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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.

13 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 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.
  2. Re: Blame Scott McNealy by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Google- almost certainly evil.

    Oracle- absolutely no doubt.

  3. 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?

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

    your basically comparing stalin to hitler at that point.

  5. 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.
  6. 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 El_Muerte_TDS · · Score: 2

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

  7. 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
  8. 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.

  9. Comment removed by account_deleted · · Score: 2

    Comment removed based on user account deletion

  10. 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.