This was a significant problem for Apache's Harmony project. They couldn't accept Sun's restrictions on use so Sun wouldn't license them as a conforming implementation (despite them having done the work to pass the tests).
And that means that Apache Harmony almost certainly violates Oracle's patents and can be sued into oblivion at any time.
Sun open sourced Java, and you can easily fork it. You can't call it Java unless it still implements the specification correctly, but the license that Sun released the code under means that you are safe from patent problems.
No, you are only safe from patent problems if Oracle determines that your implementation is fully compatible.
Google's problem is that they did not fork Java, they reimplemented it.
Google didn't reimplement the Java platform, they implemented their own platform and used the Java language. Oracle has no patents on the Java language. And the patents they do have, they could have sued over no matter what virtual machine Google had implemented.
In summary, open source Java is fine, open source almost-Java is not.
There is no "open source Java"; open source principles require the ability to make incompatible forks, and as you correctly pointed out, Oracle doesn't allow that and has the patents to enforce their will.
You know dam well the patent suite is not against java.
Indeed, it is not, it is against something that is only similar to Java. That means that Oracle's patents apply even more so to any third party Java implementation.
I'm starting to think I am feeding a troll, or worse, a language bigot.
I'm beginning to think you're someone with a commercial stake in Java.
Right. Disagreeing with the current theories, which have tons of evidence for them, requires extraordinary evidence.
Let's say someone performs an experiment and it shows a weak effect with only modest significance. If that experiment agrees with current theory, it should be easy to publish, but if it can't be explained with current theory, according to you, the author should be told to improve his experiments until he gets a stronger result. But by not publishing the weak effect, other scientists won't see it, they won't be able to independently verify it and come up with better experiments that may show a stronger result. And that, in a nutshell, is the essence of scientific dogma. Thanks for giving such a clear illustration of it.
Your problem is that you view science as a pissing contest and scientific publications as prizes. Instead, science should be a collaborative process, and the purpose of scientific publications is to communicate.
Yet despite of all of this, GR was almost universally accepted as soon as there was evidence for it.
If GR had been "almost universally accepted", Einstein would have received the Nobel prize for it in 1923. Instead, he received the Nobel prize for the photoelectric effect. You really shouldn't get your history of science from web pages meant for high school students.
(There are many other errors and misconceptions in your post, but it's pointless to try to correct them all.)
None of which changes the fact that MS introduced their VM and they made it incompatible on purpose.
That's what you can do with open platforms. It may not be a nice thing to do, but it should be legal.
The Harmony problems with Sun is another matter.
No, they are not another matter. Sun wrongly asserted that Java was an open, vendor-neutral platform, but they were lying. Their lawsuits against Microsoft, the games they have been playing with Harmony, and their lawsuit against Google all have the same root: Java is proprietary and patented up the wazoo, and Sun/Oracle has been misrepresenting what Java is.
Looks mostly like Sun/Oracle have just pushed for Java to always stand for "write once, run anywhere." Not write once and hope all the core libraries are available.
Yes, and that makes Java and anything based on it highly proprietary and non-open. And that means that Sun/Oracle were/are lying through their teeth when they describe Java as an open solution.
They are muscling using their patents much like Firefox muscles their trademark though.
There's a huge difference: enforcing trademark rights doesn't affect the openness of a platform, asserting patents does.
Stop foaming at the mouth. Dalvik is compatible with the Java language. As I have pointed out repeatedly myself, it's a different VM. It's not my fault that Sun created this dumb ambiguity.
The problem with your position is it is completely hypothetical.
No, it's not. Sun/Oracle has been playing evil games with Java certification for years; just look at Harmony.
That's rather a biased view of it especially when there was documented court evidence that MS introduced incompatibility in order to tie their Java version to Windows.
Java claimed to be an open, standard programming language and that's what you can do with an open, standard programming language. The fault here is that Sun misrepresented Java, and you're seeing the consequences now.
How many Oracle lawsuits does it take for people like you to figure things out? Java has poor Linux support, poor GUI support, is heavily patented, and arguably there is no open source implementation. As I was saying: use anything but Java.
If you're going to make a claim that scientists do have dogma - a belief unchanged by evidence - then please provide evidence yourself of that. It's a huge claim to make.
You keep using language very imprecisely. Are you saying that no scientists ever have dogma? That would be ridiculous. Of course, some scientists are highly dogmatic, just like some scientists are very open minded. The history of science shows you that there are a lot of the former. Just look at how long it took for QM and GR to become widely accepted.
Oh what nonsense. All you are describing is that extraordinary ideas require extraordinary evidence. That has nothing to do with dogma.
Extraordinary ideas require extraordinary evidence to be accepted, but they shouldn't require extraordinary evidence to be published or funded for further study. Unfortunately, many reviewers have the same confusion as you: they think something only deserves to be published or funded if the evidence is clearcut. Read this paper: http://jbiol.com/content/8/3/24 It's a real problem. And read Kuhn's work (and other works on the history of science) showing how much resistance there is even to contemplating new ideas.
As for decay rates, when people talk about "constant decay rates", they mean that the tunneling is a Poisson process absent a limited set of interactions. There is nothing intrinsically "extraordinary" about observing that it isn't, what makes it "extraordinary" is just that current theory simply can't deal with such a possibility at all. What makes the observation "extraordinary" is just our current framework and models.
They could have easily made it compatible and then told Sun to STFU
No, they couldn't have made it compatible, because Sun was the final arbiter of what "compatible" means.
but that's not the path they chose. Rather they created.NET and C# instead.
Yes, and that was the right choice, because not only could they avoid any more legal harassment from Sun, they could also fix the serious problems that the Java platform had (and still has).
I think you missed the part where Microsoft made Visual J++ with various extensions and a failure to pass the Java compliance tests. Fixing compliance would have been easy, if they just wanted to make a compatible Java(tm) implementation, but really this was their first attempt to shaft Sun.
Microsoft was right on this one: Sun was wrong trying to control the language like this. If they had prevailed, we would all have been in trouble. As for "shafting", that's the kind of rhetoric Sun (and Netscape) executives were using against Microsoft.
Sorry, I dislike Microsoft as much as other FOSS people, but Sun was also a big threat to FOSS. Arguably, Sun was an even bigger threat because they sounded like they were supporting open source while actually undermining it. And you can see the result of that in the current lawsuit: Oracle is doing to Google's open source implementation what Sun did to Microsoft. However, Oracle's case is even weaker.
Go didn't partner with Microsoft, Microsoft killed them through false advertising.
DR-DOS was competing with MS-DOS, and did reasonably well.
Sun wasn't partnering with Microsoft, Sun first was ridiculing Microsoft and threatening to kill them, then trying to impose unreasonable licensing terms, and finally suing Microsoft. Microsoft developed C#/CLR as a last resort. If Sun hadn't been so incredibly stupid, Java would have taken over the entire industry, including Windows. And if FOSS developers had paid more attention to licenses, we wouldn't be stuck with so much code tied to Oracle's proprietary Java platform.
And the things Microsoft has done have been against other companies; Microsoft has not really been successful against open source. And what matters for Mono is not Microsoft's good will or attitudes, what matters is the legal situation, and that's a whole lot better than it is for Java.
Oracle doesn't have a patent on "virtual machines", they have a patent on specific technologies. So, the question is whether Mono violates Oracle's specific patents. Sun/Oracle's patents were mostly known at the time Microsoft designed the CLR, so there's a good chance that they designed around Oracle's patents. Dalvik, on the other hand, was created both to be Java compatible and also under the assumption that Sun was friendly towards open source systems.
You can never be certain that a given piece of software violates no patents at all. But Mono seems in a pretty good position: Microsoft doesn't claim patents against it, and furthermore, it was designed to avoid patents by the other big player, Sun/Oracle. That's probably as good as it's ever going to get for these kinds of virtual machines.
Mostly rock, some ice, some metal. Probably good for mining, and a prime target for future space exploration. Potentially, these are better candidates for human settlement than any other solar system body.
The total mass of the asteroid belt is about 4% of the mass of the moon. So, no, not enough for a whole planet. The composition and orbits are wrong for being a result of the earth/moon formation. Comets mostly come from the Oort cloud.
Towards the end of the video, a lot of the asteroids seem to be detected on discrete shells--around half a doze equally spaced shells through the asteroid belt. Where does that structure come from? I assume it's an artifact of the measuring process.
They havent been doing anything _but_ buing for the last years.
That's unfair. Google has done tons of good stuff in-house. Much of the speech recognition and language translation, for example, wasn't bought but done in-house.
Slashdot Mirror
a lawsuit does not prove anything a judgment does.
A lawsuit proves bad faith on the part of the company who is suing.
This also reminds me of how SCO was able to scare people away from Linux with their IBM, etc
Oracle's patents have teeth.
Me, I need to see more evidence and where Oracle is trying to go with this
Read the f*cking patents.
spreading FUD like a typical Microserf.
You're spreading lies like the typical Sun/Oracle astroturfer.
This was a significant problem for Apache's Harmony project. They couldn't accept Sun's restrictions on use so Sun wouldn't license them as a conforming implementation (despite them having done the work to pass the tests).
And that means that Apache Harmony almost certainly violates Oracle's patents and can be sued into oblivion at any time.
Sun open sourced Java, and you can easily fork it. You can't call it Java unless it still implements the specification correctly, but the license that Sun released the code under means that you are safe from patent problems.
No, you are only safe from patent problems if Oracle determines that your implementation is fully compatible.
Google's problem is that they did not fork Java, they reimplemented it.
Google didn't reimplement the Java platform, they implemented their own platform and used the Java language. Oracle has no patents on the Java language. And the patents they do have, they could have sued over no matter what virtual machine Google had implemented.
In summary, open source Java is fine, open source almost-Java is not.
There is no "open source Java"; open source principles require the ability to make incompatible forks, and as you correctly pointed out, Oracle doesn't allow that and has the patents to enforce their will.
You know dam well the patent suite is not against java.
Indeed, it is not, it is against something that is only similar to Java. That means that Oracle's patents apply even more so to any third party Java implementation.
I'm starting to think I am feeding a troll, or worse, a language bigot.
I'm beginning to think you're someone with a commercial stake in Java.
Right. Disagreeing with the current theories, which have tons of evidence for them, requires extraordinary evidence.
Let's say someone performs an experiment and it shows a weak effect with only modest significance. If that experiment agrees with current theory, it should be easy to publish, but if it can't be explained with current theory, according to you, the author should be told to improve his experiments until he gets a stronger result. But by not publishing the weak effect, other scientists won't see it, they won't be able to independently verify it and come up with better experiments that may show a stronger result. And that, in a nutshell, is the essence of scientific dogma. Thanks for giving such a clear illustration of it.
Your problem is that you view science as a pissing contest and scientific publications as prizes. Instead, science should be a collaborative process, and the purpose of scientific publications is to communicate.
Yet despite of all of this, GR was almost universally accepted as soon as there was evidence for it.
If GR had been "almost universally accepted", Einstein would have received the Nobel prize for it in 1923. Instead, he received the Nobel prize for the photoelectric effect. You really shouldn't get your history of science from web pages meant for high school students.
(There are many other errors and misconceptions in your post, but it's pointless to try to correct them all.)
None of which changes the fact that MS introduced their VM and they made it incompatible on purpose.
That's what you can do with open platforms. It may not be a nice thing to do, but it should be legal.
The Harmony problems with Sun is another matter.
No, they are not another matter. Sun wrongly asserted that Java was an open, vendor-neutral platform, but they were lying. Their lawsuits against Microsoft, the games they have been playing with Harmony, and their lawsuit against Google all have the same root: Java is proprietary and patented up the wazoo, and Sun/Oracle has been misrepresenting what Java is.
Looks mostly like Sun/Oracle have just pushed for Java to always stand for "write once, run anywhere." Not write once and hope all the core libraries are available.
Yes, and that makes Java and anything based on it highly proprietary and non-open. And that means that Sun/Oracle were/are lying through their teeth when they describe Java as an open solution.
They are muscling using their patents much like Firefox muscles their trademark though.
There's a huge difference: enforcing trademark rights doesn't affect the openness of a platform, asserting patents does.
Stop foaming at the mouth. Dalvik is compatible with the Java language. As I have pointed out repeatedly myself, it's a different VM. It's not my fault that Sun created this dumb ambiguity.
For FOSS? C++, Python, Ruby.
For enterprise software? You might as well use commercial VHLLs, since the rest of your software is probably proprietary anyway.
Long term, we need to come up with better solutions than either Java, C#, or Python. Programming language R&D has kind of stalled for a decade.
There is tons of prior art, both physical and electronically.
Oracle probably has a ton of patents around ZFS as well, so merely complying with the license is probably not enough. Just look at Java...
The problem with your position is it is completely hypothetical.
No, it's not. Sun/Oracle has been playing evil games with Java certification for years; just look at Harmony.
That's rather a biased view of it especially when there was documented court evidence that MS introduced incompatibility in order to tie their Java version to Windows.
Java claimed to be an open, standard programming language and that's what you can do with an open, standard programming language. The fault here is that Sun misrepresented Java, and you're seeing the consequences now.
How many Oracle lawsuits does it take for people like you to figure things out? Java has poor Linux support, poor GUI support, is heavily patented, and arguably there is no open source implementation. As I was saying: use anything but Java.
If you're going to make a claim that scientists do have dogma - a belief unchanged by evidence - then please provide evidence yourself of that. It's a huge claim to make.
You keep using language very imprecisely. Are you saying that no scientists ever have dogma? That would be ridiculous. Of course, some scientists are highly dogmatic, just like some scientists are very open minded. The history of science shows you that there are a lot of the former. Just look at how long it took for QM and GR to become widely accepted.
Oh what nonsense. All you are describing is that extraordinary ideas require extraordinary evidence. That has nothing to do with dogma.
Extraordinary ideas require extraordinary evidence to be accepted, but they shouldn't require extraordinary evidence to be published or funded for further study. Unfortunately, many reviewers have the same confusion as you: they think something only deserves to be published or funded if the evidence is clearcut. Read this paper: http://jbiol.com/content/8/3/24 It's a real problem. And read Kuhn's work (and other works on the history of science) showing how much resistance there is even to contemplating new ideas.
As for decay rates, when people talk about "constant decay rates", they mean that the tunneling is a Poisson process absent a limited set of interactions. There is nothing intrinsically "extraordinary" about observing that it isn't, what makes it "extraordinary" is just that current theory simply can't deal with such a possibility at all. What makes the observation "extraordinary" is just our current framework and models.
That's the estimated total amount. I don't think the undiscovered tail of small objects really can amount to much mass anyway, however.
(Note that that's not my rebuttal, it's the standard reason given in astronomy.)
Those agreements were made after the design of .NET:
http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/press/2004/apr04/04-02sunagreementpr.mspx
It's also not clear that they would even cover the CLR.
Java is still very much a threat to Microsoft
Java is about as much a threat to anything as Cobol.
I don't care what you use, but don't use Java.
They could have easily made it compatible and then told Sun to STFU
No, they couldn't have made it compatible, because Sun was the final arbiter of what "compatible" means.
but that's not the path they chose. Rather they created .NET and C# instead.
Yes, and that was the right choice, because not only could they avoid any more legal harassment from Sun, they could also fix the serious problems that the Java platform had (and still has).
I think you missed the part where Microsoft made Visual J++ with various extensions and a failure to pass the Java compliance tests. Fixing compliance would have been easy, if they just wanted to make a compatible Java(tm) implementation, but really this was their first attempt to shaft Sun.
Microsoft was right on this one: Sun was wrong trying to control the language like this. If they had prevailed, we would all have been in trouble. As for "shafting", that's the kind of rhetoric Sun (and Netscape) executives were using against Microsoft.
Sorry, I dislike Microsoft as much as other FOSS people, but Sun was also a big threat to FOSS. Arguably, Sun was an even bigger threat because they sounded like they were supporting open source while actually undermining it. And you can see the result of that in the current lawsuit: Oracle is doing to Google's open source implementation what Sun did to Microsoft. However, Oracle's case is even weaker.
Go didn't partner with Microsoft, Microsoft killed them through false advertising.
DR-DOS was competing with MS-DOS, and did reasonably well.
Sun wasn't partnering with Microsoft, Sun first was ridiculing Microsoft and threatening to kill them, then trying to impose unreasonable licensing terms, and finally suing Microsoft. Microsoft developed C#/CLR as a last resort. If Sun hadn't been so incredibly stupid, Java would have taken over the entire industry, including Windows. And if FOSS developers had paid more attention to licenses, we wouldn't be stuck with so much code tied to Oracle's proprietary Java platform.
And the things Microsoft has done have been against other companies; Microsoft has not really been successful against open source. And what matters for Mono is not Microsoft's good will or attitudes, what matters is the legal situation, and that's a whole lot better than it is for Java.
Oracle doesn't have a patent on "virtual machines", they have a patent on specific technologies. So, the question is whether Mono violates Oracle's specific patents. Sun/Oracle's patents were mostly known at the time Microsoft designed the CLR, so there's a good chance that they designed around Oracle's patents. Dalvik, on the other hand, was created both to be Java compatible and also under the assumption that Sun was friendly towards open source systems.
You can never be certain that a given piece of software violates no patents at all. But Mono seems in a pretty good position: Microsoft doesn't claim patents against it, and furthermore, it was designed to avoid patents by the other big player, Sun/Oracle. That's probably as good as it's ever going to get for these kinds of virtual machines.
Mostly rock, some ice, some metal. Probably good for mining, and a prime target for future space exploration. Potentially, these are better candidates for human settlement than any other solar system body.
The total mass of the asteroid belt is about 4% of the mass of the moon. So, no, not enough for a whole planet. The composition and orbits are wrong for being a result of the earth/moon formation. Comets mostly come from the Oort cloud.
Towards the end of the video, a lot of the asteroids seem to be detected on discrete shells--around half a doze equally spaced shells through the asteroid belt. Where does that structure come from? I assume it's an artifact of the measuring process.
They havent been doing anything _but_ buing for the last years.
That's unfair. Google has done tons of good stuff in-house. Much of the speech recognition and language translation, for example, wasn't bought but done in-house.