Here's to hoping Oracle gets crushed. If they don't, it's very bad news for everyone who has anything to do with the Java platform.
[Insert obligatory smiley: :-) ]
Seriously, Google is one of the big backers of Java and OpenJDK. By suing Google, Oracle risk losing contributors like Josh Bloch and Martin Buchholz. I mean, they've already skipped out on JavaOne.
Cripes! They even wanted to convert James Gosling as a sort of a talking puppet at trade shows.
Your line of reasoning would work, if Oracle was about engineering. Oracle, however, is mostly a sales - and marketing operation with some engineering attached to it.
They get the Java name and popularity, but they don't pay any licensing costs because they don't license JavaME and instead try to create their own implementation.
In my opinion, Google is both morally and legally in the wrong in this situation and trying to salvage it by playing the part of the open-source-friendly corporation. The fact that they publish open-source code doesn't get them a free pass. They knew what they were doing.
And you call that "giving back little in return"?
I think if they want to go do stuff like that, it's their own business - it's not a trivial amount of work, and if that's what it takes to get around someone's licensing that they find distasteful, well, so be it.
Reimplementing something is not 'morally wrong' in the slightest, in my opinion, as long as you're not out and out stealing code. We would have no Linux or BSD if those people hadn't redone "Unix".
Yes, they've given back nothing in return to the people that have created Java. What did Sun get out of Android? Nothing. Maybe some royalties would have been enough to keep it afloat.
>I think if they want to go do stuff like that, it's their own business - it's not a trivial amount of work, and if that's what it takes to get >around someone's licensing that they find distasteful, well, so be it.
How is it distasteful to protect one's hard work? The protection was in place EXACTLY so that other corporations couldn't get away with what Google has done. Everything else was free and open both for companies and individuals. Google's acts of charity are misleading. They are always releasing non-critical software as open-source in return for good-will! Good-will is a VERY HARD thing to get for a company, but by being generous with tools that are unimportant in the grand scheme of things (which is ads and search), they've built quite a following in hackerdom. A small price to pay for a huge benefit: as you can see everyone's taking Google's side in this affair...
>Reimplementing something is not 'morally wrong' in the slightest, in my opinion, as long as you're not out and out stealing code. We would have no >Linux or BSD if those people hadn't redone "Unix".
Fine, reimplementing something is not morally wrong. How about hiring Sun's engineers and going out of their way to avoid paying Sun anything knowing that Sun would not go after them in court? Getting close to morally wrong?
Life's a bitch. Just because you create some product, does not create an obligation for the world to pay you lots of money. Especially programming languages. Most guys who create languages don't really get rich from them.
> The protection was in place EXACTLY so that other corporations couldn't get away with what Google has done.
The "protection" in this case concerns three things:
* Trademark: the Java name. Perhaps they have some kind of case there, but that's not what Oracle is suing over.
* Copyrights: sorry, but Google took nothing from Sun as far as I can tell. They did not use Sun code. No case.
* Patents: ah, software patents. This form of "protection" inhibits anyone from going out, and through their own hard work, creating an implementation that resembles the original. I don't much care for that idea really - because the real work is in the implementation.
> going out of their way to avoid paying Sun anything
Boo hoo. That's their own business if they want to go out of their way to avoid paying someone, as long as that "going out of their own way" was done legally, which it seems likely it was. As a business, the world does not owe you anything. Perhaps if Sun had done a better job with Java ME, they wouldn't have been in this quandary in the first place.
Are you angry at the Apache Software Foundation too, for creating the free code used in the class library?