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Comment by Udo | Hacker News Reader

What's most striking to me is how easily this could have been avoided, everybody knew what liabilities would arise from betting your entire mobile platform on the goodwill of a competitor. With the massively overqualified talent pool Google hoards, they could absolutely have implemented a completely new language, compiler, and VM themselves. I'm sure this alternative must have been at least on the table. Does anyone with insider info know what the reasoning was behind that decision?

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If anything, Google's desire to reinvent the world has held them back here. They could have just forked OpenJDK and made their lives easier, in retrospect. Into this went their irrational fear of GPL (describing it as 'viral' or 'infectious').

The fact remains that not even Google can reinvent the world in their image. Building a whole new language at the same time as a legacy-prone ecosystem requires too many moving pieces to fit together quickly. They picked some middle ground, java allowed them to tap into the large java talent pool (then and now). Reinventing the guts allowed their ambitious engineers to show off, which they did, but maybe not as effectively as if they'd built on top of the work of others.

OpenJDK was released around the same time Android was announced as imminent, and only a little before Android was released. Google could not have forked OpenJDK for Android at launch without doing a bunch of rework and delaying the launch, because the work they did getting Android ready mostly predates OpenJDK.

According to the Wikipedia, there is a 2-year diff between the two release: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenJDK https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Android_%28operating_system%29 .

No, May 2007 to September 2008 isn't two years, it's 1⅓ years. And Android had been in the works for years before that. (Even before the 2006 promise by Sun that Java would be released as open source.)

> Into this went their irrational fear of GPL (describing it as 'viral' or 'infectious').

Why irrational? If they used the GPL, a lot more of Android would need to be open source today, yes? Including proprietary hardware things that can't be open sourced?

This is not true. You could link the libraries as normal while maintaining your proprietary code. The GPL only asks you to release the code if a) you mix your proprietary code without separation from the GPL code b) you distribute the software to 3rd party. b) rarely happens if you sell the device as a closed/embedded system.

Also, they could use BSD code as well that comes with a more permissive MIT licence.

This is not true. Only the LGPL allows you to link to an open source library. That is why OpenJDK has a classpath exception (http://programmers.stackexchange.com/questions/119436/what-d...).

GPL requires you to release the source code to the customer of your software upon request. The person who buys the phone is the customer.

Correct in some way. Given the source code, e.g. Drupal (GPL v2), if you develop a proprietary module that can be shipped independently but relies on the Drupal Core or other GPL module, you still not violate GPL. It doesn't matter you need to compile it or not, at the end, most scripting language is compiled to bytecode in some for of JIT.

I mentioned GPL in general, not dissecting to the various version, because the parent reply was about Google's fear of GPL (in general).

OpenJDK was not pure GPL but rather GPL+classpath exception.

Ah, I see, my bad

I'm not sure I understand why forking OpenJDK would have been legally distinct from a from-scratch re-implementation. In both cases, Google is re-using the APIs that Oracle is claiming ownership over.

EDIT: I just realised that OpenJDK is released by Oracle. Never mind!

Exactly. And, let's be honest, the position Google took would have been supported by Sun. They would have wanted other implementations of their API.

Oracle is only doing this because they can. They have the money. They have the desire (to fuck with Google). So they do it.

I really don't get the anger toward Google. I don't think they did anything wrong here. If they did, it will haunt a lot of other companies than just Google.

> I really don't get the anger toward Google. I don't think they did anything wrong here.

If you check the internal email records, I suspect you'll find that Google thought that it was doing something wrong....

http://www.fosspatents.com/2016/05/heres-mountain-of-willful...

Just because people inside Google thought it was wrong doesn't make it so.

True. But the fact that Google staff felt guilty about ignoring copyright notices and spent years removing evidence from their code is a pretty good indication that they knew they were doing something wrong, even if technically they weren't...

I'm not an insider, but I think the decision making is pretty clear: they bought Android (the company). They could have started something from scratch, but they felt they could get to the market faster buying up a company that was already part of the way there.

Android could easily have been built on the GPLed version of Java. But again the reasoning behind the decision of building your own JVM is pretty clear: Android wanted someone to buy their company and felt that the GPL might make the sale difficult. Of course with Google buying, they probably wouldn't have cared, but by the time Google was doing the buying, the decision was already made.

Pretty typical story.

Also, the GPL version of Java wasn't available when Google bought Android.

Android's success was that its foundations was something the community knew. Java was either #1 or #2 of most popular language and their was a vast mind share that could be utilized.

A new language for a new mobile platform would have been disastrous. Could you imagine someone saying her is our phone everyone learn it and make great apps for launch in 6 months?

You mean, like Objective-C was disastrous for the iPhone?

Umm, Objective-C wasn't a new language for the iPhone.

Apple had the luxury of being the first to sell smartphones, they could do it in whatever language they wanted. Android could never have tried to do the same thing.

Apple were not the first smartphones. Without even nitpicking on Palm, etc, you're forgetting Blackberry.

I wouldn't call the blackberries smartphones. They were feature phones where one of the features was a proprietary email system.

There were touch-screen smartphones with no keyboards before the iPhone...

http://www.trustedreviews.com/news/O2-Unveils-Xda-Orbit-Smar...

Blackberry had a real OS, push email and third party apps. Everything the first iPhone had when it comes to "smart"

Erm, Nokia?

Nokia's smartphone line was already several generations old when Apple introduced the first iPhone... The Symbian OS had a 67% market share in smartphones in 2006. The first version of the Communicator with 3rd party software ecosystem, the 9210, was released in 2001!

Objective-C 1983 creation date :)

Came with Steve Jobs from NeXT and was used in OS X way before 2007 iPhone debut.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Objective-C

Yes I can absolutely imagine that. I believe such a decision would have been welcomed enthusiastically. Early adopters of a new hardware/OS platform are extremely easy to win over with an exciting new language. Others would have followed in good time.

Don't you see all those "why we switched from language A to language B" stories that seem to come up every other day? No need to read them. The content is not important. All they ever mean to say is "we were so bored with that old language and now we're thrilled to try something new!"

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