1) That you haven't read the article. Not only is Microsoft dropping the free edition of Visual Studio, they're also dropping the compiler from Windows SDK, therefore forcing you to buy the paid version of Visual Studio or, some people are suggesting here, rip the compiler out of the "free" Metro version of Visual Studio (I'm assuming that they found some guarantee by Microsoft that they will always make this hack possible both technically and legally).
2) That you haven't ever used an open source IDE, as there are some which are perfectly competitive with Visual Studio (Netbeans, QT creator).
It's so refreshing when you're affected with cancer to know that you "may never be able to conclusively link your illness to the meltdowns". That makes me want to settle near Fukushima right now.
Do these statistics include the default browser on Android devices in the "Chrome" group? Otherwise I'm extremely surprised by them. I can't believe that there's more than a person installing Chrome for each one that uses a PC without knowing what a "browser" is (and therefore is an IE user).
I find it interesting that when a country censors Twitter for "blasphemous content", it's universally deprecated, but when the USA tears down a site for "copyrighted content", then it's freedom at work.
Do you hear runners complaining that one competitors legs are too long and so time should be added to their runs to compensate? No?
I do hear runners complaining when competitors take drugs (build factories that pollute / explode / kill their workers) while for obvious reasons honest athletes aren't allowed to do it (there are environment / labour laws in place).
Your nation subsidies industry. You just don't hear the rest of us complaining because you live in a protectionist bubble that pretty much ignores the worlds complaints about your practices.
I live in a liberist bubble where I've lost count of the failures of free market, and I've seen the economy crash and burn while the free market prophets reassure us that in the end everything will be ok - while they take their money out of the country.
When the Chinese do it, its unfair.
No, the Chinese are entitled to do whatever they want with their economy.
When you do it, its a moral responsibility to keep American jobs yada yada.
I don't know what "moral" means. It's an investment.
Your standard of living relies on you exporting goods to the rest of the world
Then we need to change something because, for obvious reasons, we can't live in a world where every country is a net exporter, unless we start exporting to another planet.
I'm sure you'd be happy not being able to buy Chinese crap.. but your impoverished might not be so happy at how much they would have to pay to get comparable items.
The poor need a job to be able to buy things, no matter how cheap, in the first place.
Yes, there are huge barriers to manufacturing something better and at a lower price than a monopolist who can count on a huge economy of scale. Cf. Microsoft vs the rest of the world.
Unless the Americans want to embrace the life style of the Chinese workers, they need to resort to protectionism. There can be no competition when the players do not follow the same rules. People will have to spend a bit more to buy solar cells, but I'd see that extra money as an investment, e.g. to keep the competences needed to build them inside the country.
Like it or not, the CIA's factbook represents a view of what the american government sees outside its nation's borders [their "communist count" for each country, besides the "area" and "population" values, was memorable]. The IHO "enjoys observer status at the UN and is the recognised competent authority on hydrographic surveying and nautical charting; when referring to hydrography and nautical charting in Conventions and similar Instruments, it is the IHO standards and specifications that are normally used." (Wikipedia)
But in practice, mine were only examples of the fact that just about everyone and his dog calls that place "persian gulf", which is the thing that matters, and they have been doing so for milleniums, and therefore Google should label it as such when the map is viewed in English, in most european languages, and in Farsi.
The only people who have a real right to name things are people in the area that geographical feature is.
I don't think there is "a right" to give names to places... there's just a name that, for historic / cultural / whatever reasons becomes the most commonly used one by a certain population, and that's what should appear in the maps intended for them. That's why your maps show "Germany" and not "Bundesrepublik Deutschland". And in this we agree.
Besides, how do you exactly define "people in the area"? There are lots of places where either the majority or a minority of the people living in an area call the place with a different name than the official government ruling over it. If Google began choosing between either name they would open a can of worms (think about Palestine / Israel).
That said, in case there's need to state it, I don't think that Google is making political statements by removing disputed place names, instead I think that it's just a technical issue, and I especially think that the idea of suing a company because you don't like its maps is beyond ridiculous - much more so if the supposed suer is a government known to kill his own people.
Partitioning the Linux vendors away from other companies seems arbitrary to me; RedHat makes millions by selling GPLv3 software. Nokia also has GPLv3 software in its repositories for the N9 (which is an end user-oriented, DRM-restricted product).
I really don't know why companies should be afraid of the GPLv3, since it's compatible with more licenses than the GPLv2, including permissive ones such as the Apache license, and is actually more business-friendly than the GPLv2, with its automatic license reinstatement clause, the 60 days limit for the notification of violations and the explicit patent clause.
We have lots of concrete, contemporary examples of what happens when choices are made for fear instead of by reason. So if you imply that I should license my software under a permissive license only to give in to the companies' unjustified fears, in the hope that their involvement will make my software better, then I disagree.
Your stance against GPLv3 is, in fact, rigid and ideological.
As a user and a developer, I like the flexibility that the GPL gives to me to combine the software I use in ways that were not envisaged by its original authors, and I can only do so because I can actually get the code and because I have the guarantee of being able to run modified versions of it on the same hardware. Apple won't let me run the code I want on the hardware that I'd buy. Pragmatism in my case means that I must stay away from their closed products.
Far too often, open source software falls into the trap of writing code that "works for me", where "me" is defined as the person who wrote it, yet tends not to "work for me", where "me" is defined as anyone else. Corporate backing tends to fix a lot of that because you have lots of "mes" working on the code, each of whom has a significant interest in making it work correctly and reliably (because they're getting paid to spend their time doing so).
I don't see this working in the real world, e.g. with Android. Corporate backing tends to push code of low quality (cf. the plethora of bugs that were fixed when the Android specific code was put in the upstream Linux kernel) because it was written quickly due to the corporation feeling the pressure from its competitors, and because its developers are paid for the time they spend coding; their interest is focused on solving the corporation's own problems (a corporation is a very big and selfish "me") with no regards to the effect that their solution will have on others' problems (cf. what happened with Apple and CUPS). And when a corporation has moved to the next product, they have no interest whatsoever for either the old code itself or its users (cf. what happens every time a new release of Android is revealed and users would like to upgrade, but they can't because of the binary blobs or forked code).
Any licensing requirements that are sufficiently onerous to scare away that corporate backing, therefore, tend to result in software of lesser quality.
This is not what I'm seeing with GPL projects such as Linux and the GCC. I think that the code quality of an open source project depends more on the community that it's able to gather than its license. But even if it we assume it's so, then the problem lies with the FUD about the license rather than in the license itself. FUD that I find in your comment, too:
they don't have to worry about crossing some fuzzy line and getting sued.
No company has ever been sued because of "crossing some fuzzy line". A couple of companies were sued because they absolutely refused to put a tarball on an FTP site despite the fact that the authors of that code had tried to convince them to do so for years. In comparison, Google is getting sued to hell because of BSD-licensed code. The truth is that no license will make you safe from copyright/patent trolls.
They pass the TCK for the relevant JSR => they are an implementation of it by definition. Of course they have to pay for that, that was Sun's source of revenue. IBM offers a full JDK, not only the VM, and it was the main contributor to the Apache Harmony project (to the point that the project starved when IBM retired its support).
The fact that "probably" some employee of some company once worked at Sun proves nothing. By your reasoning, since Google is full of former Sun employees, Dalvik is not an independent implementation.
You're right, I didn't express myself correctly. It's not the Java SE license itself that has nothing to do with the Google case, it's the TCK requirement.
Google never implemented Java SE. They never claimed to implement Java SE, and therefore they never needed the TCK to prove that their implementation could be called Java SE. Had they tried to implement Java SE, then the TCK availability would have been a requirement for them in order to call their implementation "Java". This is the case for Apache Harmony. But this didn't happen in Google's case, because they didn't implement Java SE in the first place, they just defined their own blurry subset of Java, so different from the Java platform that running the TCK over it wouldn't even be a well-defined operation, let alone have any chance to succeed.
Oracle denied the Apache Foundation access to the TCK. Bad faith.
Sorry if I insist, but Sun never licensed the TCK for free to anyone (without FOU restictions). They're not doing a special exception for Google. Why would it be "bad faith" on their side to decide their own license conditions? It's FRAND in my opinion.
1) Just like Microsoft did back in the 90s (emphasis mine):
Learn about the features of Visual J++ 6.0 designed to help developers build commercial-quality Microsoft Windows®-based applications in the Java language.
A judge ruled against Microsoft back then, a judge will decide if Google did the same thing today.
2) You're talking about the Java SE license, which has nothing to do with the Google case.
Sun provided two licensing options for Java.
a) Java SE is a full version of Java that is free for everyone to use and implement fully - Sun didn't want money for that, and they even released a GPL implementation of it, therefore granting usage for all the patents involved.
b) Java ME is a reduced version of Java for mobile phones that is NOT free, and Sun wanted money to license it.
c) Sun clearly did not want indipendent implementations of different subsets of Java, as it would undermine their licensing model by making option (b) useless.
Google was interested in Java ME, but they could not allow Android to be restricted by Java ME's licensing terms. But they didn't want to resort to option (a), because they do not want GPL software in Android either (beyond the Linux kernel). So they decided to have the cake (the Java development ecosystem) and eat it (not giving a penny to Sun and not having GPL code in userspace).
You say that in this story it's Oracle that is acting in bad faith? I see it differently - even though I hope that Google win in the end, because as a Java user I'd like Java to be as open as possible.
That license is a license you need to agree to in order to copy Oracle's copyrighted material. If you don't copy their copyrighted material, that license doesn't matter.
The copyrighted material is the specification document that the license is attached to.
If that were the case, Oracle would be suing Google over trademark violations.
But Oracle is suing Google over copyright and patent violations, so your statement that that is "the only thing" you can't do is wrong.
It's as wrong as all absolute statements, which are meant to be read with common sense IMHO. That said, I'm not a lawyer, so I'm more interested in real examples of things that you can't do with Java beyond creating an incompatible implementation and marketing it as such. Writing Java applications isn't one of the things you can't do. Writing complete Java implementations isn't one either. What else is missing?
The Oracle lawsuit demonstrates that Java is, in fact, a quagmire of patents, copyrights, and trademarks, and it is neither free nor open.
Just like any piece of software in existence, e.g. Linux (it violates the MICROS~1 patent), thanks to the brokenness of the patent system. But at least, Java is as free and open as the GPL - which clears all problems of copyrights and patents (as far as Oracle is concerned); not of trademarks. Google did not use the GPL-licensed OpenJDK, which is what this thread is about.
I do agree that Oracle is harming the credibility of Java as an open source platform with this behaviour.
You're mixing the licenses of the GPL OpenJDK (the GPL does not allow "field of use" restictions), Oracle's binary JDK, and Oracle's Java specification.
So - you can use the APIs for internal evaluation only. In other words - if you wish to use them for any other purpose you need another license from Oracle.
Did we red the same piece of text?
includes (i) developing applications intended to run on an implementation of the Specification
means exactly that you can develop all applications you want using the Java APIs, how do you interpret that as "they could advance a case against any Java developer"?
This is exactly the case Oracle has advanced against Google (who violated clause (i) above by implementing the specification).
No, Google
1) did NOT use the GPL OpenJDK, and therefore they're not covered by the GPL license; and they expressly chose not to use the OpenJDK because they dislike the GPL, as Google said explicitly in their published emails;
2) violated this part, of the license, that you omitted to quote:
2. License for the Distribution of Compliant Implementations. Oracle also grants you a perpetual, non-exclusive, non-transferable, worldwide, fully paid-up, royalty free, limited license (without the right to sublicense) under any applicable copyrights or, subject to the provisions of subsection 4 below, patent rights it may have covering the Specification to create and/or distribute an Independent Implementation of the Specification that: (a) fully implements the Specification including all its required interfaces and functionality; (b) does not modify, subset, superset or otherwise extend the Licensor Name Space, or include any public or protected packages, classes, Java interfaces, fields or methods within the Licensor Name Space other than those required/authorized by the Specification or Specifications being implemented; and (c) passes the Technology Compatibility Kit (including satisfying the requirements of the applicable TCK Users Guide) for such Specification ("Compliant Implementation").
In other words, Oracle claim that Google created a Java-based platform that is not compatible with Java, and called it Java. Which is what Microsoft did in the 90s (and has nothing to do with the developers of Java applications). A judge will decide if this is the case, but saying that every Java user could be sued for writing Java applications is frankly not true.
And if you are using Java for any purpose other than evaluation, you are in violation.
Again, you're omitting to say that the license explicitly allows you to:
1) develop applications for Java (ANY Java platform implementation)
2) develop complete implementations of the Java platform.
There is only one thing you can't do: develop an incompatible implementation of the Java platform and call that thing Java. You can create incompatible implementations of the GPL code of course, but then you can't call it Java. Oracle thinks that Google did that.
It was clearly a tiny project that got little oversight, and less review.
Where does the "clearly" adverb come from? Why do you consider gathering unencrypted wifi traffic from the streets of half world a "tiny project"? Do you condone the fact that, as you are saying, Google treated a project with massive privacy implications with "little oversight, and less review"?
For the NYT to say it was "approved" is quite beyond the facts. Collecting wifi access point locations was approved. But Engineer Doe went off the reservation and did way more than that.
There's no proof that the plan has been approved? Who cares: there's proof that the plan has been executed, because Google did store payloads. And they lied the first time they were asked by the EU if they were doing that. Then when they were caught, they "impeded and delayed" the investigations (direct quote from the FCC report). Engineer Doe refuses to testify, why should he, if he's sure he hasn't done anything illegal?
And finally, breaking the law "by mistake" (if we want to believe them) is still illegal.
Rogue engineer? Evil managers? Who cares who is the culprit in this particular case? The plausibility of both cases is just evidence of the real basic problem: a centralised database of public (or less public) information about every single individual in the planet should not exist in the first place.There's no problem if somebody comes under my house and snoops on my unencrypted wifi traffic. There's a problem if a single entity collects all unencrypted traffic from all the streets of the world. There's a huge problem if the same entity also collects all mac addresses, street addresses, personal names, phone numbers, web history of the same people, analyses all of them to dig for those people's problems, opinions, tastes, aspirations, and the only warranty of privacy they give is "hey, we promise that we won't ever misuse that data".
And Peter McDonald should be able to register the same site for his own sheep farm in Scotland. And Mcdo Nald, which in Strobonese means "tasty vegetables", is a notorious vegetarian restaurant chain in Strobonia that should be able to do the same thing. And users should be able to tell at a glance who they're talking to, especially if they're supposedly talking to a bank instead of a fast food chain. The hierarchical name system had a reason to exist, and with a growing internet I've not seen that reason going away, if anything it has become stronger.
And then who "dropped" http:/// ? Browsers are just hiding it, but last time I checked URLs are still the building block of the free Internet. Here we're talking about dropping traditional tlds in favour of a flat namespace, which is a technical change, not a cosmetic one.
The people who are against the change are probably the same who prefer 128 kbps MP3s because they're used to the way they sound, or who prefer valve amplifiers because "they make a warm sound". The fact that Hollywood movies are heavily formulaic, with e.g. all the scenes shot in Mexico having a yellow tint and those shot in Afghanistan having a brown one, does not help. Critics will probably change their mind once some enshrined director endorses the format or a tech giant give some fancy name to it.
We're talking about the Catholic church here, not the whole christendom.
Moreover, the amount of money they receive from the italian government makes up a large entry in the church's balance sheet. If you have information about the other slices, it's welcome.
You said that the church is more effective than governments in managing its money; but - at least in Italy - they actually get lots of (most of?) their money from the government, and they only spend 20% of that money to help the needy; that can't be seen as an example of efficiency.
Slashdot Mirror
1) That you haven't read the article. Not only is Microsoft dropping the free edition of Visual Studio, they're also dropping the compiler from Windows SDK, therefore forcing you to buy the paid version of Visual Studio or, some people are suggesting here, rip the compiler out of the "free" Metro version of Visual Studio (I'm assuming that they found some guarantee by Microsoft that they will always make this hack possible both technically and legally).
2) That you haven't ever used an open source IDE, as there are some which are perfectly competitive with Visual Studio (Netbeans, QT creator).
It's so refreshing when you're affected with cancer to know that you "may never be able to conclusively link your illness to the meltdowns". That makes me want to settle near Fukushima right now.
Do these statistics include the default browser on Android devices in the "Chrome" group? Otherwise I'm extremely surprised by them. I can't believe that there's more than a person installing Chrome for each one that uses a PC without knowing what a "browser" is (and therefore is an IE user).
I find it interesting that when a country censors Twitter for "blasphemous content", it's universally deprecated, but when the USA tears down a site for "copyrighted content", then it's freedom at work.
Do you hear runners complaining that one competitors legs are too long and so time should be added to their runs to compensate? No?
I do hear runners complaining when competitors take drugs (build factories that pollute / explode / kill their workers) while for obvious reasons honest athletes aren't allowed to do it (there are environment / labour laws in place).
Your nation subsidies industry. You just don't hear the rest of us complaining because you live in a protectionist bubble that pretty much ignores the worlds complaints about your practices.
I live in a liberist bubble where I've lost count of the failures of free market, and I've seen the economy crash and burn while the free market prophets reassure us that in the end everything will be ok - while they take their money out of the country.
When the Chinese do it, its unfair.
No, the Chinese are entitled to do whatever they want with their economy.
When you do it, its a moral responsibility to keep American jobs yada yada.
I don't know what "moral" means. It's an investment.
Your standard of living relies on you exporting goods to the rest of the world
Then we need to change something because, for obvious reasons, we can't live in a world where every country is a net exporter, unless we start exporting to another planet.
I'm sure you'd be happy not being able to buy Chinese crap.. but your impoverished might not be so happy at how much they would have to pay to get comparable items.
The poor need a job to be able to buy things, no matter how cheap, in the first place.
Yes, there are huge barriers to manufacturing something better and at a lower price than a monopolist who can count on a huge economy of scale. Cf. Microsoft vs the rest of the world.
Unless the Americans want to embrace the life style of the Chinese workers, they need to resort to protectionism. There can be no competition when the players do not follow the same rules. People will have to spend a bit more to buy solar cells, but I'd see that extra money as an investment, e.g. to keep the competences needed to build them inside the country.
But in practice, mine were only examples of the fact that just about everyone and his dog calls that place "persian gulf", which is the thing that matters, and they have been doing so for milleniums, and therefore Google should label it as such when the map is viewed in English, in most european languages, and in Farsi.
I don't think there is "a right" to give names to places... there's just a name that, for historic / cultural / whatever reasons becomes the most commonly used one by a certain population, and that's what should appear in the maps intended for them. That's why your maps show "Germany" and not "Bundesrepublik Deutschland". And in this we agree.
Besides, how do you exactly define "people in the area"? There are lots of places where either the majority or a minority of the people living in an area call the place with a different name than the official government ruling over it. If Google began choosing between either name they would open a can of worms (think about Palestine / Israel).
That said, in case there's need to state it, I don't think that Google is making political statements by removing disputed place names, instead I think that it's just a technical issue, and I especially think that the idea of suing a company because you don't like its maps is beyond ridiculous - much more so if the supposed suer is a government known to kill his own people.
Among the others, the CIA ( https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/geos/ir.html ), the UN, the International Hydrographic Organization, and Google ( http://maps.google.com/?q=persian+gulf ). And a lot of other people.
I really don't know why companies should be afraid of the GPLv3, since it's compatible with more licenses than the GPLv2, including permissive ones such as the Apache license, and is actually more business-friendly than the GPLv2, with its automatic license reinstatement clause, the 60 days limit for the notification of violations and the explicit patent clause.
We have lots of concrete, contemporary examples of what happens when choices are made for fear instead of by reason. So if you imply that I should license my software under a permissive license only to give in to the companies' unjustified fears, in the hope that their involvement will make my software better, then I disagree.
As a user and a developer, I like the flexibility that the GPL gives to me to combine the software I use in ways that were not envisaged by its original authors, and I can only do so because I can actually get the code and because I have the guarantee of being able to run modified versions of it on the same hardware. Apple won't let me run the code I want on the hardware that I'd buy. Pragmatism in my case means that I must stay away from their closed products.
Far too often, open source software falls into the trap of writing code that "works for me", where "me" is defined as the person who wrote it, yet tends not to "work for me", where "me" is defined as anyone else. Corporate backing tends to fix a lot of that because you have lots of "mes" working on the code, each of whom has a significant interest in making it work correctly and reliably (because they're getting paid to spend their time doing so).
I don't see this working in the real world, e.g. with Android. Corporate backing tends to push code of low quality (cf. the plethora of bugs that were fixed when the Android specific code was put in the upstream Linux kernel) because it was written quickly due to the corporation feeling the pressure from its competitors, and because its developers are paid for the time they spend coding; their interest is focused on solving the corporation's own problems (a corporation is a very big and selfish "me") with no regards to the effect that their solution will have on others' problems (cf. what happened with Apple and CUPS). And when a corporation has moved to the next product, they have no interest whatsoever for either the old code itself or its users (cf. what happens every time a new release of Android is revealed and users would like to upgrade, but they can't because of the binary blobs or forked code).
Any licensing requirements that are sufficiently onerous to scare away that corporate backing, therefore, tend to result in software of lesser quality.
This is not what I'm seeing with GPL projects such as Linux and the GCC. I think that the code quality of an open source project depends more on the community that it's able to gather than its license. But even if it we assume it's so, then the problem lies with the FUD about the license rather than in the license itself. FUD that I find in your comment, too:
they don't have to worry about crossing some fuzzy line and getting sued.
No company has ever been sued because of "crossing some fuzzy line". A couple of companies were sued because they absolutely refused to put a tarball on an FTP site despite the fact that the authors of that code had tried to convince them to do so for years. In comparison, Google is getting sued to hell because of BSD-licensed code. The truth is that no license will make you safe from copyright/patent trolls.
"Very much strongly" in favor of copyright? Not quite. At least Stallman is in favour of experimentation to reduce the strength of copyright laws. http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/misinterpreting-copyright.en.html
The fact that "probably" some employee of some company once worked at Sun proves nothing. By your reasoning, since Google is full of former Sun employees, Dalvik is not an independent implementation.
and nobody has ever been able to create one of those for Java.
IBM's VM for Java? BEA's JRockit?
Google never implemented Java SE. They never claimed to implement Java SE, and therefore they never needed the TCK to prove that their implementation could be called Java SE. Had they tried to implement Java SE, then the TCK availability would have been a requirement for them in order to call their implementation "Java". This is the case for Apache Harmony. But this didn't happen in Google's case, because they didn't implement Java SE in the first place, they just defined their own blurry subset of Java, so different from the Java platform that running the TCK over it wouldn't even be a well-defined operation, let alone have any chance to succeed.
Sorry if I insist, but Sun never licensed the TCK for free to anyone (without FOU restictions). They're not doing a special exception for Google. Why would it be "bad faith" on their side to decide their own license conditions? It's FRAND in my opinion.
A judge ruled against Microsoft back then, a judge will decide if Google did the same thing today.
2) You're talking about the Java SE license, which has nothing to do with the Google case.
Sun provided two licensing options for Java.
a) Java SE is a full version of Java that is free for everyone to use and implement fully - Sun didn't want money for that, and they even released a GPL implementation of it, therefore granting usage for all the patents involved.
b) Java ME is a reduced version of Java for mobile phones that is NOT free, and Sun wanted money to license it.
c) Sun clearly did not want indipendent implementations of different subsets of Java, as it would undermine their licensing model by making option (b) useless.
Google was interested in Java ME, but they could not allow Android to be restricted by Java ME's licensing terms. But they didn't want to resort to option (a), because they do not want GPL software in Android either (beyond the Linux kernel). So they decided to have the cake (the Java development ecosystem) and eat it (not giving a penny to Sun and not having GPL code in userspace).
You say that in this story it's Oracle that is acting in bad faith? I see it differently - even though I hope that Google win in the end, because as a Java user I'd like Java to be as open as possible.
The copyrighted material is the specification document that the license is attached to.
It's as wrong as all absolute statements, which are meant to be read with common sense IMHO. That said, I'm not a lawyer, so I'm more interested in real examples of things that you can't do with Java beyond creating an incompatible implementation and marketing it as such. Writing Java applications isn't one of the things you can't do. Writing complete Java implementations isn't one either. What else is missing?
Just like any piece of software in existence, e.g. Linux (it violates the MICROS~1 patent), thanks to the brokenness of the patent system. But at least, Java is as free and open as the GPL - which clears all problems of copyrights and patents (as far as Oracle is concerned); not of trademarks. Google did not use the GPL-licensed OpenJDK, which is what this thread is about.
I do agree that Oracle is harming the credibility of Java as an open source platform with this behaviour.
So - you can use the APIs for internal evaluation only. In other words - if you wish to use them for any other purpose you need another license from Oracle.
Did we red the same piece of text?
means exactly that you can develop all applications you want using the Java APIs, how do you interpret that as "they could advance a case against any Java developer"?
No, Google
1) did NOT use the GPL OpenJDK, and therefore they're not covered by the GPL license; and they expressly chose not to use the OpenJDK because they dislike the GPL, as Google said explicitly in their published emails;
2) violated this part, of the license, that you omitted to quote:
In other words, Oracle claim that Google created a Java-based platform that is not compatible with Java, and called it Java. Which is what Microsoft did in the 90s (and has nothing to do with the developers of Java applications). A judge will decide if this is the case, but saying that every Java user could be sued for writing Java applications is frankly not true.
Again, you're omitting to say that the license explicitly allows you to:
1) develop applications for Java (ANY Java platform implementation)
2) develop complete implementations of the Java platform.
There is only one thing you can't do: develop an incompatible implementation of the Java platform and call that thing Java. You can create incompatible implementations of the GPL code of course, but then you can't call it Java. Oracle thinks that Google did that.
It was clearly a tiny project that got little oversight, and less review.
Where does the "clearly" adverb come from? Why do you consider gathering unencrypted wifi traffic from the streets of half world a "tiny project"? Do you condone the fact that, as you are saying, Google treated a project with massive privacy implications with "little oversight, and less review"?
For the NYT to say it was "approved" is quite beyond the facts. Collecting wifi access point locations was approved. But Engineer Doe went off the reservation and did way more than that.
There's no proof that the plan has been approved? Who cares: there's proof that the plan has been executed, because Google did store payloads. And they lied the first time they were asked by the EU if they were doing that. Then when they were caught, they "impeded and delayed" the investigations (direct quote from the FCC report). Engineer Doe refuses to testify, why should he, if he's sure he hasn't done anything illegal?
And finally, breaking the law "by mistake" (if we want to believe them) is still illegal.
Rogue engineer? Evil managers? Who cares who is the culprit in this particular case? The plausibility of both cases is just evidence of the real basic problem: a centralised database of public (or less public) information about every single individual in the planet should not exist in the first place.There's no problem if somebody comes under my house and snoops on my unencrypted wifi traffic. There's a problem if a single entity collects all unencrypted traffic from all the streets of the world. There's a huge problem if the same entity also collects all mac addresses, street addresses, personal names, phone numbers, web history of the same people, analyses all of them to dig for those people's problems, opinions, tastes, aspirations, and the only warranty of privacy they give is "hey, we promise that we won't ever misuse that data".
And then who "dropped" http:/// ? Browsers are just hiding it, but last time I checked URLs are still the building block of the free Internet. Here we're talking about dropping traditional tlds in favour of a flat namespace, which is a technical change, not a cosmetic one.
The people who are against the change are probably the same who prefer 128 kbps MP3s because they're used to the way they sound, or who prefer valve amplifiers because "they make a warm sound". The fact that Hollywood movies are heavily formulaic, with e.g. all the scenes shot in Mexico having a yellow tint and those shot in Afghanistan having a brown one, does not help. Critics will probably change their mind once some enshrined director endorses the format or a tech giant give some fancy name to it.
Moreover, the amount of money they receive from the italian government makes up a large entry in the church's balance sheet. If you have information about the other slices, it's welcome.
You said that the church is more effective than governments in managing its money; but - at least in Italy - they actually get lots of (most of?) their money from the government, and they only spend 20% of that money to help the needy; that can't be seen as an example of efficiency.
The Catholic church only spends 20% of the budget they receive from italian taxpayers in charity. The rest goes to self-sustainment, financing political parties in Poland, etc.