Did Oracle somehow make a backroom deal with Microsoft? As I recall the Sun/Microsoft suit prohibited Microsoft from having their own Java implementation, is Microsoft now going to license Java from Oracle as the .NET replacement? This is all speculation but Oracle hasn't done anything good for the things they received in the Sun acquisition, Solaris, Java and SPARC. I realize that Oracle is a big company that likes lots of revenues but it seems to me that Sun market share was on the decline and now Oracle is just shutting the door on what remaining customers they had.
Harrison's Postulate - "For every action there is an equal and opposite criticism"
Really, who didn't see this coming?
This isn't a news article. This is an article about two previous news articles. There's nothing to see coming. Submitted by the author of an article about the two previous stories. Slow news day, I hope; this is just a group-think trajectory thing.
tasks(723) drafts(105) languages(484) examples(29106)
That entirely depends on how well the GPLv2 protects you from their patents.
Oh, and you can't use the name Java because Sun has it trademarked.
Oh, and no clue what'll happen related to trademarks if you continue to use the word "java" in the various namespaces in the language.
GLaDOS for President 2016! "Well here we are again. It's always such a pleasure." -- GLaDOS, 2011
I'm not Oracle fan (actually, I'm a hater), but this seems more like a witch hunt. I mean, the title "Oracle's Java Polices Are Destroying the Community", sounds a little harsh considering you only said that Oracle released a buggy version of Java and they were not the first to report it. ...not that I'm against an Oracle witch hunt. ;)
Java is not dead. Maybe it's not the hip language anymore, but it definitely is not dead.
Just like COBOL is not dead. Sure, it's not the hip language, but so many legacy systems are built on it that it's basically guaranteed to live for quite a while longer. I suspect Java will have the same fate.
Slashdot loves to rake on java.. but I always liked it. I don't work with it much any more, but I have fond memories.
Specifically I liked developing with it. Using it is an entirely different matter.. swing based UIs are still generally terrible. From the code side it was nice.
And LibreOffice is working on reimplementing many of those features without Java.
Unless, of course, I'm missing something (which I suspect I am).
Unless I'm missing something also, it's probably the fact that a large majority of the population doesn't actually understand what the the word irony actually means.
Except the post is wrong, the article isn't about Oracle damaging the OSS community, it's about them damaging Java.
Releasing a JVM with a serious bug doesn't damage the OSS community. In fact it's an excellent way to give it more influence. Issues like these provide plenty incentive to fork.
The worst case for Oracle would be it goes the way it happened with XFree86: every distribution ships the Apache version, and everybody stops caring about the original project's existence.
You forgot "two-thirds of the world's smartphones." Android and BlackBerry OS are both heavily dependent on Java.
A couple of factors motivating users to seek open solutions are: The proprietary vendor screws a product up and then doesn't fix it[1]. The vendor starts withholding necessary documentation or other support from the software community[2]. When will my product become competition for the vendor and I too will get buggered?
I can't think of a faster way for developers to jump ship to an open version of Java. And perhaps begin to fear other Oracle products as well.
[1] Heck, enough screw-ups and I'll start looking for a competent alternative. Never mind timely patches.
[2] Its called 'cutting off their air supply' and was made famous by a little outfit in Redmond.
Have gnu, will travel.
OP didn't claim it was dead. It sounded to me like he *wanted* it dead. Add me to that list please.
Wait, this is America, and people spent money in College learning it. Perhaps the government should subsidy the language and offer incentives to companies that hire these people...
- Dan.
My sarcasm detector needs calibration, but, in the meantime, those who spent money in college learning a language and not the concepts behind the language got ripped off. Give fish vs teach fishing and all that jazz.
More Twoson than Cupertino
Biggest issue for the amount of boiler plate crap. Things like anonymous classes where proper closures would make the code a lot cleaner. Eclipse takes care of a lot of refactoring and cleanup but it's still dealing with a lot of bloat. Other issues would be the heavy reliance on XML for control & configuration of apps. Often times you'll spend more time worrying about configuration than code.
In summary I like Java but it's not improving fast enough.
Apache did, in fact they reported the trouble five days before the deadline. This was a show stopper, Oracle did not treat it as such, Oracle has a habit of this. What they should have done (keeping in mind how they treat bugs) is released on schedule but with the option disabled. But no this would have been too much of a performance regression, again Oracle has made crazy decisions in the past where they value perceived performance in some benchmark above all other sane reasoning. But really they could have in this case, then around the second or third update have this fixed and it would have been another great release all about improved performance. That would look pretty dang good in comparison to the current situation. It is just that there is clearly some disease that has spread at Oracle, and they can't think things through clearly enough when there is a deadline or benchmark involved.
Never had to interact with Oracle much, that they're not well regarded is obvious, but if is the one thing they end up doing, then I will thank them and love them for it, in a perverse way. This overheard at OOPSLA during lunch many years ago:
Some Random Guy: "So James, really, what do you think the odds of Java really working are?"
James Gosling: "Of course it'll work, there's not a damn new thing in it!"
Or put better by Jan Steinman: "Java. All the elegance of C++ with all the speed of Smalltalk."
Rant aside, sadly, from what I hear, there's enough Java love fest going on at Google to keep things going for quite a while.
One man's pink plane is another man's blue plane.
It's like "goldy" and "silvery" only it's made out of iron.
"Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge"
- Charles Darwin
I imagine that nobody is writing new applications in COBOL.
You could be wrong, you know
Fujitsu announced late Friday that it is shipping four middleware products designed to work with Microsoft's Windows Azure public cloud development platform
"The new line of products delivers runtime environments for Java and Cobol, two application programming languages that are commonly employed in building mission-critical systems, in addition to providing functionality enabling central monitoring between on-premise systems and the Windows Azure Platform."
Fujitsu Teams with Microsoft on Azure Middleware
Even Java, a much lauded language when it arrived 20 years ago, is already deemed to be old and "legacy". Yet, according to analyst Gartner, more than 70% of the world's business is run by a technology that was christened over 50 years ago - COBOL, or Common Business-Oriented Language.
At JD Williams Ltd, UK's leading direct home shopping company, for example, COBOL is one of the strategic languages used due to its key strengths in its English-like syntax, and the fact that is it very quick to develop in and easy to debug.
Recent research revealed that an average person would interact with a COBOL application at least ten times a day. With Gartner estimates putting the number of lines of COBOL code in excess of 200 billion, the global investment in COBOL applications exceeds several trillion dollars.
The case for COBOL
I have pretty positive experience with OpenJDK. I guess you won't get to run into any trouble unless you use video streaming features. (codec licensing problems) For J2EE fat client or webapps you're pretty safe.
As PyPy matures and begins to rival Java in performance, I strongly suspect Python will begin to offset Java in the enterprise. Most studies clearly indicate Java is not a desired language by most programmers. Rather, most programmers program in Java because the enterprise dictated it. With Java/Oracle beginning to lose face, IMOHO, it opens the door for languages programmers actually want to use. This means languages like Python, which have extremely rich libraries, easily integrate with other languages, and continues to grow in appeal.
Ruby, of course, is not in the running as its positioned itself as the anti-culture (anti-enterprise) hipster language.
"OP didn't claim it was dead. It sounded to me like he *wanted* it dead. Add me to that list please." Neither. The OP was merely speaking in German. Ger: Die, Java,die! Eng: The, Java, the!
Yeah!
Jazz Fish ROCKS!
I drank what? -- Socrates
I've never understood why a virtual machine is, in any way, better than an intermediate language that can be compiled to native code for a particular platform.
Garbage collection. GC makes people angry for some reason, but I'm personally happy not having to malloc memory all the time. Also hardware and OS independence. It's nice to just open a file and read and write from it, and not really care what the OS is, or what filesystem it's using, and so forth. Same with inputs and outputs, memory management, thread handling, etc. You could add all of these things to your hypothetical intermediate language, but in the end you'd just be recreating the JVM.
A fair number of languages besides Java run on the JVM. Others have been "ported" onto the JVM. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_JVM_languages
I think the JVM is here to stay. We're moving more and more towards high-level, interpreted languages. Hardware is fast enough, and with things like JIT there's no real performance loss anyway. Why not write on a JVM, which does so much for you?
Why the heck they did buy Sun then? It's not like Sun was standing in Oracle's way. I'll never understanding this kind of corporate merger shenanigans :
1. Buy undervalued tech outfit for billions $$$
2. Scrap technology within said outfit
3. ???
4 Profit!
-- Home is where you eat your heart out.
First of all, you should take the rumors of .NET demise with a grain of salt. Even more so this goes for Java - last I checked, Oracle is pretty enthusiastic about their ability to get $$$ from the stack, so it would be surprising if they ditch it anytime soon.
Regardless of the above, learning C++ is a good idea. Even if you stick to .NET or Java development, in large projects there are always bits and pieces which need to be written in C++, or at least require a good understanding of how it works - either for perf reasons, or because you need to call into a native library (because there's no pure managed version that does what you want, and no good existing wrapper). Also, Java/C# developers who know C++ tend to understand the inner workings better, and be more performance-conscious when writing code (because they actually know roughly how much things cost!).
As well, keep in mind that most desktop software for all major platforms is still written in C or C++ (and recently also - with Apple's rise - in Obj-C; but C is a complete subset of that, so you need to learn it anyway), so there are - and will be - many jobs there regardless of how well managed languages fare.