Oracle sinks its claws into Android

Ugh. Android used Harmony because OpenJDK didn't exist yet. As Android's first core library lead, I personally integrated Harmony into Android, and I'm ecstatic to see Android and OpenJDK share the same library code. This will greatly simplify contributing enhancements.

"Swing will now sit on every Android phone, using up resources."

The Swing classes were removed in a later commit and are no longer there. The commit linked in this article was just the initial bulk import of openjdk source.

[1]: https://android.googlesource.com/platform/libcore/+/master/o...

Oracle has no control with this; merging OpenJDK doesn't mean depending on OpenJDK indefinitely going forward; in E same way that building Chrome on WebKit didn't give Apple control of Chrome -- Google first became a major driver of WebKit and then forked it to make blink. Nothing in OpenJDKs licensing makes that unlikely for OpenJDK. It's a high one-tone transition cost to forever end the API copyright issue around Android, but once the transition happens Google is in full control of the roadmap.

Heck, Given the significance of Android and Google's ability to offer its choice of Java implementation in its cloud services, Google's probably in a position where, if it code to, it could credibly fork OpenJDK not just got an Android-specific implementation, but to challenge Oracle's Java more generally, the way others have done with both MySQL and Open Office.

I am astounded at how bad some of these "explainers" are. Absolutely mind-boggling comments about Swing on Android. Never mind it was removed from the Android SDK, it was never part of Android's base classes, the Zygote, or anything else in a device.

Android is still Android. The Android base classes will be an evolution of the current version. Maybe with Java 8 language features in the near future. It will not be Go (except for NDK code). It will not be Java SE. ART will still precompile Dalvik bytecode, and be the runtime for Android, and have nothing at all to do with OpenJDK.

EDIT: This guy was Mozilla's CTO? Holy crap. Maybe I'd be just as big a dope if I started ranting about JS runtimes, but he really ought to know better.

I doubt this article is right about Google's motivations.

That said, I think it's a good idea to try to avoid anything Oracle related. It is an aggressive and lawsuit happy company. When Oracle inevitably starts to decline, they'll use their IP portfolio to sue and inflict a lot of collateral damage.

It's astonishing how a former CTO of Mozilla could get so many things wrong in his analysis. The number of errors he made is rather embarrassing.

"Writing a standard C library from scratch is crazy. Its one of the most commoditized pieces of software. Its almost impossible to do it significantly better than existing implementations [...]"

As the musl developers have shown, this clearly not the case.

Switching from bionic to musl would indeed be interesting.

At least they built a mobile platform that works. Seriously tho, enough FUD. The two key premises of the article have been proven false at internet speed. Most would have withdrawn it already, but the Eich cabal are nothing if not persistent.

As crazy at it might have seemed in 2014, it is more and more likely that Google will deprecate the current Android Java-dependent APIs and offer http://flutter.io/ as the way forward.

That move would be strategic not just against Oracle, but also against Apple, as flutter.io targets iOS.

I was already quite puzzled about why Google would make the apparently quite significant change (millions of lines of code will need to be rewritten according to this post, too) and still stick with Java, instead of going Go or something else (even if it would be even harder to do it). But this article made me go "WTF are you thinking Google?!"

The only explanation I can come up so far (also in light of the recent partnership between Google, Oracle and HPE for RISC-V) is that Google kind of "admitted" that it's not supposed to use Dalvik without paying Oracle, so they went to Oracle and "reached a deal" - Google won't have to pay anything to Oracle, but Oracle gets to control a large portion of Android now, and will also likely get to be paid by Samsung, LG and all the major OEMs who will pay Oracle for a "custom proprietary license" so they can modify pieces of Android.

As the article concludes, this seems like a major win for Oracle and a big FU Android users! from Google. Can we even trust Oracle won't introduce some "accidental" goto fail-like backdoors in Android code, now? Oracle code is already full of security bugs, so nobody would even bat an eye - just Oracle doing Oracley things.