Oracle's Latest Java Moves Draw Industry Ire

snydeq writes "Two years later, Oracle's stewardship of Java continues to raise user and vendor ire, this time due to modularization, licensing, and security concerns. 'Plans for version 8 of Java Platform Standard Edition, which is due next year, call for inclusion of Project Jigsaw to add modular capabilities to Java. But some organizations are concerned with how Oracle's plans might conflict with the OSGi module system already geared to Java. In the licensing arena, Canonical, the maker of Ubuntu Linux, says Oracle is no longer letting Linux distributors redistribute Oracle's own commercial Java, causing difficulties for the company. Meanwhile, security vendor F-Secure views Java as security hindrance.'"

Comments

Oracle and Java

[ravenswood1000]

With Oracle responsible for Java, is it even worth it to learn the language any more? I mean they will be killing it off soon.

Re:Oracle and Java

[Foxhoundz]

Not a chance. Java has changed the face of mobile computing within the past decade. Why would oracle shoot themselves in the foot?

Re:Oracle and Java

[Anonymous Coward]

And if oracle keeps up, Android 5 or 6 will ship with a shiny python-esque runtime when google gets tired of paying for java lawsuits, leaving java on "feature" phones nobody writes apps for.

Re:Oracle and Java

[characterZer0]

"Write once, curse (and debug) everywhere."

That is still better than write everywhere, curse (and debug) everywhere.

Re:Oracle and Java

[Xtifr]

Why do companies shoot themselves in their feet? I don't know, but companies do it all the time. Oracle has always been remarkably short-sighted and unable to see the bigger picture.

On the other hand, the fact that there is a an officially GPL'd version of official Java out there may well mean that in the long term, Java will be fine. Oracle can kill off their own branch, but Java in some form is probably going to continue, because it's too entrenched. There are some big players on the sidelines (e.g. IBM) with a lot invested in Java who aren't going to sit idly by and let Oracle destroy it when Sun made it easy to go another route. OpenJDK may have a few shortcomings at the moment, but that could easily change if some bigger players got more serious about it.

It's still too early to tell how this is all going to play out, but the death of Java seems like one of the least likely outcomes.

Re:Oracle and Java

[Ossifer]

1. Most applications have base requirements for runtime (C libs, etc., for example)
2. HotSpot yields native code
3. Sure it does--better than any other generic language in its core, but it also provides JNI for anything else you feel you need outside of its core.
4. OSX WFM.
5. Red herring. See #2, also for truly intensive functions, use assembler.

Re:Oracle and Java

[Richard_at_work]

The GPLed branch will only act as a safety net if it's kept up to date with features introduced in the dominant branch (Oracles), or if it becomes the dominant branch in the very near future and removes Oracles ownership over the future.

If neither of those happens, the GPLed branch will be the one to fade into the past. I'm not a Java user, so can someone who is possibly chip in and give us an indication of how it's looking?

With regard to the story, it does reek of the OSGi throwing their toys out of the pram because their pet wasn't chosen.

Re:Oracle and Java

[VGPowerlord]

The GPLed branch will only act as a safety net if it's kept up to date with features introduced in the dominant branch (Oracles), or if it becomes the dominant branch in the very near future and removes Oracles ownership over the future.

Oracle's version is just a repackaged version of OpenJDK, so that shouldn't be a problem.

Re:Oracle and Java

[Anonymous Coward]

2. Oracle thinks that Java is not open, and they also have damning email correspondence showing that Google did not actually believe Java could be used without a license.

You mean the damning email that came out in August 2010 saying from engineer Tim Lindholm to Andy Rubin that said we need to license java?
(http://newsandinsight.thomsonreuters.com/Legal/News/2011/11_-_November/Oracle_v__Google_and_the_most_relentlessly_litigated_email_ever/)
Remember that Oracle purchased Sun in 2009 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sun_Microsystems) where Android was first released in 2008 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Android_(operating_system))

Putting together a timeline:
1) Android released in 2008
2) Oracle purchased Sun in 2009
3) "Damning" email in 2010

So after Android is released, Oracle purchases Sun hoping to sue Google for $$$, then an engineer says yeah we better license java. That isn't damning, that's an opinion of one engineer (or more likely a team). Now if that timeline had #3 coming first, it would be damning, but to come last in the chain is hardly even worth mentioning. Oracle's case resting on that one email is laughable at best

Re:Oracle and Java

[Anonymous Coward]

There's lots to criticise Oracle for... but Canonical's complaints are laughable (as is much of their work TBH... not to mention their moronic loud-mouthed userbase).

OpenJDK is now the *official* version of Java. It's now a legitimate part of stuff like Fedora - a full, open, legal distribution of Java. Oracle's move in this case was entirely right and constructive for all involved.

This has been discussed over and over again by various people involved - and yet we still here this bullshit.

Re:Oracle and Java

[bertok]

Maybe, but that is a massively unfair comparison.

There is no way in hell that your Java app uses anything even as remotely complex as DirectX, because a) Java is "lowest common denominator" and hardware acceleration is very new and platform-specific, and b) then it would certainly no longer work across all of those platforms. You'd have had difficulty even using multi-threading across all of those platforms back in the Netscape 2.0 days, because the threading and memory models weren't all that consistent. I've spent a lot of time debugging supposedly WORA multi-threaded Java apps back around 2003 that behaved hugely differently across Windows, Linux, and Solaris.

Comparing a Windows app (game?) that uses hardware acceleration (!) to a business app that's basically just a bunch of "if-else" code and string processing is not exactly fair. Try writing the SAME app on both platforms and see how your portability compares.

In my experience, Microsoft has some of the best backwards compatibility of any vendor out there. Well written C++ and .NET apps on Windows will probably keep working until the heat death of the universe. Meanwhile, Java took a long time to catch on to the fact that the runtime and standard libraries aren't 100% backwards compatible, and that people may actually want to run multiple versions side-by-side. For comparison, every .NET app uses the appropriate runtime automatically.

Back in 2006 I wrote a fairly complex NET app with several interacting components starting with .NET version 2.0 that ran on 32-bit Windows XP/2003. The exact same app works on two processors platforms (x86 and x64), on at least five major editions of Windows, three editions of IIS, and has been upgraded trivially through .NET 3.0, 3.5, and now 4.0. On top of that, the back-end database started on SQL Server 2005 RTM, and went through every major service pack release all the way up to 2012 RC0 without a hitch, despite using .NET stored procedures in the database.

Mind you, Microsoft's .NET isn't perfect either. Their insistence on using external unmanaged code for everything they can does sometimes bite them in the ass. For example, running a business app developed originally on a x86 computer on an x64 machine will sometimes cause it to run as 64-bit, which normally would be fine, except that Windows has a different set of ODBC drivers for x64. The app will run, but it might not be able to connect to its data sources. Oops.

Re:Oracle and Java

[kaffiene]

What a moronic load of crap. Java has not succeeded for this long because of marketing. At some point, a language needs to be able to just get stuff done - and it has. People like the Apache foundation haven't produced a metric shit-load of projects in Java because they liked Sun's marketing, they did it because Java was good at getting work done.

I'm a C hacker from way back. I used C++ from when it was a C preprocessor. C is one of my favourite programming languages, but so is Java. They are both excellent at Getting Shit Done (tm). Ignoring all that's good about Java because it had a marketing drive decades ago is pathetic. Ruby has been hyped recently. Microsoft's Visual C++ has had a tonne of marketing from MS - ditto C#. Should we dump all those languages or claim that their successes are all marketing? Give me a break. Grow the fuck up.

F-Secure

[Anonymous Coward]

Great, a language is a security hindrance. Isn't that like saying executable files themselves are security hindrances?

Re:C++ is cross-platform

[stanlyb]

but the idea is actually to distribute the source code, not the binary!

Re:C++ is cross-platform

[Osgeld]

*ix user since Solaris 2.6 Intel desktop edition, and to this day if someone hands me source, and I don't absolutely don't need to have that software, I walk away. I honestly have better things to do than guess at your dev enviroment, scurry up bullshit and do your job.
 

Re:Java, Ubuntu, and students

[DrgnDancer]

I don't want to be an ass, and I agree in principle that school sites should be at least as platform independent as possible; but honestly how many possible OS configurations should a school test against? If you work on Windows you probably have 90% of parents covered. If you work on Windows and Mac you probably have 99.9% of parents covered. Is working on Ubuntu really worth that extra .1% of parents who could honestly just put Windows in a VM? I understand the desire to use what you want to use, and not let stuff like this dictate how you run your computer, but is it really worth a whole lot of tax payer money to make sure that the school website works for such a small user base? If so at what point do they stop? Do they have to test against every Linux distro? The various BSDs? 32 and 64 bit version of all of this? Install the most minimal cost/complexity Windows VM you can get away with and show the kids how to boot it to do their work.

Re:Not an accurate summary of the case

[WaywardGeek]

I love posts on slashdot by people who have more than the average clue about what's going on. Thanks for the info. I've been using openjdk for the last year, and I think it is finally something close to a real free software alternative for most Java programs. I also use Android's Java. Pretty much, I think we should be using any viable alternative to Oracle. They simply can't be counted on.