Oracle: Google Has "Destroyed" the Market For Java

itwbennett writes: Oracle made a request late last month to broaden its case against Android. Now, claiming that 'Android has now irreversibly destroyed Java's fundamental value proposition as a potential mobile device operating system,' Oracle on Wednesday filed a supplemental complaint in San Francisco district court that encompasses the six Android versions that have come out since Oracle originally filed its case back in 2010: Gingerbread, Honeycomb, Ice Cream Sandwich, Jelly Bean, Kit Kat and Lollipop.

Comments

Groklaw Needed More Than Ever

[linuxrocks123]

It's a shame Pamela Jones shuttered Groklaw ... her insight into this case would have been invaluable.

We need to stop the dangerous idea that interfaces can be copyrighted before it becomes as much a bane on software as software patents were before Alice vs. CLS Bank.

Re:Groklaw Needed More Than Ever

[phantomfive]

We need to stop the dangerous idea that interfaces can be copyrighted

I miss Groklaw too, but it's really too late for that. The Supreme Court upheld the earlier court's decision that interfaces can be copyrighted (or more specifically, declined to hear an appeal).

It's not the end of the world. Use of an interface for purposes of interoperability has been declared fair use. The Google vs Oracle case is still in court, trying to decide if Google's use of Java is fair use.

Of course, Java is under the GPL, so in most cases this is not even an issue.

Re:Groklaw Needed More Than Ever

[0123456]

If the API headers are the most valuable part of your software... you're doing something wrong.

Re:Groklaw Needed More Than Ever

[flink]

It's not the end of the world. Use of an interface for purposes of interoperability has been declared fair use. The Google vs Oracle case is still in court, trying to decide if Google's use of Java is fair use.

It's a serious blow to interoperability and to open source in general. Fair use is and affirmative defense, not an absolute right. It's very subjective. In order to even assert fair use, you have to be sued, refuse to settle, go to court, and convince a judge that the fair use defense applies... and then you have to actually litigate the case, with the risk you will lose, be out potentially millions in your own legal costs, plus damages, plus maybe paying the plaintiff's costs. This is a huge burden for anyone but a massive corporation to meet.

It is impossible to write a non-trivial Java application without extending or overriding some API "owned" by Sun/Oracle. This means that basically every Java application and by extension, every program that implements a public, non-open-source API or is written in a proprietary language exists at the sufference of the API/language creator. Maybe you could go to court and try to assert "fair use", but good luck doing that if you are not Google.

Re:Oracle's monopoly?

[MightyMartian]

Because J2ME was such a brilliant mobile platform.

Profiting on the Backs of Others

[Great Big Bird]

Oracle (then Sun) could have created an operating system for mobile phones based around Java. But since Google did, they want to profit off of it? They should go to hell.

Re: Profiting on the Backs of Others

[ArmoredDragon]

Microsoft created libraries that were compatible with Sun's Java, and then added their own proprietary (and incompatible) extensions to pull developers away from the real Java. This was a deliberate move to make sure that developers had to target Windows and couldn't target ordinary Java (which could run on any other platform) By the way, this was the same motivation Microsoft had for creating Internet Explorer (that is, they didn't want developers being able to target a web browser instead of an operating system.)

The whole idea was to force end users to stay with Windows instead of anything else, as Microsoft wanted to maintain their monopoly status.

Android on the other hand wasn't attempting to do that. That is, it never made any effort to pull any developers away from the Java platform, nor was it ever intended to do that in the future, nor did they make any attempt at being compatible with existing Java applications. Sure, it would be easier to port Java applications over, but it's intended to be the same at all, whereas Microsoft's implementation was intended to be a drop-in replacement.

Furthermore, Sun won their case against Microsoft because it was proven that Microsoft did what they did for anti-competitive reasons; copyright infringement was never claimed at any point. And likewise, Oracle isn't making any kind of anti-compete claims towards Google.

Oracle is just saying "Hey, you created an interface with similar naming to something created by a company we purchased. Even though other companies have done the same thing numerous times and have never been sued before, we're going to shake you down because we happened to have noticed just how successful you are and we'd like to get on your gravy train without having contributed anything to it."

Which by the way, what I just said above is typical Oracle behavior. When somebody comes along that does something similar to what they do, then they first try to buy it out, and if they can't buy it out, then they sue it out. Having said that, Oracle is every bit as much of an asshole company as Microsoft has ever been, if not more so.

Re:Profiting on the Backs of Others

[Dutch Gun]

By "irreversibly destroyed Java's fundamental value", Oracle means "we should be getting payments from Google because they're using a version of Java that they didn't license from us to make money." Everything else is fluff.

Re: Profiting on the Backs of Others

[fredgiblet]

If we refused to buy from any company that did anything assholeish then there'd be nothing to buy.

Fuck Oracle

[binarylarry]

Java was never useful on phones until Google built something decent.

Sun/Oracle could never build a decent phone with Java, no matter how much money they pumped into it.

If you work somewhere that uses Oracle products or is considering an Oracle product, fight to the bone to get their shitware tossed out.

We need to end this company, it's a tumor in the software ecosystem.

Ooops, misread the headline

[gnunick]

At first, I read that as "Oracle Has 'Destroyed' the Market For Java"... which, of course, seemed quite plausible.

RIP SUN

Oracle, please look in the mirror

[JPyObjC Dude]

The contenders for biggest enemies of Java are:

1) Micro$oft - Effectively killed the JavaBean web plugin market with their own lackluster JVM via EEE (Embrace, Extend, Extinguish).

JavaBeans is the technology that has the biggest negative view on the net and rightly so. If Microsoft had not done such a good job killing it, Java would likely be in a different light today as more energy would have been spent making JavaBean libraries better while the real engineers at Sun still had control of the source.

2) Oracle - They just do not get open source or anything that came from Sun.

Google has popularized Java way more than Oracle could ever imagine.

"You don't anthropomorphize your lawnmower, the lawnmower just mows the lawn, you stick your hand in there and it'll chop it off, the end" - B. Cantrill

Re: Oracle's monopoly?

[Anonymous Coward]

Are we supposed to believe that business models in general must be protected from disruptive technologies?

Re: Oracle's monopoly?

[garyisabusyguy]

Yes, and what exactly did Sun do with that?

Oh yeah, there is JavaFX, which still requires an OS to run on

That is where the disconnect is

Oracle confuses language and operating system

[Morgaine]

'Android has now irreversibly destroyed Java 's fundamental value proposition as a potential mobile device operating system ,'

Java is a programming language, not an operating system. Examples of operating systems are Linux and Unix.

Nothing could have "destroyed Java's fundamental value proposition as a potential mobile device operating system" because the value proposition of Java as an operating system is zero, and always has been. It's like the value proposition of an orange to be an apple.

Oracle's nonsensical claim might be merely a case of lawyers or managers showing their ignorance of the computing subject domain or just being sloppy with their terminology, which is not uncommon. However, it gets worse.

A proprietary software package may have a calculated expectation of market share and profit if there is no competition, but this is not the case with programming languages because they always have competition from countless other languages. It is especially not the case with open source programming languages because they typically enjoy multiple implementations, and these make captive markets almost impossible to maintain.

It seems therefore that Oracle's market expectations were based on a flawed analysis.

That mistake would have made any market expectations unsafe, but any expectations were dealt a further blow by Oracle's highly abusive attempt to copyright SSO in their litigation against Google. This must have alienated practically everybody who knows anything about programming, and the likelihood is high that many Java programmers who had other languages available must have abandoned Java like the plague to avoid potential SSO copyright liability.

In other words, if anyone killed off interest in Java, it was probably Oracle themselves.

Re:JAVA FTW

[ckatko]

Actually, it's pretty pathetic that C++ doesn't give you a stack trace for exceptions.

Though, as an aside, that just reminded me of the equally-as-pathetic amount of Stockholm Syndrome exhibited by C++ programmers on Stack Overflow:

http://stackoverflow.com/quest...

You don't need it! They're useless! If you use it you're not a good programmer! Why would you want C++ to be like other languages?!

Re:Oracle's monopoly?

[Z00L00K]

Oracle are the ones that have destroyed Java since nobody trusts Oracle and their licensing.

Oracle has destroyed all achievements of SUN

[Anonymous Coward]

And now they even want to destroy the only working free and open-source mobile operating-system .. this is like destroying the ocean for profit, destroying the rain forest for profit or destroying free wisdom by patents .. so in the end Oracle yes indeed is as evil as any other terrorist / capitalist.

Re:It always sucked

[Anonymous Coward]

Is that why Java rules the enterprise and Microsoft is relegated as a distant outsider? Java pretty much dominates enterprise development. C#? Not so much. Just ask the London stock exchange for experience with Microsoft and C#.

Since the London Stock Exchange switched to Linux/C++, your comment is irrelevant to this discussion.

http://www.computerworlduk.com...

Oracle didn't need any help destroying Java

[DrXym]

They managed to do it all by themselves. I used to program set top boxes with J2ME and dear god was it awful. J2ME was so stripped down that it simply wasn't fit for purpose by the end. It didn't even contain fundamental classes that had been in Java since 1.2 like ArrayList! And it was very expensive to licence too.

So we ended up using another VM called Skelmir which was a clean room Java, roughly analogous to Java 1.5 SE albeit missing some stuff mostly in the javax & sun namespaces. Performance was better, it was cheaper and it was possible to develop normal Java code with a reasonable expectation it would work on the STB. I'm sure the same sentiment was felt everywhere. Companies resented being charging an arm and a leg for a piece of shit runtime which was barely fit for purpose.

As for why Google succeeded where Oracle failed... It's because they offered more or less a full Java SE API and a rich mobile API that allowed developers to write apps without making compromises. It didn't really matter that the byte code was compiled into something else because they also provided excellent tools that integrated with Eclipse to take care of all that.

I don't believe for a second that if Google hadn't used Java as their API that Oracle would have triumphed. Not in the slightest. If anything Google did Oracle a favour by using their language and therefore keeping it relevant for portable devices.