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Inside Oracle's Cloak-and-dagger Political War With Google (recode.net)

Posted by msmash on from the tussle-continues dept.

schwit1 shares a Recode report: The story that appeared in Quartz this November seemed shocking enough on its own: Google had quietly tracked the location of its Android users, even those who had turned off such monitoring on their smartphones. But missing from the news site's report was another eyebrow-raising detail: Some of its evidence, while accurate, appears to have been furnished by one of Google's fiercest foes: Oracle. For the past year, the software and cloud computing giant has mounted a cloak-and-dagger, take-no-prisoners lobbying campaign against Google, perhaps hoping to cause the company intense political and financial pain at a time when the two tech giants are also warring in federal court over allegations of stolen computer code. Since 2010, Oracle has accused Google of copying Java and using key portions of it in the making of Android. Google, for its part, has fought those claims vigorously. More recently, though, their standoff has intensified. And as a sign of the worsening rift between them, this summer Oracle tried to sell reporters on a story about the privacy pitfalls of Android, two sources confirmed to Recode.

38 of 86 comments (clear)

  1. Ah the Oracle gameplan 101 by rahvin112 · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Cut off your nose to spite your face, that's the Oracle gameplan 101. They are mad at Google so they will try to destroy android, the only software keeping Java relevant.

    Smart as always.

    1. Re:Ah the Oracle gameplan 101 by tomxor · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Cut off your nose to spite your face, that's the Oracle gameplan 101. They are mad at Google so they will try to destroy android, the only software keeping Java relevant.

      Smart as always.

      Regardless of the truth of your Java statement (I'm not a Java fan FYI), this is just not how Oracle operates, and no i'm not an Orcale expert either - but it's clear from their history that they don't care about long term investments, they care about buying up and cashing out all IP possible, often through litigation... they are run by lawyers and salesmen alone without any concern for more than their bottom line.

    2. Re: Ah the Oracle gameplan 101 by sl3xd · · Score: 1

      Get some women to 'remember' sexual 'assaults' by Oracle management from 20 or 30 years ago, then demand that the accused resign or be fired

      In times like these, it's useful to refer to organizational trees of the companies

      Oracle will likely sue, and then use every option in its power to bankrupt any accuser with legal costs before it gets to trial. Sure, there's probably a "loser pays" part of the law, but eventually the Lawyer representing Oracle's accuser is going to say "you know... I may never get paid for this... I'm out."

      --
      -- Sometimes you have to turn the lights off in order to see.
    3. Re:Ah the Oracle gameplan 101 by jellomizer · · Score: 1

      While Java is still widely used, it is a far cry to Java a decade or so ago.

      --
      If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
    4. Re:Ah the Oracle gameplan 101 by rahvin112 · · Score: 1, Insightful

      While Java is still widely used, it is a far cry to Java a decade or so ago.

      People are free to disagree with me, but the widespread teaching and use of Java is only still happening because of Android.

      Were Android to abandon Java many teaching programs would move away from teaching Java at all and in probably less than a year the only place Java would still be relevant would be in the enterprise tool markets where over time Python and other languages would start to take over as they have already begun to erode Java's dominance in this area.

      Java is a language that is losing relevance every day but being propped up by it's use in Android.

    5. Re:Ah the Oracle gameplan 101 by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      This is silly. Java will exist and be relevant long after you are.

    6. Re:Ah the Oracle gameplan 101 by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      My admin job involves the care and feeding, and updating and migrations, of an application server product that uses java for just about everything. It is not going away anytime soon.

    7. Re:Ah the Oracle gameplan 101 by Gr8Apes · · Score: 1

      While Java is still widely used, it is a far cry to Java a decade or so ago.

      People are free to disagree with me, but the widespread teaching and use of Java is only still happening because of Android....Java is a language that is losing relevance every day but being propped up by it's use in Android.

      Yep, you keep thinking that way, I'll keep being employed. Working with Java. Not on Android.

      --
      The cesspool just got a check and balance.
    8. Re:Ah the Oracle gameplan 101 by Gr8Apes · · Score: 2

      Had Android used compiled ELF binaries,

      Android would have the numbers seen for Blackberry phones, today.

      it likely would see a 50-75% performance gain, just due to not having the overhead of a bloated JVM.

      You really don't know what you're talking about, do you? Have you even ever seen Dalvik? It's not technically even a JVM and is missing so many JVM features that to be considered bloated, well, that's truly hilarious. Now, what is bloated and designed by a sophomore is the asynchronous GUI Activity/Frame framework.

      --
      The cesspool just got a check and balance.
    9. Re:Ah the Oracle gameplan 101 by KiloByte · · Score: 1, Insightful

      My admin job involves the care and feeding, and updating and migrations, of an application server product that uses java for just about everything. It is not going away anytime soon.

      There's lots of Cobol as the base of massive banking operations, yet somehow I wouldn't call Cobol thriving.

      --
      The creatures outside looked from Alt-Right to Antifa; but already it was impossible to say which was which.
    10. Re: Ah the Oracle gameplan 101 by MachineShedFred · · Score: 1

      Oh Oracle is indeed all evil. Just not because of that - they are all evil because of many other things.

      --
      Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
    11. Re:Ah the Oracle gameplan 101 by Zontar+The+Mindless · · Score: 1

      I've known two people in the last year who left Oracle to work at Google. On Java. Nothing to do with Android in either case.

      --
      Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
    12. Re:Ah the Oracle gameplan 101 by Zontar+The+Mindless · · Score: 1

      Yet you can make a very good living if you know Cobol.

      --
      Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
    13. Re:Ah the Oracle gameplan 101 by Gr8Apes · · Score: 1

      It still is a VM that has to translate each and every instruction. It takes bytecode, and then executes it in the context of the architecture at hand, with all the instructions interpreted.

      Good thing that Android moved to the ART then, isn't it? But even then, you're so wrong it's funny. The Dalvik VM compiles the bytecode. It no more translates each instruction than C does, nor does it interpret instructions like Perl/PHP/Ruby et al (which is why those all suck for anything performance bound)

      CS 101 stuff here.

      So basic, you'd think even an AC on /. would know it.

      --
      The cesspool just got a check and balance.
    14. Re:Ah the Oracle gameplan 101 by tehcyder · · Score: 1

      My admin job involves the care and feeding, and updating and migrations, of an application server product that uses java for just about everything. It is not going away anytime soon.

      There's lots of Cobol as the base of massive banking operations, yet somehow I wouldn't call Cobol thriving.

      No, but the point is that Cobol is not going away anytime soon either.

      --
      To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
  2. Not exactly a tough sell by sl3xd · · Score: 1

    And as a sign of the worsening rift between them, this summer Oracle tried to sell reporters on a story about the privacy pitfalls of Android, two sources confirmed to Recode.

    That's not exactly a tough sell, given Google's revenue stream is dependent on tracking as much as possible about their users, to serve "more relevant" advertising.

    --
    -- Sometimes you have to turn the lights off in order to see.
  3. Re: Blame Scott McNealy by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Google- almost certainly evil.

    Oracle- absolutely no doubt.

  4. Just wait if Oracle wins by bobstreo · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Then you'll see how much per CPU in your phone/tablet/android device it will cost extra for your Oracle licensing.

    \s?

  5. Re: Blame Scott McNealy by rogoshen1 · · Score: 2

    your basically comparing stalin to hitler at that point.

  6. Copying Java? by PPH · · Score: 4, Funny

    That's sort of like peeking at the exam paper of the dumbest kid in class.

    --
    Have gnu, will travel.
  7. Come on google, Hit them hard by 140Mandak262Jamuna · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Develop a database product that is 10 times faster than Oracle using MapReduce, and make it perfectly backward compatible with existing Oracle database. Oracle destroyed Sun, destroyed Java, destroyed PeopleSoft.... It is the worse company than even Microsoft.

    --
    sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
    1. Re:Come on google, Hit them hard by 140Mandak262Jamuna · · Score: 1

      Thanks for being complacent. Thats how it got Microsoft.

      --
      sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
    2. Re:Come on google, Hit them hard by El_Muerte_TDS · · Score: 2

      Google just has to buy EDB, make their Oracle compatibility layer OpenSource and part of PostgreSQL.

    3. Re: Come on google, Hit them hard by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      Yeah, great. They'll get right on that. And when they do, nobody that matters would be stupid enough to use it, because of Google's love of randomly killing projects and products arbitrarily.

      Who in their right mind would trust their core data strategy to the mercurial shifts that Google has displayed? People running big data need to know they will still have support for all that data in two years.

    4. Re:Come on google, Hit them hard by coofercat · · Score: 1

      Google already has a Mysql/Postgres compatible cloud SQL solution. If they added Oracle compatibility to that, it would be a good start (and no open sourcing required).

      I know banks use Oracle, as do some wanna-be banks. Banks are slow to move, so your sales cycle mostly runs to years, so Oracle have at least another 5 years before they see any major decline there. I also know some companies who really shouldn't have ever used Oracle for their application, but thought that it would be a safe choice. Those are the people "someone" could peel away from Oracle onto a compatible alternative. The sales-cycle will be shorter, they're more price-sensitive than banks and they're less worried about regulators (although some are regulated, just not the same way as banks).

    5. Re:Come on google, Hit them hard by James+Youngman · · Score: 1

      Well, they already have Spanner, MySQL and Postgres. And that's just their relational database offerings. They have Cloud Bigtable too.

  8. Awesome by nightfire-unique · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Hopefully this three-way battle between Google, Amazon and Oracle will result in an opening a new mobile competitor can squeeze into. Android desperately needs some legitimate competition.

    --
    A government is a body of people notably ungoverned - AC
    1. Re:Awesome by squiggleslash · · Score: 1

      I'm not sure I want an Oraclephone, the idea brings visions of 1990s talk plans coupled with some large, hard to use, device that only works efficiently if you're a trained professional.

      --
      You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
    2. Re: Awesome by Reverend+Green · · Score: 1

      Are you kidding, broham? Have you actually used an iPhone? Android is way more pleasant, regardless of cost.

    3. Re:Awesome by jay+age · · Score: 1

      It has one - iOS.

  9. Re:Right side of prevailing politics by youngone · · Score: 2

    What a weird place, where businesses need to pay protection money to stay in business.

  10. Java is still highly relevant by DeplorableCodeMonkey · · Score: 1

    Look at the world of big data. What do you see? A ton of Java SE without the bullshit of Java EE holding it back. Aside from Go, try writing most of those products in the hipster-approved platforms like Python and NodeJS.

    1. Re:Java is still highly relevant by Just+Some+Guy · · Score: 1

      A ton of Java [...]

      ...but called Scala. I don't see a lot of bare Java in the big data stores I'm around.

      Aside from Go, try writing most of those products in the hipster-approved platforms like Python

      ...which had its first public release 26 years ago. Python can rent cars and it would buy a house if it wasn't a millennial. Its kid sister, Java, just turned 22.

      But yeah, I see way more Python than (again, plain ol') Java in big data. JVM languages other than Java are pretty popular, and Spark/Hadoop are often coordinating efforts behind the scenes, but the software running on the cluster is probably going to be Python/NumPy/SciPy/scikit-learn or Scala.

      Admittedly, the datasets I work on aren't bigger than a small number of petabytes, so maybe we're not big data by some standards.

      --
      Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
  11. Comment removed by account_deleted · · Score: 1

    Comment removed based on user account deletion

  12. Comment removed by account_deleted · · Score: 2

    Comment removed based on user account deletion

  13. Jobs still alive by twdorris · · Score: 1

    All this because Jobs wanted to go thermonuclear on Google for stealing iPhone market share and Mr. Larry vowed to avenge his lost friend?

  14. PostgreSQL by Tablizer · · Score: 3, Interesting

    All Google has to do is invest R&D into PostgreSQL (including UI's and documentation), and maybe some marketing. It could trigger a big drop in new Oracle sales, and knock the company into a panicky death spiral as investors flee. Novell redux.

    --
    Table-ized A.I.
  15. Up next by easyTree · · Score: 1

    Who has the best office furniture, Oracle or Google?

    --
    Requiem for the American Dream