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Comment by st3fan | Hacker News Reader

My guess is that there is some sort of Oracle licensing agreement that prevents Apple from distributing Java with the release. You'd think that these two massive public companies would be able to work something out

This is pure unfounded speculation.

In reality Apple probably wanted to make the Lion base install leaner.

Many components are are now simply loaded and installed on demand. Like for example also extra voices for text2speech.

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Mike Swingler (Apple JVM developer) said: http://lists.apple.com/archives/java-dev/2011/Jul/msg00041.h...

After a decade of shipping Java on the Mac and tricking old apps that hardcode paths to the 1.3.1 JVM, or putting in class loader hacks to fake out Xerces XML classes that were moved in 1.5.0, we are ready to try something different.

In http://lists.apple.com/archives/java-dev/2011/Jul/msg00044.h...

What you loose in a per-app embedded model is shared memory mapping of the native libraries and .jar files, but this is the same problem as a half dozen apps embedding (often different) versions of the Sparkle.framework to do app self-updates. The cost of the JVM heap is still the same, and class-sharing was never ported to 64-bit by Sun, so that optimization hasn't been around for a long time on Macs.

In http://lists.apple.com/archives/java-dev/2011/Jul/msg00038.h...

Long-term, we recommend that app developers who use the JavaApplicationStub should transition to embedding the Java runtime within their own app. We are working with Oracle on the OpenJDK project to provide an open source version of JDK7 that can be embedded, and several developers have already started deploying their apps with an embedded JDK7 (but it requires many manual steps right now).

We are tracking the progress of creating an embeddable JRE in http://java.net/jira/browse/MACOSX_PORT-105

Conclusion: Apple's JVM team think this model is better for solving end users problem with JVM compatibility.

The suggested "bring your own" model of software deployment solves a lot of support problems, too.

Yes, but "bring your own" solves a lot of Apple's support problems related to sole exclusivity on old and insecure JVMs.

Does this mean all Java software that's distributed in this new way has to be compatible with OpenDK's license?

And conveniently it means that mac app store apps can't be java apps, which leads to them being better integrated and (slightly) higher quality.

Can't they just distribute the JRE like Apple suggested?

There are already apps on the Mac App Store embedding their own JRE.

http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/cyberduck/id409222199?mt=12&#...

I like how you put those 2 sentences together:

> This is pure unfounded speculation.

> In reality Apple probably wanted to make the Lion base install leaner.

Can't agree more - pure speculation.

Apple's "leaner install base" for Lion seems to ship with Oracle's VisualVM tool, which won't work until you install Java

The thing that annoys me is that people always thing the worst when something happens in Apple land. Most of the times things happen because they simply make sense.

That's absolutely right. The problem is just that not everything that makes sense for Apple's bottom line makes sense for mine.

For instance, deleting everything from my iPod without warning probably made sense for Apple's copyright negatiations with media companies. It didn't make much sense to me. Censoring dictonaries and banning everything sexual, satirical, political or otherwise "unclean" from the app store probably makes sense for Apple. Makes no sense to me.

So, I guess, the issue I have with the phrase "making sense" is that it obfiuscates the fact that everyone has their own vested interests and the vested interests of a particular large corporation are sometimes very different from mine.

"the vested interests of a particular large corporation are sometimes very different from mine."

Couldn't agree more! Especially when it comes to large corporations where you are a product being sold to advertisers, they're even worse than large corporations that accept money from you in return for goods and services.

I wouldn't say one is necessarily worse than the other. It's more that my interests overlap and disagree with either of them in different areas.

Ad driven companies have an incentive to spy on me and I have to defend against that. On the other hand, they have to be pretty agnostic when it comes to the type of content they enable and that gives me free and anonymous access to pretty much anything I want.

Stuff like this needs to be called out. These days, some blogger speculates on a reason for something and every technology news site is reporting it as fact.

Agreed. This was announced 8 months ago and widely covered by the tech media. It's just irresponsible reporting if people are covering this story and don't know the reasons why.

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/10/21/apple_threatens_to_k...

It's also a known fact that the CEOs of these two companies are very close friends; it's unthinkable that they couldn't sort out an issue like that.

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