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Ellison Doesn't Know If Java Is Free
New submitter Emacs.Cmode sends this excerpt from CNet:
"Among the highlights emanating from U.S. District Court in San Francisco courtroom 8 today was Oracle CEO Larry Ellison's response to a question regarding the status of the Java programming language, which his company acquired when it bought Sun Microsystems in 2010. Asked by Google's lead attorney, Robert Van Nest, if the Java language is free, Ellison was slow to respond. Judge William Alsup pushed Ellison to answer with a yes or no. As ZDNet reporter Rachel King observed in the courtroom, Ellison resisted and huffed, 'I don't know.'"
Groklaw has a good write-up about what happened during day one of the trial and a briefer summary of what happened on day two.
Yeah, bullshit. iOS pushed its own, and gosh, those poor developers, none of them managed to get programming quickly. Oh wait, which app market is compeltely dominating again?
If google had been smarter they would have made Java an option, not mandatory. Some Google Java fanboy made this choice and now the company is in trouble for it. As much as I dislike Oracle for all this, a part of me hopes they win, just to get rid of Java. Why on earth burden a full unix OS with just one language and a slow one at that.
Maybe if Oracle wins, MeeGo gets a new look. Now that is a nice development platform. Code in anything you bloody well want. A man's phone. I user perl on my phone, just because I can! (typing it on a virtual keyboard is seriously masochistic)
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
Companies are people, not a person. Ellison failing to have an answer offhand to a technical question is not a failing.
If it really was just him, then he's stupid for having anybody else on payroll. It's people's jobs to handle some things because one guy can't know everything. As CEO, he's responsible for the company's actions, which is not the same thing as being a repository of all relevant knowledge.