Oracle Asks Apache to Reconsider Java Committee Departure | Hacker News Reader

Oracle Asks Apache to Reconsider Java Committee Departure

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80 pointshornokplease31 comments

Let's sum this up.

    Apache states that if java 7/8 has non-open licensing, they'll leave.
    Oracle votes for java 7/8 to have non-open licensing.

Apache leaves. Oracle looks Apache in the eye and asks "Are ethics and morals really that important?"

Makes perfect sense to me why Apache left. I'd do the same in Apache's position.

It's more a courtesy call so they don't look quite like saying "Good riddance!"

That is exactly it, I think.

Apache: ffs, if Java 7/8 has non-open licensing, we'll leave. Oracle: ffs, you're leaving?!!

This isn't going to end well.

It's frankly bizarre that Oracle would sue Google over Java licensing, and then expect an organization with Google employees on the board and deeply involved at many levels to gladly accept their stewardship of Java.

Oracle seems to think that everyone should commit code to independent Java repositories, improving the Java ecosystem, and furthermore pay Oracle for the privilege of improving Oracle's IP.

Oracle not only fails to grasp the point of open source, they have it completely backwards.

Oracle's position is understandable. An Apache licensed Java runtime would possibly deny them of a substantial amount of profits it currently derives from J2ME licensing (it comes with every phone).

Oracle is not as prone to underpants gnome-like business plans as Sun was.

Too bad their product line is the antonym of cool.

Both positions are understandable. I'm just surprised that Oracle thought that they could play both sides like this. Pre-Sun they were all "yeah, what ASF said! Open licensing!". Post-Sun they take all of the historical Sun positions.

Again, it's understandable, but why are they so surprised that the ASF would respond like this? They are asking everyone to play a game using weighted dice. If you don't like Oracle's rules, you can go home. So how can they be surprised that ASF actually left?

I am not surprised Oracle thought they could. Oracle hasn't faced much opposition in its corporate history - their partners usually cave to whatever rules Oracle demands them to play with.

       it's understandable

No matter how awful a certain action gets by moral standards, everybody has understandable motives or urges ... rape, murder, backstabbing allies, you name it.

What isn't understandable is how companies can act hypocritical and get away with it, when your friends wouldn't.

That's a huge and hurtful double standard, especially since in the US companies have the same legal status as people, which is a huge advantage for them.

Would you trust to do business with, or be friends with, or just tolerate a person that acts like Oracle does?

> What isn't understandable is how companies can act hypocritical and get away with it, when your friends wouldn't.

Maybe because the company is not your friend? You are paying them money (in general) for services and you are getting services. If they do 'bad things' to you, you should consider switching to something more appropriate.

> especially since in the US companies have the same legal status as people, which is a huge advantage for them.

Corporations don't have same legal status as people (irrespective of the meme). They probably have more rights than you want them to have, but that doesn't make them a person

> If they do 'bad things' to you, you should consider switching to something more appropriate.

Well yeah, that's what I'm saying: there's some trust involved when dealing with companies, like will Oracle pull the plug on the platforms I'm building my business on? And it makes perfect sense to switch to something else in such a case.

So when Oracle acts a certain way, then backs away when in control forgetting their own complaints, how can you trust them after that?

From the actual Oracle statement, and left out of the linked post:

Earlier this week, by an overwhelming majority, the Java Executive Committee voted to move Java forward by formally initiating work on both Java SE 7 and SE 8 based on their technical merits. Apache voted against initiating technical committee work on both SE 7 and SE 8, effectively voting against moving Java forward.

So overall, just an amazingly sincere request from Oracle, wholly indicative of a good faith effort to work this out with Apache. [Edit: </sarcasm>]

http://blogs.oracle.com/henrik/2010/12/oracle_response_to_ap...

I disagree with the characterization "amazingly sincere." Oracle dangled the technical merits of the proposals as a carrot, but paired them with the stick of non-open licensing requirements.

I was being sarcastic.

I couldn't tell either

Interesting that they don't mention Google's vote "no".

The official comments of each party in the JCP on this vote are pretty interesting, even a large number of the "yes" votes clarify that they are voting only on the technical merits and they have deep concerns with the licensing.

http://jcp.org/en/jsr/results?id=5111

The Credit Suisse comments are particularly interesting:

On 2010-12-06 Credit Suisse voted Yes with the following comment:

Credit Suisse's vote is purely on the technical content. We strongly demand open standards and an active community around Java as we selected Java SE & EE as primary pillars for our application development (as many others in the industry do). The current battle around licensing term, however, reveals that Java never actually was an open standard. FOU restrictions clearly discriminate open source implementations and prevent competition, and with that, innovation in that space. While Java had a considerable head start, it lost a lot of momentum over the last years. Fragmentation (or a fork) of the language and its platforms are clearly not desired. But today, customers are already facing competing models for developing enterprise applications (e.g., Spring, OSGi, Java EE). The main problem, in our view, is the lack of modularization, clear delineation of Java IPs owned by Oracle and truly open standard extensions, and the ignorance of developments outside of the JCP (even though OSGi has a JCP blessing). The OpenJDK framework is not sufficient for all aspects of the language. Java must be kept interesting for researchers and universities: researchers not only contribute to the standards (e.g., Doug Lea for concurrency or Michael Ernst for type annotations) but also decide on the languages (and paradigms) that are taught at universities -- and this in the end determines the knowledge and mindset we acquire with our software engineers. While we recognize Oracle’s intellectual properties around Java, we strongly encourage Oracle to re-think its current position around licensing terms. We strongly support open source as a licensing model for contributions in the JCP.

> we selected Java SE & EE as primary pillars for our application development (as many others in the industry do)

Sadly, this is exactly Oracle's motivation.

Can anyone explain clearly why OpenJDK is not enough?

OpenJDK is enough for 99% of people. The remaining objections are philosophical and strategic: To count as a true bona-fide 100% open standard, you should be able to implement Java from scratch (without using any OpenJDK code) using any license you want and get it certified. Also, the ASF is trying to build a completely ASL-licensed stack, either because of NIH or because it benefits IBM and Intel in some way.

Oracle has patents all over it, and will sue anyone that uses it in any way that they don't like.

OpenJDK comes with a patent grant, so that's not the issue. It's about the GPL and Sun/Oracle's control over the project.

For the same reasons any GPL'd software isn't enough. We could go back and forth forever about whether those reasons are good, but that's not a conversation unique to OpenJDK vs Harmony.

I agree that releasing a GPL'ed derivative of OpenJDK may not make sense for every business plan I can think of, but, from a user point-of-view, would there be any difference?

Like any two implementations of a spec, they probably have different performance and stability characteristics. As for what those differences actually are, or if there are others as well, I'm really not familiar enough with Harmony to say. My completely unsubstantiated guess is that end users will be more interested in OpenJDK, as it's derived from the mature, battle tested jvm Sun's been shipping for years.

I was under the impression it was the TCK that caused the issues. OpenJDK could be certified, but you weren't allowed to then run the "certified" version on a mobile device.

Which is an additional restriction onto of the GPL.

Since Sun distributed OpenJDK under GPLv2, they waived that restriction. GPL'ed software cannot have FOU restrictions. AFAIK, however, OpenJDK does not include J2ME, so, you would be able to run, say, NetBeans on your phone, but not Hexic.

I can't wait to read the long list of what the ASF would like Oracle to reconsider.

It may not be that long: "do what you contractually said you would and open the TCK"

The rest, I have zero doubt, Apache can handle on their own.

[unenthusiastically] Stop. Don't. Come back. -- Willy Wonka

Aside from leaving the JCP, is there anything more Apache could do? As long as Apache keeps contributing to the Java ecosystem through their various open source projects, Oracle still wins.

As a Java developer, I really do not like what Oracle is doing, but I am not really sure of the best course of action. Should I simply boycott Java and start looking for another language? It's not that simple, for practical and economical reasons. Plus, aside from Ruby, the languages I would be most interested in run on the JVM (Scala, Clojure), and heavily depend on Java libraries.

Let's say I keep using Java, and want to open source some Java code. Would it be possible to use some sort of open source license that has an exception to forbid its use by Oracle? Or would this defeat the purpose of Open Source? What if I want to contribute, but do not want to help Oracle's business?

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