Oracle Clings To Java API Copyrights

An anonymous reader writes in with a story about some of the ramifications of the Oracle-Google lawsuit. "You could hear a collective sigh of relief from the software developer world when Judge William Alsup issued his ruling in the Oracle-Google lawsuit. Oracle lost on pretty much every point, but the thing that must have stuck most firmly in Oracle’s throat was this: 'So long as the specific code used to implement a method is different, anyone is free under the Copyright Act to write his or her own code to carry out exactly the same function or specification of any methods used in the Java API. It does not matter that the declaration or method header lines are identical. Under the rules of Java, they must be identical to declare a method specifying the same functionality — even when the implementation is different. When there is only one way to express an idea or function, then everyone is free to do so and no one can monopolize that expression. And, while the Android method and class names could have been different from the names of their counterparts in Java and still have worked, copyright protection never extends to names or short phrases as a matter of law.'"

Comments

Unix

[MrEricSir]

Can you imagine if Bell Labs had sued for control of the Unix APIs? We'd never have GNU, Linux, or many other projects that rely on those.

It would be a different world.

Re:Unix

[Hentes]

While I agree with the ruling, Oracle didn't sue for control of Android. The Java licence terms are fair: everybody can use Java IP as long as they implement at least one Java standard. Google couldn't get JSE to work on a phone, but could have implemented JME with little effort. Although I don't think that Oracle has any ground to sue, Google was quite a jerk in this case.

Re:Unix

[Anonymous Coward]

While I agree with the ruling, Oracle didn't sue for control of Android.

No, their motive was simply the same as every lawyer in the copyright business: "All your moneys are belong to us".

Re:Unix

[Anonymous Coward]

Only if they'd won. Ownership law of decades past wasn't much different, so more probably we'd have an altered world where the precedent legal climate would be shifted but little dev difference I can think of. Oracle could and would manage to be headline-size dicks over something else, so I yeah I'd imagine about the same.

Re:Unix

[Anonymous Coward]

They didn't want control of Android, just billions in royalties from some one else's work. Oracle are in deep shit, their hardware (from Sun) is dying, and their database products are being replaced on generic intel boxen by good-enough FOSS DBs at a very alarming rate. They are absolutely shitting bricks, because at within ten years time or so, they're going to be in the gutter with many other bust tech outfits, relying on legacy banking applications for their bread and butter.

Re:Unix

[Anonymous Coward]

Psychopaths clinging to greed. What else is new?

Captcha: rebels

Re:Unix

[Anonymous Coward]

You mean, can you imagine of Bell Lab's hadn't sued for controll of UNIX. Bell did (well, it's parent, AT&T did). Otherwise we'd all be using BSD varients that were started, but then held in limbo due to the lawsuit. That's when Linux got it's start, and momentum over what the BSDs were doing.

Re:Unix

[symbolset]

They wanted control of what Android has become. They would have had it: Google tried to negotiate terms that would have given them that. But they wouldn't grant the licence necessary to let Android become what it has become. So Google had to do something else. It worked out for us. Android would not have been accepted as fast, nor progressed as fast, nor been as lightweight, if Sun had taken that deal. We wouldn't have as many of these amazing new things.

Personally after having followed the case and read through what Oracle has claimed here I am unwilling to use anything from their company ever again - no matter how indirectly derived or loosely controlled. It truly is despicable.

Re:Unix

[ZombieBraintrust]

Google couldn't get JSE to work on a phone, but could have implemented JME with little effort.

Not true. Google didn't implement JSE because many of the libraries in that standard don't make sense on a touch screen phone. They cut out a bunch of libraries and they changed the I/O library. JME has different rules than JSE. Oracle was protecting its mobile business and wanted a cut of app revenue.

Re:Unix

[hairyfeet]

But just to play Devil's Advocate here I'd say there is a downside in that no corp that doesn't expressly make their living using the GPL "Blessed Three" which is 1.-Selling Services/Support, 2.- Selling Hardware or 3.- The tin cup will touch a GPLed company with a 50 foot pole because this ruling as far as the corps will be concerned makes any and all code of that company public domain and thus worthless if you don't use the blessed three.

Now some may consider that a good thing, after all Red hat has been doing just fine for itself using the blessed three, but I think a lot of the asking price of companies like Sun was tied into the idea of taking a very popular but unprofitable company and finding a way to monetize it. Kinda similar to how many of the MMOs went from subscriptions to microtransactions and I think this ruling has made it quite clear that this approach simply won't work with a GPL company, like it or lump it you HAVE to use the blessed three with the GPL if you want to make any profits thanks to the redistribution clause.

Now I bet if one were to ask RMS about this he'd probably be in agreement and happy with this as its well known he is pretty anti-corporation but I think in the future when a company that is primarily GPL gets in trouble they are gonna find few bidders and the bids they do get VERY low for the size of the project. After all if there is no clear and obvious way to make a ROI why buy it in the first place?

Re:Unix

[Klaxton]

Totally agree with you there, Oracle did not have anyone's interests in mind but their own and reached far beyond what they deserved.

Re:Unix

[Anonymous Coward]

You mean, can you imagine of Bell Lab's hadn't sued for controll of UNIX. Bell did (well, it's parent, AT&T did).

No, Bell Labs didn't sue for control of UNIX.

BSD was sued by USL (UNIX Systems Laboratory, which at that time was a spinoff from AT&T) because there was UNIX code in BSD UNIX.

It turned out there was more BSD code in USL UNIX so BSD countersued and the matter was settled out of court.

Although that was a setback to BSD UNIX, it's questionable if that was Linux's most significant advantage.

Re:Unix

[willoughby]

WTF does public domain have to do with the GPL?

Re:Unix

[roman_mir]

I am unwilling to use anything from their company ever again - no matter how indirectly derived or loosely controlled. It truly is despicable.

- I came to that realisation probably in 2007-8, when I saw the proliferation of their drones disguised as 'contractor architects', whose only real mission was to push Oracle solutions into every single aspect of every business they managed to stick their tentacles into.

It's too bad Oracle bought Sun, it should have been Google or IBM. The fact that Oracle is the owner of Java TM and the reference implementation of JVM is extremely unfortunate (and it's part of the reason there is so much misinformation on Java in general, which I think is a marketing problem).

Re:Unix

[jbolden]

That's a myth from the BSD community. Absolutely the LAMP stack wasn't the BAMP stack. Possibly you can argue that Linux was ahead in 1994 because of the lawsuit but what about the 18 years since then?

There were niches like embedded where BSD was well established that they lost to Linux. BSD lost to Linux because:

a) They didn't care much about appealing to Windows power users who became the base of Linux. They focused on recruiting from the smaller Unix community.
b) They didn't have the GPL so they never got the industrial cooperation from hardware players that Linux got, contrary to their theories about licensing.
c) Their product is too damn hard to use, even today twenty years later.

Re:Unix

[Anonymous Coward]

According to Linus Torvalds, it is the whole reason Linux even exists.

Re:Unix

[jbolden]

We just had a test of this on a major GPL company. Trolltech was sold to Nokia for $153m. Their product was GPL / commercial and profitable, though $150m was grossly overpaying. Nokia LGPLed it which killed the 2 distribution model and thus Trolltech's way to make money on software. When Nokia sold Trolltech to Digia I think it was about $5m total.

Re:Unix

[devent]

Apropos misinformation. The reference implementation of Java 7 is now OpenJDK:
https://blogs.oracle.com/henrik/entry/moving_to_openjdk_as_the
OpenJDK is under the GPLv2. So I don't know how Orcale "own[s]" the reference implementation of the JVM.

Re:Unix

[Anonymous Coward]

They effectively did, by suing BSDI at the time and by their descendants suing Linux. They even claimed certain things in K&R's book on C programming were "AT&T Trade Secrets" and "encumbered". Indeed, that was a major thing with AT&T at the time. If you knew how to program in C, you were "encumbered" by AT&T trade secrets and they (sometimes) would try to claim anything you did or developed as a result really belonged to them.

That was a common attitude at the time, which is why compilers of that era often carried encumbrance licences which claimed rights over anything you developed using the compiler and accompanying runtime.

Re:Unix

[Anonymous Coward]

One note on this idea that lawyers are about taking everyone's money - it is akin to saying that software developers are out to take money from anyone who is a client of their development skills. Lawyers are proxies - they themselves don't do anything at all.

They are like paid soldiers on the legal battlefield. Lawyers don't have standing to sue anyone themselves, nor can they bring suits without a client. The client is the one who is suing, and the client is the one who has a claim. Lawyers can be paid hourly, or flat fee, or contingency percentage. In other words, if the client is asking the lawyer to bring suit, and will pay 10% of the damages in fees, then the client has agreed to that.

The real question is: why are you so indignant that lawyers get paid to represent clients? Do you hate the adversarial court system? Then legislate to change it. Do you hate lawsuits? Them legislate change to how lawsuits are brought. The idea that lawyers get PAID (heaven forbid) to represent someone's interests should not be a shock to you. We pay for all kinds of services from waiters to janitors to tax accountants to represent our interests, but if it is a legal representative, OH NOES!

I have family members in the legal profession, and they are good people - I get very tired of hearing about how evil lawyers are. If anyone is evil it is the CLIENTS.

Re:Unix

[Anonymous Coward]

They also lost decisively on pretty much the same grounds that Oracle lost.

Re:Unix

[sjames]

There are too many lawyers that are too willing to say or do ANYthing for money. At least whores have limits.

That's not to say all lawyers are that way (I know a few who I believe to be good people doing good things), but too many are. As officers of the court, it is their duty to keep crap out of the courtroom.

As for the rest, nobody ever lost their house because someone hired a waiter but they couldn't afford one so they got their own sandwich.

Lawyers are hardly the only problem, but they (collectively) have the power to stop it and don't. They are also the public face of the very troubles system.

Re:Unix

[miroku000]

Why is the parent mod'd informative and not funny? Actually, the popularity of Linux over BSD is probably helped a lot by the fact that Bell Labs did try to sue over this. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USL_v._BSDi

Re:Unix

[hairyfeet]

Even though we rarely agree i have to give you credit is that is a GREAT example of what happens when a company that doesn't make their living using the GPL model tries to buy a GPL company, it ends up in a mess.

And I have taken shit over the years for pointing out that the GPL works best (and I would argue ONLY) with what I call the blessed three...what is wrong with that? Red Hat has made a billion dollar business out of the blessed three so it obviously works, it simply doesn't work with all kinds of software. for example I'd have a hard time seeing how you could make a profitable business out of desktops or video games using the blessed three model, which is probably why we have seen no serious competition from GPL software on those fronts. It simply doesn't fit into the methods of making money with GPLed software.

Personally i think in the long run this may turn out to be a good thing, companies that get bought for insane amounts of money usually end up getting turned into a mess by the buyer if they can't see a quick enough ROI and as companies like Red Hat have shown you have to be in it for the long haul with the GPL, you can't just flip companies for quick cash it just doesn't work that way. So maybe this will bring some sanity into the market and the only ones that will buy GPL companies will be those already making money using the GPL that will know how to treat the purchases right, not bring a mess of uncertainty like Oracle did with Sun.

Re:Unix

[Anonymous Coward]

The world would be one hell of a lot better of if I clicked my remote and they all dropped dead.

Re:Unix

[Anonymous Coward]

So any independent contractors who were working on the uncompleted death star were innocent victims when it was destroyed by the rebels?

Re:Unix

[stenvar]

The Java licence terms are fair

License for what? What exactly do you think Sun/Oracle owns that Android should have licensed?

everybody can use Java IP as long as they implement at least one Java standard.

That requires them to pay money to Oracle. Furthermore, the original promise of Java was that it was going to be an open standard; Sun kept reneging on that promise.

Re:Unix

[symbolset]

I don't care if Oracle released it under the BSD license. They claimed in this suit to have copyrights on max() and min() as if they invented that shit. It took a judge who was a programmer also to call them out on it or that stupid shit would have gone to a jury ignorant of the technology history. "I could implement that in 15 minutes" or some such he said. They claim to have various patents to prevent all of Java, Unix, Linux, Windows and every other thing involving technology everywhere in this universe and any alternates that subordinate all of the open source licenses they grant.

A company like that, their output is toxic. The safest course is not to deal with them or anything claiming to be derived from them at all. That means nothing from Solaris (not even ZFS or its derivatives), no MySQL (forks should be safe for now), No BTRFS, no Java - or anything even in the most remote sense related to Java. If they would sue over the API, what wouldn't they sue over?

It's a shame as Oracle has bought up some of the greatest stuff in IT - but perhaps that's the point. Uncle Larry isn't and has never been in the giving stuff away business and has no respect for the folks who are. He's found great success in the selling stuff business so when he finds givers in dire straits he takes their scalps and then scalps their customers too.

I have no interest in buying him another island. I've got useful stuff to do.

Re:Unix

[Eivind Eklund]

That's a myth from the BSD community. Absolutely the LAMP stack wasn't the BAMP stack. Possibly you can argue that Linux was ahead in 1994 because of the lawsuit but what about the 18 years since then?

There were niches like embedded where BSD was well established that they lost to Linux. BSD lost to Linux because:

a) They didn't care much about appealing to Windows power users who became the base of Linux. They focused on recruiting from the smaller Unix community.
b) They didn't have the GPL so they never got the industrial cooperation from hardware players that Linux got, contrary to their theories about licensing.
c) Their product is too damn hard to use, even today twenty years later.

That like your opinion, man.

There's a million different ways to argue this, from "Stallman poisioned the well by using propaganda techniques to make people into GPL zealots" to "The Linux community had a structure that was better able to scale development and evangelization". The truth is that there were many different causes, and we'll almost certainly never know how important each was, and how much of this was basically random chance.

I can counterfact some of your hypotheses above, in case you're interested in having a clearer picture, though:

For the "because of the lawsuit" argument, you seem to be arguing against a straw man. The argument was about being on a similar exponential curve, and Linux getting ahead, and the idea of network effects has always been included - ie, Linux got bigger, and because Linux got bigger it got a bunch of advantages that is just because of it being bigger, leading to extra growth for Linux and less growth for BSD. (I think this is a very partial truth, myself, and that there are structural differences that are much more important.)

There was very little focus on recruiting in the BSD community - there was a "put it out there and let them use it if they want to" and recruiting developers from the existing set of BSD users. There was no focus on recruiting from the Unix community - it just happened to that kind of people that discovered BSD.

Your GPL view may be biased by what side you've been following - you may well have seen companies that would contribute to GPLed projects because they would "get protection" - I've been on the opposite side of the fence, and seen a lot of contributions that were from companies that did this because they could have the freedom to do whatever they wanted, and would contribute the parts they wanted to contribute, and would have used a proprietary codebase to work from if they hadn't been able to use BSD licensed code. Overall, it is very hard to estimate which of these effects is larger - what I personally have seen (from watching the BSD community from the inside and the Linux community from the outside) would make me estimate the positive effect of freedom on company contributions to be much larger than the positive effect of restrictions, but people on the opposite side tend to consistently make the opposite estimation.

As for user friendliness: I switched from Linux to BSD back in 1996 because I found BSD easier to use than Linux, almost immediately after install. For many definitions of "ease of use", Linux has now beat BSD - but back then, BSD seemed at least to me to be much easier to deal with.

Re:Unix

[Genda]

Its not the getting paid. Its the creating ways of getting paid by raping and pillaging society. Patent Trolls, Divorce Ninjas, Ambulance Chasers, Corporate Mercenaries, Political Lobbyists, and a whole zoo of lower life form crawling a full kilometer below the most disgusting social muck, all in the name of wealth and power. I'd take the dignity and straight up honesty of a hard working whore over such human toxic waste any day of the week and twice on Sunday.

I don't have a problem with the majority of lawyers who are honest, hard working people many who believe in what they do. I have a problem with people whose morality is tied to personal expedience, and whose personal interests transcend any and all moral value. We hung people at Nuremberg, for committing atrocities, but at least they were in fact following orders or following some ideology albeit abhorrent. These people commit atrocities, sell future generations down the stream, gut civil rights, sell their soul and intellect to the highest bidder and remake our system of jurisprudence into a perpetual fart joke (an endless stinking noise we can all share in.)

I would gladly double all their wages if they would just grow a soul.

Re:Unix

[symbolset]

BTW: How the FTC approved Oracle buying the owner of MySQL bears investigation. Somebody got paid to put that through, and we ought to hunt him down.

Re:Unix

[davester666]

You frequent whores that are either too cheap or too expensive.

Re:Unix

[Hal_Porter]

Something analogous happened with processors. MIPS had a an instruction set with a couple of patented instructions. Lexra made MIPS compatible chips and didn't implement the patented instructions. Unfortunately they trapped the unimplemented instructions and MIPS successfully argued that since the invalid instruction trap handler could implement the patented instructions the Lexra chip invalidated the patent!

http://jonahprobell.com/lexra.html

If a Lexra processor encountered an unaligned load or store instruction in the program that it was executing then it did the same thing that it would do for any other invalid opcode, it took a reserved instruction exception. In the second lawsuit between MIPS Technologies and Lexra, filed November 1999, MIPS Technologies claimed that because exception handler software could be written to emulate the function of unaligned load and store hardware, using many other instructions, Lexra's processors infringed the patent. Upon learning of this broad interpretation of the patent, Lexra requested that the US Patent and Trademark office (USPTO) reexamine whether the patent was novel when granted. Almost every microprocessor in the world can emulate the functionality of unaligned loads and stores in software. MIPS Technologies did not invent that. By any reasonable interpretation of the MIPS Technologies' patent, Lexra did not infringe. In mid-2001 Lexra received a preliminary ruling from the USPTO that key claims in the unaligned load and store patent were invalid because of prior art in an IBM CISC patent. However, MIPS Technologies appealed the USPTO ruling and won a favorably broad interpretation of the language of the patent from a judge. That forced Lexra into a settlement that included dropping the reexamination request before MIPS Technologies might have lost its appeal.

One interesting problem with the patent system is that one institution, the USPTO, determines whether a patent is valid but a different institution, the courts, determine whether one infringes. It is entirely possible for the two institutions to interpret a patent differently and for either a non-infringer to be wrongly convicted or an infringer to get away with the crime.

The case of MIPS Technologies v Lexra was ultimately settled out of court and the request for reexamination of the patent was dropped. To this day there is no precedent indicating that processors that execute the MIPS-I instruction set that treat unaligned loads and stores as reserved instructions, such as Lexra's, infringed the '976 patent. The patent expired on December 23, 2006 at which point it became legal for anybody to implement the complete MIPS-I instruction set, including unaligned loads and stores.

After its experience with Lexra MIPS Technologies changed all of its 32-bit cores to use its new MIPS32 instruction set which extends the MIPS-I instruction set to include other features patented by MIPS Technologies. This is similar to Intel's addition of the instruction set extensions to Pentium III in order to prevent AMD from building compatible processors.

Cores from Lexra as compared to cores from MIPS Technologies were smaller, had higher clock speed, had high performance instruction extensions, brought features (such as on-chip debug, MIPS16, write-back caches, MMU, and more) to market sooner, and were less expensive. Despite MIPS Technologies' relatively abundant resources, their product offerings in the market were inferior, their investors wanted to see MIPS Technologies defend its intellectual property, and MIPS Technologies needed to justify the license fees that other companies such as Broadcom, PMC-Sierra, and LSI Logic were paying for rights to use the instruction set for their own processors. This left MIPS Technologies little choice but to sue Lexra, despite a weak case.

Ultimately, MIPS Technologies hurt Lexra's business, Lexra hurt MIPS Technologies' business, and ARM made off with a solid dominance of the IP

Re:Unix

[tofarr]

Just like assassins are not evil - it's the people who hire them that are evil. I am not saying that all lawyers are "evil", but if a person does something morally bankrupt then "I was getting paid for it" is no excuse.

Re:Unix

[symbolset]

I'm kind of impressed that so many mods dug this far down into the tree to mod this up. Maybe /. isn't dead after all.

Re:Unix

[Anonymous Coward]

I'd take the dignity and straight up honesty of a hard working whore

It's not her dignity I would take ...

Re:Unix

[gtall]

Have you been killed dead by pencil sharpeners? If so, please dial our number immediately, you may be entitled to reasonable compensation for your death. We here at Dewey, Cheatem, and Howe are trained in keeping your interest and payout for the pain and agony your death has caused. Pencil sharpeners have been shown to be virtual harbingers of death, cruelly subjecting innocent people to the business end of sharpened pencils. The FDA has issued a ruling requiring pencil sharpener manufacturers to fund a fund for the innocent victims of this vicious device, this is money you are ENTITLED to and we can help you get it.

We will leave no stone unrolled in our efforts to acquire just compensation.

Re:Unix

[jbolden]

If it is any consolation Oracle has had problems with companies like Peoplesoft as well. They don't do well with merges it ain't just the GPL. If I had to guess I'd assume that primarily Oracle doesn't care about making the money directly. I think they were buying Sun's customer base a huge percentage of whom were Sun/Oracle so that they could switch them gradually to x86/Oracle rather than potentially losing them to x86/Postgres or AIX/DB2. I think the complexity of Sun caught them off guard.

But no question Oracle is a terrible fit for open source culture. I don' think they really understood that products would fork within weeks of them being jerkish and once forked regaining control would be difficult. Oracle also bought MySQL and Berkley DB. In the case of Berkley they kept the old developers on, and in the case of MySQL they got forks.

An example of a company that does work really quite well with open source acquisitions is Adobe. Adobe gets the idea of open sourcing one part of a product and selling surrounding products because so many of their core products (pdf, flash, shockwave...) had free readers. They aren't doing your blessed 3 either they are in the: give away part and keep the rest. They use the GPLed (and other open source and or free) product as advertising for their non GPLed components.

As far as the blessed 3 BTW both Trolltech and MySQL were good counter examples. They both made money by giving away the GPLed version and selling the non-GPLed version. Both very successful. That model seems to work quite well for component software. When Nokia moved to the LGPL, which is liberal enough that people were perfectly happy with Qt's free version then it became essentially a worthless company. Digia paid $5m to land all kinds of Qt consulting gigs (selling services / support).

Re:Unix

[roman_mir]

I'm kind of impressed that so many mods dug this far down into the tree to mod this up. Maybe /. isn't dead after all.

- not unless Netcraft confirms it.

Re:Unix

[Anonymous Coward]

That was me modding you up! Actually saw your previous post about Oracle trying to assert rights to max() and min() and being called out by a judge, went to slashdot.org/~symbolset to see if you'd posted another comment about the java-api and saw your other comment as also being worth modding up. I comment infrequently and just recently (one week ago) got mod points. Am I doing it right? I just mod new things that I see that are worthwhile. Should I go back in time to older threads to mod things up too?

Re:Unix

[jbolden]

Well written counter argument.

"Stallman poisioned the well by using propaganda techniques to make people into GPL zealots

That's very different than the lawsuit. And I think no question that Stallman, had a huge impact on making people believe in the GPL and changing people's mind. But if you look at the LAMP stack:
GPL: Linux, MySQL
BSD/MIT style: Apache, Perl

So at least by the early 1990s were it the case that the BSD/MIT licenses were far superior there were ways people could have seen it. Looking back 18 years later... Perl hit roadblocks to the point that the "P" became PHP, which is also BSD and everyone else exploded with success.

(I think this is a very partial truth, myself, and that there are structural differences that are much more important.)

That's my opinion that the structural differences are what mattered. Now it is possible that without the lawsuit Linux never meaningfully exists, i.e. it is just a kernel from the Minix community for 386 capabilities and never goes beyond being a hobbyist kernel ... i.e. Linux stays at the LINIX (Linus' Minix stage).

"The Linux community had a structure that was better able to scale development and evangelization".

I'd agree with that one.

There was very little focus on recruiting in the BSD community - there was a "put it out there and let them use it if they want to"

Exactly! That's a huge differences from the Linux community which was very evangelistic. There were no BSD installfests. The BSD community was ambivalent about attracted youth in the 1990s. The 14 year old who installed Linux in 1994, is a 32 year old system administrator today who knows how to configure Sys V and doesn't know BSD style admin. BTW this is still true. My 13 year old daughter's "boyfriend" talks about various Linux gimmicks used to attract people all the time. He's excited and enthusiastic about Linux, no one from the BSD community wants to deal with a 13 year old who can program a little Python and so figures he's an OS expert.

Right now far and away the most popular desktop Unix is a BSD, OSX. That is the system for most computer enthusiasts today, not Windows. Why would the BSD community not work closely with the Darwin community to make the transition smooth? They still don't recruit.

Overall, it is very hard to estimate which of these effects is larger - what I personally have seen (from watching the BSD community from the inside and the Linux community from the outside) would make me estimate the positive effect of freedom on company contributions to be much larger than the positive effect of restrictions, but people on the opposite side tend to consistently make the opposite estimation.

I think both sides see each other's progress. The Linux community does follow XFree86 / X.org, Apache, Perl / PHP / Ruby / Python, SSH, Postgres.... The BSD community follows Gnome, KDE, GCC, MySQL... If I had to guess the reason for the difference I think it has more to do with how they value contributions. The BSD community wants quality code, and Linux wants innovative code. A lot of time GPL contributors are company B getting code from A who was working on something entirely different and donating to C which B doesn't care about. The way that for example Apple with GCC wrote a huge chunk of the code that the Sony Playstation used for their game compilers. The BSDs would be very antsy about something like that since obviously Apple has no intention of maintaining code for Sony.

This is a very chaotic process that I don't think the BSDs would be comfortable with. So they tend to value long term contributors and devalue people who jump in for a few years dump lots of complex code, do an integration get it partially working and leave. Conversely Linux people, because they jump from distribution to distribution don't experience continuity and thus devalue it.

As for user friendliness: I switched from Linux to BSD back i

Re:Unix

[jbolden]

companies that get bought for insane amounts of money usually end up getting turned into a mess by the buyer if they can't see a quick enough ROI and as companies like Red Hat have shown you have to be in it for the long haul with the GPL, you can't just flip companies for quick cash it just doesn't work that way.

I would agree with that. I don't think there is any quick profit making scheme with GPL that I know of. RedHat BTW has been a company that has been able to acquire a turn a nice profit on acquisitions.

Re:Unix

[Anonymous Coward]

Rather than being anti-corporation I'm pro end user usability (I like RMS, but I don't agree with him on all points). It seems like every time some corporation snaps up GPL'd software to monetize it the user gets the crap end of the stick. So, yeah if this helps end users by preventing corporations from ruining free software then I'm all for it.

Re:Unix

[Anonymous Coward]

Damn it, I did not realize that posting anonymously would undo the upmoderations I had done to your comment last night. Sorry! I screwed up. I'm just learning about this moderation stuff. (i ought to do it in moderation!) gia

Re:Unix

[Anonymous Coward]

One note on this idea that lawyers are about taking everyone's money - it is akin to saying that software developers are out to take money from anyone who is a client of their development skills. Lawyers are proxies - they themselves don't do anything at all.

They are like paid soldiers on the legal battlefield. Lawyers don't have standing to sue anyone themselves, nor can they bring suits without a client. The client is the one who is suing, and the client is the one who has a claim. Lawyers can be paid hourly, or flat fee, or contingency percentage. In other words, if the client is asking the lawyer to bring suit, and will pay 10% of the damages in fees, then the client has agreed to that.

The real question is: why are you so indignant that lawyers get paid to represent clients? Do you hate the adversarial court system? Then legislate to change it. Do you hate lawsuits? Them legislate change to how lawsuits are brought. The idea that lawyers get PAID (heaven forbid) to represent someone's interests should not be a shock to you. We pay for all kinds of services from waiters to janitors to tax accountants to represent our interests, but if it is a legal representative, OH NOES!

I have family members in the legal profession, and they are good people - I get very tired of hearing about how evil lawyers are. If anyone is evil it is the CLIENTS.

This is naive in the extreme. Lobbyists ARE lawyers and they don't need a client in order to lobby Congress to make laws which benefit their industry. Software patents are a perfect example of lawyers literally injecting themselves into an entire sphere of human activity for the sole purpose of diverting money from that sphere into their own pockets. This goes doubly for the patent office and its directors and employees itself. To assert as you did that lawyers as a group never consider that legislation they lobby Congress for will have the net effect of making their own services more widely necessary in society is a joke so bad it borders on lying.

Re:Unix

[devent]

+5 Informative with no information at all just some stupid rant.
Oracle is just a symptom of the broken patent and copyright system in the US. If the patents and copyright law were sane, like it used to be 50 years ego, than those lawsuits like Oracle vs. Google wouldn't be possible at all.

Like copyright only for registered works, and limited for 14 years, plus 14 years extension. Like patents only for real inventions and not for everything under the sun like processes, maths and algorithms. You should thank your representatives, the Senate and Congress to pass one extension after another to please the big companies like Disney and Sony.

If you really think you shouldn't touch anything "toxic" then you should search a new field of profession, like hunting or fishing. In the US you can't write a Hello-World software and not violate some ones patents.

On the other hand maybe you should be thankful to Oracle to test that APIs are not copyright protected. Also thankful to SCO that Linux do not violets any Unix related copyrights. That is the environment you chose to live in, full of patent trolls and big companies whom think that they own copyrights on anything. You don't read news of German patent trolls or German companies suing one another.

Re:Unix

[Anonymous Coward]

Can you imagine if Bell Labs had sued for control of the Unix APIs? We'd never have GNU, Linux, or many other projects that rely on those.

It would be a different world.

For better or for worse, I wonder?

Re:Unix

[nanoflower]

It certainly won't be her virginity.

Re:Unix

[hairyfeet]

Actually Adobe IS using the blessed three. Nowhere does the blessed three say you have to make money on every part of the chain and by selling support/services (more complex dev tools for writing content for the free readers) what Adobe is doing fits into the blessed three model just fine and has a history with the GPL. Take another company you mentioned MySQL, they sold a locked down version with feature requests for companies that didn't want to go GPL but wanted to use MySQL in their product, so they were selling that as a service, hence #1 of the blessed three.

Like any business rule the blessed three can cover a LOT of use cases, the only real hard and fast rule with the blessed three that is nearly impossible to avoid is the GPL software itself has almost not value, its the things that interact with the GPLed software that has value, the Android phone for instance, or the dev tools which are not GPLed, or the non GPL version you sell to companies. In all these cases its not the GPLed software that is bringing in the money, Adobe makes no money off the GPLed reader which is why I never understood why so many FOSSies hated Adobe, hell they even let Flash be forked into Gnash, think MPEG-0LA would let you fork H.264 into a free alternative? MySQL made their money off the non-GPL version, Sun sold services and tools.

In all these cases (and I would argue pretty much the entire ecosystem) the GPL software itself was NOT the value which is why a traditional company will flop because they see everything as assets and it just don't work that way. The reason why you pointed out, any attempts to monetize ends up with it being forked, the fork gains focus and the original becomes an ignored dead project, bringing its value back to $0. As I said there is NO REASON why you can't make money in GPL as long as you follow the blessed three, RH has become a billion dollar company by following the blessed three but even they know the value isn't the code itself, look at CentOS for proof of that.

Re:Unix

[jbolden]

Agree with what you wrote. I might make it the blessed 4 to include selling "non GPLed version" to cover the Qt, MySQL case rather than bundling that as a service, but... its fine either way. Regardless any attempt to monazite the GPL code directly is a disaster, we agree. Companies often don't realize when they buy this sort of IP that a few puny developers run off and fork and suddenly there multi-million dollar asset is worth 0. They aren't used to having to keep engineers happy as a critical business process.

As an aside, the PDF reader isn't GPLed it is closed source but free. The .pdf spec is fully open and public. I should also mention reasonably well written. Anyone is free to create their own .pdf tools from the spec, and there are lots of open source tools. They never published the spec for Flash, but they had competing business models there (Flash specific issue that's a rabbit hole as far as this discussion). And I should mention .pdf isn't hated by open source people. TeX which is the basis of GNU documentation (texinfo) and is heavily used by the Unix community now uses pdfTeX as the engine (i.e. TeX code that compiles to .pdf) and most of the extensions of the last decade are on top of .pdf like Omega / XeTeX.

Re:Unix

[Rakarra]

Even though we rarely agree i have to give you credit is that is a GREAT example of what happens when a company that doesn't make their living using the GPL model tries to buy a GPL company, it ends up in a mess.

It's probably the big reason why the FSF recommends not only releasing code as GPL, but then assigning ownership to the FSF. It sounds self-serving, but it ensures that an "owner" can not close or restrict the source afterwards.

Re:Unix

[hairyfeet]

Actually no need for a fourth as that fits the first rule just fine, selling a non GPL version is a SERVICE that you offer to those that like the software but not the GPL, no different than how you can buy the serices of the dev to make alterations which are not shared or like Adobe making dev tools that interact with the free version. In all cases its not the shrink wrapping of GPL software as the software itself has NO value, its the things that tie into it.

Now some take offense at me saying it has no value but just because something is free of cost doesn't mean you don't want it, air is free but without it you'd be none too happy, its just not something you can package up and sell easily which is why so many companies get into trouble with the GPL, because that mindset simply does not work in this context.

And what I meant with adobe is that readers simply aren't a business to them, unlike MPEG-LA they aren't gonna sue your ass if you make a PDF reader or something that can play Flash because as you note the specs are right there, help thyself. That is because Adobe knows the money is NOT in the player, its in those that want to create content so they sell tools to make developing content in those formats easier. This also has precedents with the history of GPL, such as selling custom versions or dev tools and fits perfectly in the first rule as you are NOT selling the GPL software in and of itself, you are selling either tools to make working with that GPL software easier or are selling the ability to remove the GPL license as a service to some company that doesn't like/can't use the GPL in their product. This fits perfectly as you are selling support with the dev tools which makes working with the format easier or services like license changes with the proprietary version.

My point with the blessed three wasn't to condemn the GPL or say its shit, its to point out that it has parameters one must follow if one wants to be a success. the reason you haven't seen the next Bioshock come from a GPL source or a desktop that rivals the polish and ease of use of Win 7 or OSX (don't get me started on win 8, Ballmer is snorting waaay too much dope if he thinks he can sell that Edsel) is simply because you can't fit those programs under the blessed three which is why so many companies like Xandros and Mandriva have failed and why I think Canonical will be dead by 2015, its simply because nobody has been able to figure out any way other than the blessed three to make a profitable business using GPLed software. Now if you follow the blessed three? The sky is the limit, just look at Red hat, or the vendors of NAS boxes or a billion other pieces of hardware. In ALL of the cases its NOT the GPL software in and of itself that is being sold, its the services or the hardware being sold.

My argument is simply that when software is truly "free" that you can't make your living by sticking that free product in a box and selling it, it just doesn't work. In fact the closest I've ever seen to anyone being able to do that was the services that sold CDs of GPLed software during the 90s to those on dialup but even then one could argue they fit into the blessed three as you were paying more for their time putting it on a physical disc and shipping it to you than you were for what was on the disc because the GPL makes that truly "free" in pretty much every sense of the word. Why anyone would get shirty (not meaning you, just the attitude I've gotten for saying this) for pointing out what RMS made quite clear was the POINT of the GPL, to make software truly free and available to all that want it? Well it leaves me scratching my noggin.

Then again I still can't figure out why Christians get all shirty when you point out that Easter and Xmas don't have shit to do with Jesus, one is a fertility ceremony and the other the Roman winter solstice celebration, so maybe its just me.

Re:Unix

[Anonymous Coward]

Appealed to Windows power users? HAHAHA! WTF are you talking about?

Re:Unix

[symbolset]

There are a lot of companies that go about their business trying to compete with innovation and differentiation like they should. Only a few take this IP prevention of competitive innovation route. Those need to be avoided. The law is an ass, and anybody can sue anybody over anything these days - but if you're the sort who brags about suing everybody you can for any thing you can, not only am I not going to pursue what I might do with your products: I wouldn't give you a ride in my car, in a blizzard, nor have any other thing to do with you. You are the drama queen normal folk need to stay away from to keep their life on track.

Doh

[war4peace]

So much time, so much money and so many brains wasted with this. It's a pity, really. Asking a 5-year old would have yielded pretty much the same answer in 30 seconds, albeit a bit simpler than what's in TFS.

Re:Doh

[wiredlogic]

Don't despair. All the lawyers got paid a few metric assloads of loot. That's trickle-down economics in action. Working for the people.

Re:Doh

[the eric conspiracy]

Perhaps to the standards of ordinary people. However the real metric assloads of loot come from settlements in class action suits.

Reading between the lines

[SinisterRainbow]

I'm always surprised in these types of articles that the main point is not about the US justice system which allows such crap to happen in the first place and the lack of reprisals against those bringing frivolous lawsuits. When there's little risk and high possible reward, they are going to keep happening. Why not speak their language and punish their pocketbook when they fail. Make it risky to abuse things or be ignorant about things (tho doubtfully the later).

Re:Reading between the lines

[Anonymous Coward]

Because it's very difficult to legally distinguish between a troll and a tiny operation with genuine innovation that has gotten screwed over by a large corporation with lots of lawyers, especially for the non-expert patent officer whose job it is to grant the patent.

Re:Reading between the lines

[jbolden]

Their are penalties for frivolous lawsuits. The problem is there is a huge range between bad lawsuits and frivolous. The bar is high for frivolous.

As an American I'd like to see more suits have to pass a quick summary judgement on viability. And much stronger restrictions on changing the initial fillings.

Google should have bought Sun

[Anonymous Coward]

Google worst decision was to let Oracle buy and cannibalize Sun. It would have saved us and them from all these nonsense. Also Google's philosophy is so much closer to Sun's: great engineering and giving back to open source. The only thing Google is different than Sun is that they know how to profit from their products.

Heck, if they didn't want to spend all the money on their own they could lead a group of companies to buy out the IP of Sun.

It's really a pity that Oracle got a chance to buy Sun. I couldn't have imagined a worst end for such a great company.

Re:Google should have bought Sun

[Anonymous Coward]

Google is careful not to get into a monopoly position in any market.

Re:Google should have bought Sun

[MightyMartian]

Was it a mistake? Oracle has blown huge sums of cash in acquiring and then attempting to defend and monetize Sun's IP. And what have they got for all of it? Linux is still carving into Solaris and Sparc market share. Java was already leaving Sun's hands long before Oracle bought it.

Oracle bought very little for a lot of money, and now they're left arguing a spec is the same as an implementation.

I expect Ellison to join Ballmer in the stupid executive's retirement home. Both have fucked up hugely.

Re:Google should have bought Sun

[Anonymous Coward]

You've got that backwards. Sun needed Google. Google did not need Sun.

Re:Google should have bought Sun

[Anonymous Coward]

I read this as "Google should have bought the sun," which seems a fine idea for taking "the cloud" to the next obvious level.

Re:Google should have bought Sun

[asshole felcher]

Google hasn't figured out how to profit off Motorola yet. The IP lawsuits are ineffective and the phone business is still reporting quarterly losses. Maybe they need to fire some more people?

Google's ad business brings in piles of cash and subsidizes everything else. Sun used to be profitable, too. Profitable enough to subsidize all kinds of things that didn't generate any income.

Re:Google should have bought Sun

[ArsonSmith]

Sure wish I could fuck up as rich^H^H^H^Hbadly as them.

Re:Google should have bought Sun

[Kjella]

Was it a mistake? Oracle has blown huge sums of cash in acquiring and then attempting to defend and monetize Sun's IP. And what have they got for all of it? Linux is still carving into Solaris and Sparc market share. Java was already leaving Sun's hands long before Oracle bought it. Oracle bought very little for a lot of money, and now they're left arguing a spec is the same as an implementation.

Not to mention with this case they pretty much settled it if Google starts going after desktop java with an enhanced Dalvik for laptop/desktop replacements. What would be nice though is if the Linux devs could get their hands on a GPL-compatible version of Solaris so they could integrate ZFS and some various other goodies, but I suspect you'd have to pay dearly for that.

Re:Google should have bought Sun

[Kaenneth]

Maybe if Sun and Motorola had merged, and made a good Solaris/Java-based phone/tablet platform?

Re:Google should have bought Sun

[interval1066]

Sure wish I could fuck up as rich^H^H^H^Hbadly as them.

Royalties from legacy products. Innovation? Oracle & Microsoft are in the same boat, scrambling for a life preserver. People aren't going to keep paying for Oracle and Windows if they're replaced by something that everyone else adopts (like they did Oracle and Windows...)

Re:Google should have bought Sun

[saleenS281]

Oracle literally would collapse tomorrow if Java were to go away overnight. Oracle absolutely had to acquire Sun for the Java IP, no matter the cost. Had it gotten into the hands of IBM and had IBM pulled the shit Oracle just tried to do to HP + Itanium, Oracle would be fucked. The *ONLY* reason that Oracle is so screwed right now is because of Larry Ellison and his personal relationships. The original plan was for HP to acquire all of the hardware business, and Oracle to take the software. Then Mark Hurd got caught banging an assistant, and the rest is history. Ellison hired Hurd, they both tried to screw HP by ending Oracle support on Itanium (and subsequently had that decision overturned in court as well), and now Larry is stuck bleeding cash because he doesn't know how to sell a product that you can't lock a customer into. It turns out if your servers suck, people just walk away. They aren't tied into it by the balls like they are with his database. His solution is "engineered systems" - read proprietary software that they won't sell you to run on just any old x86 hardware (for those saying you can run it on any hardware, let me know how you manage to get hybrid columnar compression working on something other than exadata). Fortunately most of the industry is bright enough to see through the lock-in and continue to run Oracle software on standard hardware.

Re:Google should have bought Sun

[jbolden]

What is competitive with Oracle for large relational databases other than DB2? Oracle financials, Peoplesoft, Siebel, JD Edwards...

I think they are fine for now.

Re:Google should have bought Sun

[jbolden]

ZFS is open source. Turns out it sucks on inexpensive (x86 quality) hardware, in ways that are unfixable even by smart people. Apple lost years proving that.

But http://zfsonlinux.org/

But Oracle's BTRFS plays the same role and is even better.

Re:Google should have bought Sun

[Anonymous Coward]

This. Larry and Sergei could have bought Sun for the change in their couch cushions. Google would currently own a shitload of Sun patents and they could have gotten most of their money back by spinning off the hardware business (to Fujitsu, IBM, or even Oracle).

Re:Google should have bought Sun

[Nerdfest]

PostgresSQL. If you're using the non-standard PL/SQL stuff in Oracle you're never getting out though.

Re:Google should have bought Sun

[KonoWatakushi]

The suposed problem you are referring to (ZFS reliability on cheap USB hardware which ignores cache flushes) was in fact well known, and easily fixed. It just took a long time, as no one sane would run ZFS on USB hardware to start with. All Apple proved was that their engineers had a very shallow understanding of ZFS.

Re:Google should have bought Sun

[bill_mcgonigle]

But Oracle's BTRFS plays the same role and is even better.

Wow, you haven't deployed either of them at scale, have you?

There's still frequent data corruption going in btrfs land and you'll be in for major pain if you try to host a VM storage file on it. They did recently fix the abysmal fsync performance, which is good, and a cursory fsck is available now. The kernel folks are still figuring out how to do cache devices in the dm stack and send/receive are still experimental.

The benefits to btrfs being what we want it to be are huge, so folks like Fedora keep wishing it were ready (default on F16... now maybe F20) but real experience shows it's not really out of alpha yet. Since Oracle is still selling ZFS, it would be hard to see why they would put significant resources into creating a free alternative at this point.

Re:Google should have bought Sun

[bill_mcgonigle]

All Apple proved was that their engineers had a very shallow understanding of ZFS.

I wouldn't say that - they have an independent company now continuing the project and many people like it.

Steve Jobs killed the project because Jonathan Schwartz blabbed to the press that Apple was going to embrace it, and nobody punks Steve Jobs, or ELSE!

Re:Google should have bought Sun

[elashish14]

Of course they could spend their money on any number of products that they want to keep out of competitors hands. Now, I'm the farthest thing you can be from a businessperson, but even I find it hard to imaging that it's a good practice to do this. Wasting tons of money on something just so the other guys don't get it just seems... wasteful.

Of course, even Google has succumbed to wasting large sums of cash on patents and the like, so perhaps they're not as smart as we hoped....

Re:Google should have bought Sun

[jbolden]

Postgres is a comparable to about Oracle 8 in terms of features, there are still very good reasons to use Oracle. Besides my point was that even if the database business does die they have many many more products now.

Re:Google should have bought Sun

[Nerdfest]

From what I've seen, the rest of their products are quite poor. I always joked that they should stick to databases, but even that has significant competition now.

Re:Google should have bought Sun

[jbolden]

Wow, you haven't deployed either of them at scale, have you?

Nope, parroting other's opinions.

Since Oracle is still selling ZFS, it would be hard to see why they would put significant resources into creating a free alternative at this point.

AFAIK BTRFS is better for Oracle and more feature rich. Ultimately it is not to Oracle's advantage that Z-OS, I-OS (the IBM one) and AIX are the OSes for very large storage. That's how they could lose to DB2 / Netezza.

Re:Google should have bought Sun

[jbolden]

Apple supposedly had problems with their internal drives, where it mattered. As for shallow understanding of ZFS they hired several of the world's leading experts on it for their port.

Re:Google should have bought Sun

[jbolden]

Apple doesn't have a filesystem strategy today. They have had this problem since OSX 10.5. Steve Jobs might have an ego about getting punked, but he wasn't crazy.

Re:Google should have bought Sun

[jbolden]

No. There is nothing like Peoplesoft or Siebel. Oracle financials is excellent. I would never describe those as poor.

Re:Google should have bought Sun

[Rich0]

Sure wish I could fuck up as rich^H^H^H^Hbadly as them.

Royalties from legacy products. Innovation? Oracle & Microsoft are in the same boat, scrambling for a life preserver.

Yeah, maybe Oracle and MS are scrambling for a life preserver, but Ellison and Ballmer certainly aren't. Sure, their companies woes might mean that there will be an upper limit on how many Gulfstreams they can buy, but I'm sure that 99.9% of Americans wouldn't mind the difficulties of going into the "stupid executive's retirement home."

Re:Google should have bought Sun

[stoploss]

AFAIK BTRFS is [...] more feature rich.

[citations desperately needed]

Furthermore, ZFS has been around since 2005-ish and is stable for use in production enterprise systems.

Ultimately it is not to Oracle's advantage that Z-OS, I-OS (the IBM one) and AIX are the OSes for very large storage. That's how they could lose to DB2 / Netezza.

So, you're saying that it therefore makes more sense for Oracle to back the multi-year development of a completely new filesystem that is attempting to mimic a subset of the features of ZFS, rather than to... merely dual-license ZFS, which would allow ZFS to be included in Linux tomorrow?

Those are some flaming hoops of reasoning you just leaped through there.

The reason ZFS on Linux isn't getting much traction is that the community doesn't want to encourage this kind of "can't ship as a binary/have to personally compile" fragmentation of Linux. I mean, what a nightmare for enterprise providers like RedHat... "Sure, we support your custom-compiled kernel! What could possibly go wrong?"

Re:Google should have bought Sun

[jbolden]

[citations desperately needed] [[for BTRFS more feature rich]]

OK I looked at the latest list. There was some nice stuff added to ZFS so I'll retract. But: File Change logs and Extents are still BTRFS only.

So, you're saying that it therefore makes more sense for Oracle to back the multi-year development of a completely new filesystem that is attempting to mimic a subset of the features of ZFS, rather than to... merely dual-license ZFS, which would allow ZFS to be included in Linux tomorrow?

Well ZFS is a module for most Linuxes. The Linux kernel supports variable modules. So that's not a big deal. That being said releasing ZFS under the GPL as well would be good as well as releasing the BTRFS.

Re:Google should have bought Sun

[stoploss]

Interesting, thanks for that info.

An aspect of the file change log capability already exists in ZFS ("zfs diff"), which displays the file/dir changes between two snapshots or a snapshot/filesystem. It would be nice to determine what has changed on the filesystem since an arbitrary point, like btrfs can do. However, this isn't a capability that is intrinsically precluded from ZFS—the filesystem uses transaction IDs—it's more like no one has extended the zfs diff functionality yet.

As for the extents, that term seems to be overloaded in btrfs: extent block groups, extent trees, btree extent backrefs, etc. Were you referring to the extent block group administrative control, the allocation strategy, or something else?

Does btrfs allow you to add cache or log accelerator devices to a storage pool? I couldn't find any equivalent of that feature, based on my googling. Hm, "How ZFS continues to be better than btrfs" seems to indicate that log acceleration isn't available.

Oh, and who could forget RAID-Z[2,3]?

Having more choice is better, and perhaps a bit of competition from btrfs will prompt the ZFS devs to add additional features (eg. like the file change search capability).

Re:Google should have bought Sun

[Anonymous Coward]

they have an independent company now continuing the project and many people like it.

That independent company was a one-man outfit (Don Brady, the former Apple engineer responsible for Apple's abandoned ZFS port). And I say "was" because Brady got a day job with a storage appliance company, Greenbytes, so his one-man shop, Ten's Complement, is no more.

Greenbytes has made a "community edition" ZFS release available, along with wishy-washy statements about continuing the project, but new releases have been thin on the ground. And it's known that Mac ZFS was not planned to be Brady's primary job responsibility at Greenbytes either. Nor is it clear that OS X ZFS fits well with what the company is doing. And Greenbytes has gone through a CEO change since Brady joined. The Mac ZFS fanboys are really nervous about it all.

Also, they're not totally happy with what's been released. It's not a highly polished ZFS port by any means. It's based on a positively ancient 2007 ZFS code drop, and integration with OS X is still a bit crude. It's pretty clear that Brady has never been able to make the same rate of progress on the port since he left Apple, which is only natural -- at Apple all he would've had to do is code, as an independent he would've been spending lots of time trying to figure out how to make money (which he ultimately failed at). And at Greenbytes he has other things to work on. What's been released is a start, but to want to use it in its current state you have to be a crazy person obsessed with "MUST HAVE ZFS".

Steve Jobs killed the project because Jonathan Schwartz blabbed to the press that Apple was going to embrace it, and nobody punks Steve Jobs, or ELSE!

Ah yes, the usual bill_mcgonigle idiocy.

OS X ZFS went away at right around the time that Oracle negotiated for and bought Sun. The two events are almost certainly related. Nobody has made an outright public statement about it, but it doesn't take a genius to see that Larry Ellison would've wanted big license fees for stuff Sun was formerly giving away for free (hey, what's TFA about again?). Thing is, ZFS is not in any sense a must-have feature for Apple. Despite all the noise ZFS fanboys generate, it's irrelevant to 95% or more of Apple's Mac customer base. So even though Ellison and Jobs were best buds, it's not likely that paying for ZFS would've been attractive to Apple.

There's a typo in this headline.

[Anonymous Coward]

I know it's hard to believe that in 2013 there could be an obvious lack of editing in the Slashdot summary, but if you dig deep, you're going to find it, just like I did.

Touch down for common sense!

[bogaboga]

And, while the Android method and class names could have been different from the names of their counterparts in Java and still have worked, copyright protection never extends to names or short phrases as a matter of law.

That's it. Who disagrees?

Re:Touch down for common sense!

[luke923]

I'm sure LucasFilm does, which is why Motorola has to pay a license fee to use the term "Droid" for their Android phones. Also, I'm sure Cisco disagrees as well, since Apple pays a license fee for iOS. Granted, the latter is more an issue of trademark, but I'm sure a five-letter work classifies as a name or short phrase that was contained in a publicly-accessible work.

Re:Touch down for common sense!

[Anonymous Coward]

The word "droid" is a trademarked word not a copyrighted word.

Re:Touch down for common sense!

[Kaenneth]

"Droid" is a valid Trademark vs. "GetCurrentTime()" being an invalid Copyright.

Re:Touch down for common sense!

[foniksonik]

Trademark's not the same as copyright derp.

Try again.

Re:Touch down for common sense!

[Anonymous Coward]

What's a copyright derp?

Wrong in quite a few ways.

[Anonymous Coward]

1. You have to obey the rules to get the Java license, but your compiler, if it isn't being called java, doesn't have to obey them. dalvik.
2. The license doesn't require you implement at least one java standard. You have to implement a minimal functionality and can place your own in a different namespace. But you don't have to implement at least one java standard. But see #1 as to why this doesn't apply
3. dalvik was written because Google didn't want to implement java to their license, not because they couldn't.

Your assertion of google's jerkness is predicated on incorrect assertions.

Re:Wrong in quite a few ways.

[sjames]

Consider the many security problems Java has had wherever a browser plugin exposes it to the real world. Now consider how much more exposed an app on a phone can be.

Then you'll see why Google needed more freedom to maneuver than Oracle was willing to give them.

Re:Wrong in quite a few ways.

[gbjbaanb]

I wish people would stop thinking this is about Java. Its about Java Mobile Edition.

Now Oracle (or Sun, whatever) released Java with a permissive licence that said you can use it pretty much freely, but they kept the Java ME version to themselves, if you wanted the phone edition, then you had to buy a licence form Oracle. Google didn't feel they wanted to give Oracle a percentage of each Android sale so made their own very-compatible version.

Much as I dislike Oracle, I don't feel Google played fair on this, they took someone else's technology and effectively stole it. It doesn't have anything to do with Java the language, or Java that everyone (no longer) uses. Its all about the proprietary ME version.

Its not like Microsoft who used patents (IIRC) to extort a cut of each Android sale.

Its still good news for developers though, so the big boys - now all of us can copy whatever APIs we want. I guess any API that's out there is now effectively an open standard, all you have to do is write your own implementation. I wonder if Google'll see the funny side when someone creates a map and exposes it to developers using an identical google maps API. The Samba boys can write their own Active Directory with exactly the same external surface, just with their own internal mechanisms and there's nothing MS can do about it. Anyone could write a Facebook API as long as it uses their own internal implementation. This is still good news for us, but I still can't help thinking its feels like we'd be thieving someone else's designs.

Re:Wrong in quite a few ways.

[phantomfive]

The jerkiness of Google is they went against the direct wishes of the creator of the project. Sun wanted to make sure that Java was compatible with Java anywhere, which is why they sued Microsoft for adding incompatibilities.

Sun decided they wanted to make Java open source, but took measures to make sure any new implementation would be compatible. They did whatever they could to make sure it would be.

Then Google decided to make an incompatible version, apparently to avoid the J2ME license issues, but for whatever reason, they made it incompatible. Not cool.

Re:Wrong in quite a few ways.

[FrangoAssado]

Much as I dislike Oracle, I don't feel Google played fair on this, they took someone else's technology and effectively stole it.

How exactly did any technology got stolen?

1) Dalvik is completely different from the usual Java VMs (Dalvik is register-based, while Java VMs are stack-based). That's how they got away with a VM that interprets (modified) Java bytecode without infringing any patents related to Java (as was confirmed by the "Oracle vs Google" case).

2) Android uses the exact same interfaces than Java, but that has been standard practice for decades (Unix, for example). No code between Android and Sun/Oracle's Java is the same, except for the stuff that must be the same to implement the same interfaces. The "Oracle vs Google" confirmed that's OK (as the summary says).

In the end, what happened is that Google didn't want to pay Sun/Oracle for a license to use Java mobile, so they implemented their own Java-compatible system (or rather, bought it from other people). That's how technology evolves. As someone else said here a few posts back: imagine if anyone wanting to do a Unix-like OS had to pay a license to someone. Where would we be now?

Re:Wrong in quite a few ways.

[jbolden]

Let me quote RMS on that one

The freedom to run the program means the freedom for any kind of person or organization to use it on any kind of computer system, for any kind of overall job and purpose, without being required to communicate about it with the developer or any other specific entity. In this freedom, it is the user's purpose that matters, not the developer's purpose; you as a user are free to run the program for your purposes, and if you distribute it to someone else, she is then free to run it for her purposes, but you are not entitled to impose your purposes on her.

Sun had a legitimate right to trademark the name "java" and control what could be called Java. But davlik is "java like" I don't see where Sun has any rights over a Java like language.

Re:Wrong in quite a few ways.

[MrDoh!]

Differences. MS took Java, changed it, kept calling it Java. Google took the Java API's, changed it (where needed), didn't call it Java (Dalvik).

Re:Wrong in quite a few ways.

[phantomfive]

I don't see where Sun has any rights over a Java like language.

This is why you are having trouble understanding. I wasn't talking about rights, I was talking about not being a jerk. Ask Stallman what he thinks about xemacs, if you want a real analogy.

Re:Wrong in quite a few ways.

[phantomfive]

I try to be polite, but in this case you deserve to be called an idiot. If you'd done any research at all, you'd find that Google refers to it as Java all over the place. Look at pretty near any API doc. Dalvik is the VM, not the language.

Re:Wrong in quite a few ways.

[jbolden]

Stallman has defended right to fork long after XEmacs. At the time what he said was:

The long delay in releasing Emacs 19 is the FSF's fault. (In some sense, therefore, mine.) While it's regrettable that there are multiple versions, I can't blame people for filling the gap that the FSF left. One of the goals of the copyleft is to allow people to do this--so that one central maintainer's lapse does not hold back the rest of the community.

Re:Wrong in quite a few ways.

[phantomfive]

I'm not sure if you are incapable of understanding, or if you are purposely acting dense, but I'll repeat it for you again just in case: it's not about rights. You have a right to be a jerk.

Re:Wrong in quite a few ways.

[putaro]

That's just dumb. The security problem is that the sandbox has too large of an attack surface. If you're using the OS to contain untrusted code, rather than the sandbox, Java is just as secure or insecure as C or Perl.

Re:Wrong in quite a few ways.

[putaro]

Implementing your own system that meets your needs is not being a jerk. Asserting rights that you do not have is jerky behavior. Oracle is being the jerk in this instance.

Re:Wrong in quite a few ways.

[phantomfive]

Implementing your own system that meets your needs is not being a jerk.

It's orthogonal to being a jerk.

Mainly I suspect you're a fanboy who is trying to defend Google because you like them, because I suspect normally you would be more logical about the situation.

Re:Wrong in quite a few ways.

[jbolden]

I'm not being dense I don't think Google was being a jerk. Google was doing what they thought was best. Google doesn't work for Sun. Just because Sun wants something doesn't mean Google is being for not doing it. I'm sure Microsoft wasn't fond of Open Office, that doesn't mean that Sun was being a jerk for not canceling the project because Sun objected.

I'm hard pressed to see what the difference is between what Google did when they created Davlik and what Sun did when they made Java from Oak.

Re:Wrong in quite a few ways.

[sjames]

Who said anything about the OS? Java is supposed to support a sandbox well, but in practice it didn't work out that way.

To have a prayer of making it work, Google needed to be free to modify the spec in a few critical places.

Re:Wrong in quite a few ways.

[putaro]

Or don't use the sandbox. It's an added feature that most languages do not have.

Re:Wrong in quite a few ways.

[putaro]

No, I'm tired of companies and people trying to assert rights they do not have. BTW, this post is copyrighted by me and if you reply to it you will have to pay me $10 (feel free to call me a jerk).

Re:Wrong in quite a few ways.

[phantomfive]

Let's consider what you wrote. Here is your thesis: "I'm not being dense I don't think Google was being a jerk." OK, not a bad start. Let's see how you support it. Your first sentence: " Google was doing what they thought was best." Irrelevant. You can be doing what you thought best, and still be a jerk. Your next sentence: "Google doesn't work for Sun." Also irrelevant, being a jerk is orthogonal to working for Sun.

Thus far you've demonstrated you are incapable of constructing a coherent paragraph that supports your point. OK. The next point you bring up is vaguely relevant, but suggests you might not understand why forking someone's project can be a jerky thing to do.

Your final point about not being able to see the difference between Oak and Dalvik is so wrong that I can only conclude you are either an idiot, or a blinded fanboy. Get those blinders off so you can become your logical self again, please.

Also, learn how to write.

Re:Wrong in quite a few ways.

[phantomfive]

You may be tired, and that may be the reason you lack reading comprehension. This thread is about being a jerk, not about rights. Please try to pay attention if you're going to post.

Re:Wrong in quite a few ways.

[LarryWest42]

You're getting your facts wrong. Sun *approved* of Google's efforts, publicly and officially, in the forum of their CEO's blog.

Search (e.g., Groklaw) for Jonathan Schwartz's blog from November 5, 2007:

• "I just wanted to add my voice to the chorus of others from Sun in offering my heartfelt congratulations to Google on the announcement of their new Java/Linux phone platform, Android, Congratulations!"

And it continues in that vein, referring to Android as a Java-based platform.

This is after much discussion between the companies. The context matters. Google weren't being jerks.

Read up on the Oracle's lawsuit at groklaw for more factual background and generally reasoned commentary on the Oracle suit.

Larry

Re:Wrong in quite a few ways.

[phantomfive]

Hey, congratulations. You're the first person who replied to me in this entire thread who could write a coherent paragraph.

I'll check out the info, thanks.

Re:Wrong in quite a few ways.

[miroku000]

The jerkiness of Google is they went against the direct wishes of the creator of the project. Sun wanted to make sure that Java was compatible with Java anywhere, which is why they sued Microsoft for adding incompatibilities. Sun decided they wanted to make Java open source, but took measures to make sure any new implementation would be compatible. They did whatever they could to make sure it would be. Then Google decided to make an incompatible version, apparently to avoid the J2ME license issues, but for whatever reason, they made it incompatible. Not cool.

The creator of the Mp3 player probably never intended other companies like apple to add a bunch of DRM and make their Media Player incompatible with everything else.

Re:Wrong in quite a few ways.

[phantomfive]

That's great speculation.

Re:Wrong in quite a few ways.

[Anonymous Coward]

Thus far you've demonstrated you are incapable of constructing a coherent paragraph that supports your point.

Also, learn how to write.

If you say Google's a jerk, I guess we'll have to take your word for it, as you are clearly a subject matter expert on being a jerk.

Re:Wrong in quite a few ways.

[fredprado]

Maybe that is why you are trying your very best to be one?

Re:Wrong in quite a few ways.

[stenvar]

3. dalvik was written because Google didn't want to implement java to their license, not because they couldn't.

AFAIK, Dalvik was created before Google purchased Android. And the developers of Android developed Dalvik because Sun had screwed them over before when they were using the JVM on their previous projects.

Re:Wrong in quite a few ways.

[Anonymous Coward]

Microsoft wanted to call their Java + Window extensions "Java", which threatened Sun's "write once deploy anywhere" concept because anything written for Windows using the Windows extensions would not run anywhere but Windows. While Google acknowledged Dalvik implemented Java APIs, by not calling it Java, they were not implicitly claiming "write once deploy anywhere". If one wrote Dalvik code for Android, there was no expectation that it could be ported to any other Java platform.

Re:Wrong in quite a few ways.

[phantomfive]

Oh, it can be so fun to be a jerk on Slashdot. Try it sometime.

Re:Wrong in quite a few ways.

[Anonymous Coward]

You're a fucking asshole.

Is that coherent enough for you?

Re:Wrong in quite a few ways.

[stenvar]

Yes, it is about being a jerk.

Sun was the jerk because they kept misrepresenting what Java was and what they were going to do with it in order to get industry support. They pulled out of standardization efforts and bullied other companies with outrageous legal threats, all the while running Java into the ground technically and having an army of contributors fix their problems for them under exploitative licensing terms. They had everybody by their balls.

Android Inc decided to implement their own version of Java, in part because many of the people there had been jerked around by Sun's lawyers before and they weren't going to let Sun do that to them again.

All Google did was buy Android a couple of years after it had been founded. It's hard to see how you can blame them for any of this.

Re:Wrong in quite a few ways.

[Anonymous Coward]

For someone that purports to understand the situation you seem very ignorant of the matter. Google didn't steal anything. Oracle was unable to produce any code, save for the 9 lines Joshua Bloch re-used when we went to work for Google. If you think using method signatures is taking other people's technology then you're an idiot - plain and simple. But, you knew that already.

Re:Wrong in quite a few ways.

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm pretty sure you understood the posters points.You on the other hand, just showed yourself being exactly what you're complaining about, namely a jerk who resorts to ad hominems at the very first opportunity.

Go fuck yourself sideways with a rusty nail, you stinking hypocrite.

Re:Wrong in quite a few ways.

[gl4ss]

if your system has any local user to root exploit then exploiting it from a dalvik application is trivial. there's no separate permission for running local native code(as the sandboxed user created for the application).

I think you would be better off comparing dalvik to the numerous j2me implementations, which are often more secure and more transparent about which data the application is accessing - actually to the point that on most phones several API's are totally unusable because the user is bombarded with 4 to 6 fucking different dialogs for creating a new file in a new directory.

so that manouvering isn't really the reason.. the reason is that just staying out of the official java mobile license bullshit ring was SO MUCH EASIER! the whole fucking project was fucked up by first sun and then oracle that it's not funny at all - they had defacto monopoly at one point on multi vendor smartphone apps but decided to just fuck it.

Re:Wrong in quite a few ways.

[poetmatt]

This is exactly what they said in court, and the facts backed it. It amazes me people think Oracle should be defended here and don't understand the implications of if Oracle's view was supported by the courts.

Re:Wrong in quite a few ways.

[poetmatt]

"not being a jerk" doesn't exist. That's not a law, and it never can and never will be. Do you realize how subjective those kind of statements are and why they do not have any legal standing or otherwise? If google was really "being a jerk", the community would revolt. Have they? I've yet to see an actual developer community go "google sucks" that wasn't MS based.

Re:Wrong in quite a few ways.

[poetmatt]

Uh, sun praised google for the creation of android. You know that, right? http://theblitzbit.com/2011/07/26/sun-ceo-praises-android-take-that-oracle/ . Anything following Oracle's acquisition at that point is entirely moot. Note the date, as well.

You are incredibly biased and either accidentally or intentionally missing both a: facts and b: cognitive arguments being made by everyone else. Were you a sun developer or something?

Re:Wrong in quite a few ways.

[ThePhilips]

If you'd done any research at all, you'd find that Google refers to it as Java all over the place.

The word "java" is all over the place in the name of the methods (e.g. java.lang.Number). Thus the "Java all over the place" doesn't play any role.

Dalvik is the VM, not the language.

I haven't followed the suit very closely, but in previous legal cases, Sun/Oracle not once tried to blur the line between "Java as implementation" (aka JVM and Java runtime library) and "Java as API or language."

Do not buy into it: there are two different things commonly referred to as Java: Java as language and APIs and Java as implementation of the language and APIs.

Implementation is copyrightable - language and APIs are not.

Re:Wrong in quite a few ways.

[Anonymous Coward]

and the API thing is a problem how? as long as you aren't using trademarkable stuff, there shouldn't be a problem.

Why should we rewrite an entire generation of software and reinvent the wheel several times over because some people who doesn't understand the point of object oriented programming gets buthurt that their API could be used by someone else to make a competing service.

APIs don't matter, its the underlying architecture that makes you money. Thats like if cadillac had tried to prevent others from using their control schema for cars. It ended up being the best, and we use to this day. And it was a damn sight better then the model T or Rolls Royce method of joysticks, levers, and other stuff that requires 3 arms and 1 foot to be able to operate and was unmanageable above 25 miles per hour.

Re:Wrong in quite a few ways.

[Anonymous Coward]

and you can't patent a language. Sameway you can't claim copyright on a telephone directory.

Re:Wrong in quite a few ways.

[Rakarra]

Sun was the jerk because they kept misrepresenting what Java was and what they were going to do with it in order to get industry support. They pulled out of standardization efforts and bullied other companies with outrageous legal threats, all the while running Java into the ground technically and having an army of contributors fix their problems for them under exploitative licensing terms. They had everybody by their balls.

Wait, was that Sun or Oracle? Sun is long dead.

At the moment I am unwilling to give Oracle a single benefit of the doubt about Java. What they have done lately is EXACTLY the opposite of what Java was originally intended for. Talk about being a jerk.

Re:Wrong in quite a few ways.

[Rakarra]

and you can't patent a language. Sameway you can't claim copyright on a telephone directory.

But you can copyright a database, even if it's a database of publicly-available information.

Re:Wrong in quite a few ways.

[Anonymous Coward]

To have a prayer of making it work, Google needed to be free to modify the spec in a few critical places.

what modifications did they have to make to what critical places?

Re:Wrong in quite a few ways.

[Anonymous Coward]

It is effectively an Embrace, Extend, Extinguish tactic, soon the only Java anybody cares about will be Google's Java.

Re:Wrong in quite a few ways.

[Anonymous Coward]

Right. Soon everyone will rewrite those apps like Eclipse and Idea, all kinds of DB management and educational tools from Java SE to Android platform (such an extremely easy task! And so many profits - I mean, who wouldn't want touchscreen support, UIs optimized for small screen devices and severely limited memory optimizations for all those!) and rewrite browser plugin to Android as well, leaving poor Larry behind. Totally like that time with MS Java, where small changes would get you better performance on Windows, but lose compatibility everywhere else.

Shall I help you with getting that foot out of your mouth?

Re:Wrong in quite a few ways.

[sjames]

The security manager comes to mind...

Re:Wrong in quite a few ways.

[Anonymous Coward]

Dalvik is completely different from the usual Java VMs (Dalvik is register-based, while Java VMs are stack-based). That's how they got away with a VM that interprets (modified) Java bytecode without infringing any patents related to Java (as was confirmed by the "Oracle vs Google" case).

FYI, as far as I know Dalvik bytecode is pretty much its own thing which is not compatible with (or derived from) conventional Java bytecode in any way. (It kinda has to be in order to be register-based instead of stack-based.)

Re:Wrong in quite a few ways.

[FrangoAssado]

Dalvik bytecode is almost always generated by compiling Java source to Java bytecode (.class) and then using "dx" to convert one or more .class file to a .dex (sometimes the conversion is done by converting a .jar containing .class files to an .apk or a .jar containing .dex files).

I'm not sure where is the "official" documentation for dx, but you can find its source code in "com.android.dx" in the Android SDK source (here you can see its "Main" class, for example). Or just google "android dx tool".

Does it have a product?

[tepples]

it's very difficult to legally distinguish between a troll and a tiny operation with genuine innovation

Does it develop and license significant know-how related to its patent portfolio? If so, it's genuine innovation (cf. ARM).

Re:Does it have a product?

[Kjella]

Does it develop and license significant know-how related to its patent portfolio? If so, it's genuine innovation (cf. ARM).

That's a fairly good negative proof, but the absence is hardly a good positive proof. After all, most companies are in the business of using their own innovations not licensing them to third parties. Nor do small companies have a patent portfolio, they may have patented one or a few key innovations that their business model revolves around that would be their unique selling point. And demanding it be in actual use it is a lot harder for small innovators that are looking for funding/production/partners/customers than for a huge corporation that can afford to make 100 units in a "production run" even though they're never going to launch it to their millions of customers. The patent system already favors the big incumbents way too much.

Re:Does it have a product?

[robbak]

How about "No, it doesn't, because before they finished development MegaResourcedCorp had been selling their unlicensed product for 6 months, and had been given other patents that prevent anyone (including the original inventor) from producing a competing product."

Ann Droid vs technical documentation

[Anonymous Coward]

Oracle kicks off its legal arguments with the tale of a mythical writer, Ann Droid who copies the titles and some sentences from a Harry Potter book and publishes her book. Oracle then argues that we would not accept that.
BUT, API's should rather be compared with writing an anatomy book. We all would have chapters like 'Introduction, digestive tract, neural system etc.'. So if the argument of Oracle hold, no_one_can write another anatomy book (or most technical books).

Re:Ann Droid vs technical documentation

[sjames]

The BBC should sue Oracle.

Looks like a win for progress

[detain]

I hope this isnt an april fools joke (a judge making an intelligent decision) but assuming its not, this is a pretty significant win for developers in general.

Re:Looks like a win for progress

[ZombieBraintrust]

No this is really old news. It happened last year. Basically nothing new has occurred. Oracle has just finished some of their paperwork on their appeal.

Dictionary

[ZombieBraintrust]

The Java API is a dictionary of the words, punctuation marks, and grammar of the Java language. The only thing possibly covered by copyright is the layout and descriptions. Google didn't copy either.

Re:Dictionary

[elashish14]

A glimpse into the world as seen by Larry Ellison

If I were Daniel Webster, I'd be kicking myself for not trying to copyright English....

Re:Dictionary

[Anonymous Coward]

Hey, man, Webster's the Google in this. Doctor Johnson would have the copyright and you colonials would be forced to use the original specification, not your fork with the serial numbers filed off.

Does this mean...

[Dcnjoe60]

Does this mean that mono is protected from Microsoft's .net in the same way? Not trolling, just seriously asking.

Re:Does this mean...

[FlyingGuy]

You wont get any serious replies. Remember this is /. and the vast majority of the people here are haters on anything they can't just take, no matter how much work was put into it, by whom. And they especially hate Oracle for having the nerve to try and make money.

Re:Does this mean...

[gbjbaanb]

doubt it, Microsoft never asserted copyright claims to the .NET API words, they do however claim to have a shed-load of patents that they won't use against mono should be become successful, honest.

Patent law being a lot more screwed than copyright law is, I wouldn't count on it.

Re:Does this mean...

[Anonymous Coward]

Same as in not protected? Yeah languages of all types are not protected by copyright. Spanish, Klingon, Java, and new words like "lol" are not covered by copyright.

Re:Does this mean...

[Anonymous Coward]

You've obviously never been closely involved in purchasing anything from Oracle or you'd likely have a different attitude.

Re:Does this mean...

[ais523]

Unless they've done something stupid like copying the documentation word for word, or stealing source code, it isn't likely that there will be copyright-related problems. (And giving it a different name means that trademark-related problems are also unlikely.) People are mostly scared about patents, instead.

Re:Does this mean...

[Dcnjoe60]

I guess what I was asking, from the ruling, is that with Java the API isn't protected so one is free to impliment their own back end. In addition, from the ruling, if there is only one way to impliment something, it isn't protected, either. One of the concerns with mono is that Microsoft could pull the rug out from under it, Like Oracle tried to do with Android. But based on the Oracle ruling, does this mean that mono is much better protected and safe to use?

Re:Does this mean...

[Anonymous Coward]

Depends on what patents MS is holding and whether they are willing to use them. They published the specs as ECMA standard, which requires RAND licensing for all implementors, and it was covered by MS Community Promise (not to sue the implementors over patents etc. - google it), but it was 2006 and corresponds to .NET 2.0 or 3.0 - 2.0, I think. And updated standard from 2012 isn't listed on Community Promise site.

IOW, you can safely implement older .NET, but if you want any of newer stuff you'd better be careful. Don't think they'd go after Mono, but if Mono implements any of post-2.0 features and you want to build your commercial product on top of it - check with your patent lawyers.

Re:Does this mean...

[FlyingGuy]

Or they will pop off as A/C spewing forth without any knowledge.

Oracle is based on copyright violations then...

[Anonymous Coward]

They stole, and copied the entire IBM DB2 application as their baseline Oracle Database.

Code, language, API, everything - 100% copied...

WTF - sure wish IBM would sue for 100% of Oracle's Profits due to 100% copyright violation then...

Re:Oracle is based on copyright violations then...

[jbolden]

Just in case anyone believes this:

Oracle founded 1977
DB2 first version 1983

Re:Oracle is based on copyright violations then...

[Anonymous Coward]

IBM System R database - lead from IBM co-founded SDL which became RSI, which became Oracle - sorry - grabbed wrong database name...

Still came from IBM Database code...

Re:Oracle is based on copyright violations then...

[Anonymous Coward]

Oracle didn't steal IBM code, they took the SQL language, and algorithms and design work described in papers published by IBM, just as Hadoop is based on papers published by Google on MapReduce.

I don't think Oracle would dispute that IBM could've rattled some lawyers at them a long time ago, but they didn't. And it's too late now.

Re:Oracle is based on copyright violations then...

[jbolden]

R was a research application it wasn't commercial. Oracle was very very different. There wasn't any code in common.

Re:Oracle is based on copyright violations then...

[Anonymous Coward]

The first postgres DBMS was the first relational one using SQL. It was a university project before Oracle. Not even IBM had a relational one at this time.

Except that Dalvik is NOT A COMPILER

[Anonymous Coward]

It is a binary translator. You can't do anything android without 1st compiling with a JAVA CERTIFIED compiler before you can run dalvik on the binary output.

Try building an android app without an Oracle or IBM java compiler .... and see how far you get.

Re:Except that Dalvik is NOT A COMPILER

[cbiltcliffe]

I've built java apps without either. Not sure exactly why you're having trouble with it....

Compared to what?? Androd's horrendous record?

[Anonymous Coward]

Android is not a secure platform by any means. Even the official app store is infected with malware.

Re:Compared to what?? Androd's horrendous record?

[sjames]

Consider how much worse it would be if it was vanilla Java.

But most of that malware is of the Trojan type. It claims to be one thing, but does another with the unwitting permission of the user. That is quite different from circumventing a security mechanism to do something that was forbidden.

Re:Compared to what?? Androd's horrendous record?

[Anonymous Coward]

There are still several orders of magnitude less Android malware than Windows malware.

And that's despite Android overtaking Windows in the OS market, and being poised to overtake it in installed base within a couple of years.

Re:Compared to what?? Androd's horrendous record?

[Anonymous Coward]

Why don't you point us to some of the malware? Oh wait, you're a lying low life troll.

Re:Compared to what?? Androd's horrendous record?

[exomondo]

Consider how much worse it would be if it was vanilla Java.

What would be worse? I'm not much of a Java guy so I'm not sure what is inherently worse about Oracle/Sun Java than Google Java.

Re:Compared to what?? Androd's horrendous record?

[sjames]

Android has redone the security manager, the part that keeps getting bypassed in the many plugin based exploits that have been all over the IT news.

Re:Compared to what?? Androd's horrendous record?

[exomondo]

Android has redone the security manager, the part that keeps getting bypassed in the many plugin based exploits that have been all over the IT news.

In what way? Like what is it that they have done that can't be done in Oracle's version of Java?

Re:Compared to what?? Androd's horrendous record?

[sjames]

They moved the security out to the kernel and system in violation of the spec.

Re:Compared to what?? Androd's horrendous record?

[exomondo]

They moved the security out to the kernel and system in violation of the spec.

That sentence doesn't seem to make much sense, you're saying they moved all the security to the kernel (what did they put in the kernel?) and system (you mean Java.lang.System?)? Or just the SecurityManager? In either case how does that make it more secure?

Re:Compared to what?? Androd's horrendous record?

[sjames]

The Linux kernel and the operating system, naturally. And that makes it more secure by controlling native code as well as bytecode, and by narrowing the cross section of control. Suffice it to say that unlike the on-going security disaster that has plagued Java (just google if you don't believe me), Dalvik has been somewhat more under control.

In any event, Google felt more comfortable just re-implementing and not attempting to claim the result was Java and it seems to have paid off.

Re:Compared to what?? Androd's horrendous record?

[exomondo]

The Linux kernel and the operating system, naturally.

Well here you mentioned the Security Manager, which is in Java.lang.System, is that what you mean when you say 'system'? Or were you suggesting something else?

I know on the Android Security page it lists 'System and Kernel Level Security' but I'm wondering if you just read that and that's why you're suggesting they moved the security out to the kernel and system, which is just general OS security, or whether you're suggesting they've changed the Java security model in some non-standard way and they're using general OS security mechanisms to interact with it?

And that makes it more secure by controlling native code as well as bytecode, and by narrowing the cross section of control.

It doesn't have to be in the kernel to be native code so suggesting moving it into the kernel for that reason doesn't make sense.

Re:Compared to what?? Androd's horrendous record?

[sjames]

You really should be googling for this, or paying me some tuition...

If you move security from one place to another, you have to make some changes, yes? Surely you don't advocate leaving a bunch of unneeded code just sitting there burning cycles and memory on a handheld device?!? Not to mention adding attack surface for no gain. So modifications are needed to slim it down.

It doesn't have to be in the kernel to be native code so suggesting moving it into the kernel for that reason doesn't make sense.

No, it needs to be in the system or the kernel to MANAGE native code. Otherwise the security manager is bypassed entirely when native code runs. If you think it would be better in a system library than the kernel, fork the project and make it so :-)

Re:Compared to what?? Androd's horrendous record?

[exomondo]

You really should be googling for this, or paying me some tuition...

Well I'm just wondering if you know what you're talking about because your answers are pretty vague.
What specifically have they done with Android Java that makes it more secure than Oracle Java? 'I don't know' is a valid answer but you seem pretty confident that the Android model is better than the Oracle one.

If you move security from one place to another, you have to make some changes, yes?

Yes, if you do that, and you are indeed saying they moved code, so what code did they move? The SecurityManager still exists with seemingly most of the same functionality (looking at the API) as in Java so they haven't moved it out of the managed environment into native.

No, it needs to be in the system or the kernel to MANAGE native code.

But we're talking about modifications to Java and you're suggesting they moved security code to native so are you telling me their version of Java has been modified - because it certainly still exists - to interact with operating system security measures?

Re:Compared to what?? Androd's horrendous record?

[sjames]

In that case, I'll have to tell you the real story. One fine day, while getting ready to pirate the crap out of Java, a Google developer was visited by Eldarr, the anti-piracy unicorn...

If you want to know what SPECIFICALLY, download the source and find out.

Re:Compared to what?? Androd's horrendous record?

[exomondo]

In that case, I'll have to tell you the real story. One fine day, while getting ready to pirate the crap out of Java, a Google developer was visited by Eldarr, the anti-piracy unicorn...

wtf?!

If you want to know what SPECIFICALLY, download the source and find out.

I'm not asking for code, I'm asking how they've changed the Java security model to be tied to the kernel and system security, you made the claim that they changed the Security manager and then say they've moved stuff into the kernel and system, now that on it's own doesn't make sense and I can't see any evidence to support that. It appears you actually don't know what you're talking about and you just saw 'Kernel and System' on the Android security page and extrapolated from there.
You've said they've made changes and that these changes make it more secure, but the truth is you actually have no idea.

Oracle cant kill Sun or Java fast enough

[Anonymous Coward]

If you love Solaris its so hard to watch. Solaris is like family. All the crap, it went down hill so bad so fast, its frickn amazing.
Its time to dump the old girl, and her Java sister.

Hypocrite Linux

[Anonymous Coward]

Yet those at Red Hat/Fedora still continue to use Java. Yet, at the same time whine about Mono and C# and pantents. What a bunch of hyprocrites.

Trademark

[sproketboy]

Why didn't Oracle sue over the Trademark instead? It worked for Sun against Microsoft.

Re:Trademark

[miroku000]

Why didn't Oracle sue over the Trademark instead? It worked for Sun against Microsoft.

Google was careful to not call it Java.

Oracle lawyers digging Oracle grave

[Anonymous Coward]

Imagine if Windows API could be copyrighted. Microsoft could claim copyright over ever app ever written, including Java, including Oracles products.

So Oracle lawyers are really digging Oracle's grave here. If they lose they lose, if they win they lose everything, All of their database business will be open to Microsoft infringement claims, all of their apps, all of Java, everything, will be there for Microsoft to claim ownership over.

They really don't see the bigger picture here.

Eh?

[stoploss]

It just took a long time, as no one sane would run ZFS on USB hardware to start with.

Are you attempting to troll? ZFS on FreeBSD has performed superbly on my home NAS using USB hardware. But why take my word for it...

OpenSolaris Home Server: ZFS and USB Disks:
"Together, USB disks and ZFS make a great team. Not enterprise class, but certainly an interesting option for a home server."

oracle can't see the future

[kawabago]

Because it isn't in it!

Re:oracle can't see the future

[Anonymous Coward]

Ironic, given their name

you're quite wrong

[stenvar]

The jerkiness of Google is they went against the direct wishes of the creator of the project.

The creator of the project (Sun) had promised to make Java an open ISO and ECMA standard. That's why people initially adopted it.

After several years, all of that turned out to have been a lie.

Sun decided they wanted to make Java open source, but took measures to make sure any new implementation would be compatible.

Just because Sun decides they own or control something doesn't mean they do.

Then Google decided to make an incompatible version, apparently to avoid the J2ME license issues, but for whatever reason, they made it incompatible. Not cool.

Google didn't decide to make an incompatible version, Android Inc. did.

Android Inc did this before Sun released Java under an open source license.

Android Inc decided to do this because Sun had already screwed them once before on J2ME

Making Android compatible with J2ME would have made no sense; J2ME was a lousy design.

The only thing that's been "not cool" is Sun's long string of lies, their technical ineptness and mismanagement, and Oracle's attempt to establish API copyrights. Everybody else is just trying to dig out from under the consequences of their mess, deceptions and trolling.

Compaq

[Anonymous Coward]

Imagine if IBM won over Compaq when their BIOS API was reimplemented from scratch. Isn't this case exactly the same now as it was then?

Public domain and GPL

[Anonymous Coward]

WTF does public domain have to do with the GPL?

More than you think. The GPL programs are out there, to study and understand. Remember that the GPL license doesn't keep you from studying the code and re-implement the ideas, perhaps with enhancements in any way you please.

So the code itself comes with some restrictions, which make sure you don't restrict others -- but the knowledge represented in this code enhances the public domain.

Stealing?

[Anonymous Coward]

Much as I dislike Oracle, I don't feel Google played fair on this, they took someone else's technology and effectively stole it. It doesn't have anything to do with Java the language, or Java that everyone (no longer) uses. Its all about the proprietary ME version.

So if I write a FORTRAN compiler including run time system from scratch, that's stealing in your book?

Scary.

Only one way?

[Digital Vomit]

When there is only one way to express an idea or function, then everyone is free to do so and no one can monopolize that expression.

What if there are only two ways? Is everyone supposed to hope their implementation is the non-copyrighted one? If not, then what if there are three ways? Or four? Five? When does the stupidity of copyright law actually start applying to code? Is it really when there are just two ways of doing the same thing?

APIs are not Java, they are the java spec.

[Anonymous Coward]

And since APIs are not copyrightable (non expressive, required for interoperability), if Java WERE the API, then Oracle have no rights to require a license to Java.

No copyright on code

[Anonymous Coward]

Unless you're writing some incredibly complex system that only you could recreate it should not be copywritten. A musician can string together notes and phrases to construct a unique song, but in order to violate copywrite someone would have to come along and duplicate it without making hardly any changes to it. This makes sense because it protects someone's oringinal creation. When you start talking about copywrite on a min() and max() funciton that could easily be rewritten by any first year programming student, then IMO you've departed from the path of wisdom and sanity.

The problem is not that lawyer get paid

[Anonymous Coward]

The problem is that lawyer at all point of the legislative and political system make obstacle to the normal folk understanding, and manipulating of the law. Thus self perpetuating their own insured high paid job.

Look , when you have to pay a monopoly entity which has an iron grip on the copy of laws, copy of the interpretation by courts, and make every obstacle possible so that you cannot represent yourself, but on the other hand make sure their own group are never negatively impacted even when they do glarous error leading to people death, at some point such gruop will be rightfully hated.


"lawyer will be the first on the wall" and the likenning of lawyer with all sort of carnivorous or necrophage critter, is not because people don't like rich sucessful people (well maybe they do) but because people which had to do with lawyer have seen how the system is manipulated and feel powerless to change it.

Lawyers

[alexo]

Lawyers are proxies - they themselves don't do anything at all.

But they do. They perpetuate a system where you *have* to use an *expensive* lawyer in order to get justice or to protect yourself from legal attacks (which are usually more harmful than physical ones).

They are like paid soldiers on the legal battlefield.

No. Lawyers are akin to mafiosi operating a protection racket.

Lawyers don't have standing to sue anyone themselves, nor can they bring suits without a client. The client is the one who is suing, and the client is the one who has a claim.

Many countries have socialized medicine. Most countries have a socialized education system. As long as you must pay, often a sum that will bankrupt the average person, to defend yourself in court, justice is only for the rich. (Preemptive note: the "public defender" option is a fig leaf, it does not work, on purpose).

Lawyers can be paid hourly, or flat fee, or contingency percentage.

Guido can break your kneecaps, burn your house or rape your sister. I guess it's OK, as long as you have a choice.

The real question is: why are you so indignant that lawyers get paid to represent clients?

As a Canadian, I know that my basic health-care does not depend on the thickness of my wallet, and yet, doctors here still get paid. Plus, I do have an option to use a private clinic if I want to. I trust you're intelligent enough to compare and contrast.

Do you hate the adversarial court system? Then legislate to change it.

Legislators are lawyers. Good luck making them legislate against their own interests.
Campaign contributors and lobbyists are big businesses, who want to have an unfair legal advantage against those less wealthy. Good luck making legislators legislate against those who pay them.

Do you hate lawsuits? Them legislate change to how lawsuits are brought.

See above. Similarly: Do you hate the mob? Then change how it operates.

The idea that lawyers get PAID (heaven forbid) to represent someone's interests should not be a shock to you. We pay for all kinds of services from waiters(1) to janitors(2) to tax accountants(3) to represent our interests

1) I face no adverse consequences for choosing not to go to a restaurant. Everybody can cook a passable meal.
2) I am not forced to use the services of a janitor. The janitor union does not try to make maintenance as difficult and incomprehensible as possible to lay people.
3) I pay $20/year for a piece of software to do my taxes for me. I could use a free one which is no less good, but I find the paid version more convenient.

I have family members in the legal profession

So you are biased.

and they are good people

In your opinion. I am sure that many family members of the RIAA/MPAA/BSA feel the same (organizations chosen to avoid Godwining this thread).

I get very tired of hearing about how evil lawyers are.

The truth hurts.

Re:Lawyers

[Anonymous Coward]

Brilliant! Modderup as high as it'll go.....

This is EEE!

[Anonymous Coward]

Differences. MS took Java, changed it, kept calling it Java. Google took the Java API's, changed it (where needed), didn't call it Java (Dalvik).

And both are clear examples of Embrace, Extend, Extinguish behavior...this is the behavior we all berated Microsoft for when they did it to Java but there are bunch of fools like you that defend this action when it comes from Google because you were duped by them telling you they wouldn't be evil. And how do you defend it? By saying it's ok because they don't actually call the VM "Java".

You're mostly correct.

[Anonymous Coward]

The problem is specific people, and not any general type of people.