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Comment by toyg | Hacker News Reader

Actually the opposite is true, Jobs and Ellison were notoriously great friends - they were from the same generation, the "pirates" usurped by Gates. They just made sure to swim in different seas, as big sharks do.

Apple simply gave up on Sun, seen as a losing bet, and abandoned Java too.

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The Apple/Java story is still interesting. I now personally don't care much about Mac OS and Java anymore, but I remember me being pissed when Apple abandoned shipping Java, Cocoa bindings, native LaF for Swing and other integrations around 10.7 and leave the field for Oracle, after SJ had promised to deliver "first-party, best-of" Java dev experience years earlier. Oracle had also published a dev build for the Oracle RDMS on Power-based Macs, but then denounced the Mac as a serious platform. Maybe a back-deal or bet was in effect here, or Apple figured they'll never get into datacenter and enterprise anyway?

Steve was once asked about Apple's commitment to Java by one of the engineers working on it. SJ called Java "a big, fat pig." It was on its way out of the OS within the year.

Yes, I was a bit annoyed about that, it came just as I was finishing off a commercial Java application.

That's interesting, to me it seemed the other way round - it was good for Oracle to be responsible for their runtime. The integration was always a really terrible fit and without it, Oracle could ship current versions of Java. The Apple/Java thing was just a bad idea with a long lifetime and somewhat sluggish death.

It was the plan B in case Mac OS developers wouldn't be willing to use Objective-C from the new shinny OS X stack.

I also got pissed off, but I do get the reasoning behind it.

Apple only bet on Java, because the hype wave was still going strong and they were quite unsure how well the Mac developer community would be willing to embrace Objective-C.

So for a while they kept both languages on the platform to see which one would get the uptake.

When they saw that the developers had no issues with Objective-C, the decision was clear.

They were friends, but there was a lot of rumors going around that Jobs didn't want a business relationship with his friend. The strange part is that Ellison was put on the new Apple board when Steve took over[1], and the multiple stories of Ellison wanting to lead a takeover bid of Apple and Jobs stopping that cold.

1) Check the crowd reaction when Ellison is announced as part of the new board https://youtu.be/PEHNrqPkefI?t=11m40s

Jobs and Ellison being friends doesn't preclude Jobs NOPEing away from a position of extreme vulnerability wrt Ellison. Quite the opposite, I'd imagine.

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