Comment by kodablah | Hacker News Reader

Comment by kodablah | Hacker News Reader

> Google positions a decision in favor of Oracle as a disaster for all developers.

That's a bit of hyperbole, because it requires a company to sacrifice developer good will (if it has any, unlike Oracle) to claim ownership/copying.

Also, where they reasonably can, people need to stop building on tech owned by companies they despise. Of course this is not reasonable in many cases, but for me, I won't use Graal and will actively tell others not to because it's easy not to. I don't have a problem w/ Google or FB like many others on here, but if you did, not using Go or React is probably unreasonable, but not using Google Cloud might be reasonable.

Also, we need to start holding privileged developers accountable for their chosen employer. I'm not talking about the underprivileged intern, I'm talking about the Oracle engineer that continues to work there at this time. If it's on your resume of late, I won't hire you. I also might not accept your PR if you are employed there.

> If it's on your resume of late, I won't hire you.

Then they can't leave. I'm not sure that's what you want.

> Then they can't leave. I'm not sure that's what you want.

It is, my statement is about industry-wide stigma henceforth, not specific literal effects on existing employees.

I'm not sure how your clarification addresses MBlume's concern.

A mass culture of "If you have X on your resume, I won't hire you" puts pressure on people who have X to stay in the space where X is true rather than try to exit it. It could put pressure on incoming software engineers to not join X, but if X's perks are good enough, will it? I'm reminded of the fact that undocumented immigrants in the US rose after the beginnings of tightened border security during the "war on drugs"---if the flow back and forth is easy, people flow back and forth. But if the flow is blocked, people will tend to stay where they are (or, worse, migrate to where the perks are better...).

Sorry, I was unclear and didn't address the concern specifically. I meant it is still overall what I would want even with that downside. Granted I recognize that there will likely be no observable effect to such a limited, hard-line stance on these principles, but that's the case with many other principled choices too. I wouldn't suggest it if it was hard or unreasonable.

GraalVM is Open Source and licensed under the same license as OpenJDK: https://github.com/oracle/graal

It is true that GraalVM has a proprietary version too, that AFAIK has extra features, but the open source version is impressive on its own.

What developers really need to do is to stop building on platforms based on how much they like a company. Stop treating companies like sports teams. Your feelings for a company are completely irrelevant because its culture can always change, or it can be sold to the highest bidder.

Things that matter much more:

1. Is it Open Source? This is important for having control. E.g. no matter what Oracle does next, there is now a community dedicated to maintaining and improving OpenJDK and in fact OpenJDK has cool features that Oracle’s Java does not, like a cool new low latency GC contributed by Red Hat.

2. Does it have an ecosystem around it?

GraalVM is new, but it piggybacks on Java’s ecosystem and Java is huge. In fact that’s also why Google piggybacked on Java too.

Speaking of which, I’m not defending Oracle’s lawsuit, I think they did it because they are greedy bastards, however the elephant in the room is that Google fragmented the Java ecosystem.

It is 2019 and Android’s SDK still does not support Java 8’s bytecode.

So how is Google any more special than Microsoft and what they did with Java (J++) back in the day? I don’t see a difference. And now the Java ecosystem can’t move on to Java 8 due to Android.

We have a huge double standard. Back in the day when Sun sued Microsoft people cheered for Sun.

> If it's on your resume of late, I won't hire you.

Thank you for saving good employees from a bad boss.

> good employees

An assumption at best. Those of us that have the leverage to choose our employers can be judged by that choice.

That's ridiculous self-serving high-horse grade-a bullshit. You've chosen a single feature among countless other's and decided to give it disproportional weight and treat it as a perfect predictor.

> You've chosen a single feature among countless other's and decided to give it disproportional weight and treat it as a perfect predictor.

Not true. It's not a predictor of anything and I never claimed it was. I said that is a feature that is a disqualifier, especially in the current market of employer/employee choice. There are many other features like this too, including the attitude presented by your comment.

Please relinquish any power you hold over other humans.

>If it's on your resume of late, I won't hire you. I also might not accept your PR if you are employed there.

And who told you these (or any other) people are looking forward to be hired by you?

How about we attach an "industry wide stigma" (sic) on you for proposing something so inane and inconsiderate?

Maybe if you get fired under such pressure on your employer and can't find a job you'd reconsider how nice "blacklisting" of the type you propose is?

> I also might not accept your PR if you are employed there.

That's a little ridiculous.

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