decoration decoration
Stories

GROKLAW
When you want to know more...
decoration
For layout only
Home
Archives
Site Map
Search
About Groklaw
Awards
Legal Research
Timelines
ApplevSamsung
ApplevSamsung p.2
ArchiveExplorer
Autozone
Bilski
Cases
Cast: Lawyers
Comes v. MS
Contracts/Documents
Courts
DRM
Gordon v MS
GPL
Grokdoc
HTML How To
IPI v RH
IV v. Google
Legal Docs
Lodsys
MS Litigations
MSvB&N
News Picks
Novell v. MS
Novell-MS Deal
ODF/OOXML
OOXML Appeals
OraclevGoogle
Patents
ProjectMonterey
Psystar
Quote Database
Red Hat v SCO
Salus Book
SCEA v Hotz
SCO Appeals
SCO Bankruptcy
SCO Financials
SCO Overview
SCO v IBM
SCO v Novell
SCO:Soup2Nuts
SCOsource
Sean Daly
Software Patents
Switch to Linux
Transcripts
Unix Books

Gear

Groklaw Gear

Click here to send an email to the editor of this weblog.


You won't find me on Facebook


Donate

Donate Paypal


No Legal Advice

The information on Groklaw is not intended to constitute legal advice. While Mark is a lawyer and he has asked other lawyers and law students to contribute articles, all of these articles are offered to help educate, not to provide specific legal advice. They are not your lawyers.

Here's Groklaw's comments policy.


What's New

STORIES
No new stories

COMMENTS last 48 hrs
No new comments


Sponsors

Hosting:
hosted by ibiblio

On servers donated to ibiblio by AMD.

Webmaster
Serevan on field of use | 126 comments | Create New Account
Comments belong to whoever posts them. Please notify us of inappropriate comments.
Serevan on field of use
Authored by: mirrorslap on Thursday, April 19 2012 @ 10:23 PM EDT
I got the impression that Severan was trying to lay the foundation that
Apache Harmony was precluded from running on mobile devices, and (by
an as-yet unestablished extension), that Google was infringing?

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

Serevan on field of use
Authored by: Anonymous on Thursday, April 19 2012 @ 10:32 PM EDT

I've been using java since 1999. The language was released in 1995 or 1996. There were four javas mentioned in the testimony, JavaCard, JME, JSE, and JEE. JEE is structured around Enterprise JavaBeans and Object-Relational Management layers and is for high-volume web services. It has fallen off in terms of relevance, and most people would prefer to use Ruby on Rails if given their druthers. JSE is standard java and suitable for basic services and desktop applications and utilities. Sun thought the first big thing was going to be applets, but poor network speeds and a java that needed more work meant that that dream was dead forever circa 1998. JavaCard is java for smart cards which have minimal processors. JME back then was about mobile devices, which didn't have displays of any sophistication. There has been many changes and today's smartphone compares very favorably with a mid-90s $3000 computer.

If we keep this in mind, I think we can understand why Mr. Severan described the motives for splitting the javas as he did. Mid-way through the last decade, when mobile phones started having the resources to run interesting applications, once could argue that the division based on capabilities lost importance and Sun was more focused on mobile as a revenue sector.

Sun gave away JSE and JEE (and OpenOffice) because Microsoft was firmly established, offered a web application stack and a way to make some inroads on the desktop or protect Sun's hardware and Solaris business was to give java away. On the servers, if the application you wrote could run unchanged with Solaris underneath, then letting programmers target Windows, or HPU/X, or AIX, etc., servers meant eroded some of the vendor lock-in that arose from different flavors of Unix or Windows. I note that java for Linux was slow to arrive and did so with an outside organization that Sun gave a license to.

It didn't work. Sun's revenues continued to decline and the company was laying off large numbers every 2-3 years from 2000 on. But mobile was growing, the hardware was advancing rapidly and Sun wished to leverage its platform and its wide programmer base so it became a money-maker.

The more testimony I see, the more I think this is not a case of software freedom being encroached, but a case where one company thought another should pay for something. The other company engaged in talks and decided that rolling their own might be better. But they didn't completely build it from scratch. We are going to see Google have fuzzy memories about those times someone there said "We need a license." Oracle will have fuzzy memories about the times when it, as a consumer and not the owner, said giving things away was really the right thing to do for Sun. (The interesting element in Severan's testimony is that Harmony was Sun, with Oracle's blessings, making sure java was safe so if java went to someone else, Oracle was not at risk for suit. You got to love irony when it appears, though I'd have a different opinion if I was paying the lawyers.) The folks are not the Brothers McBride, manufacturing narratives out of whole cloth, claiming rights they should have known they didn't acquire. As to the industry, when this case is in the books, java will still be on its long decline as the language arts and the computing environment have changed with the emphasis on networking, concurrency and distributed computation. Nobody is ever going to try and write a platform like java or .net again because it really didn't work out that well for Sun and Microsoft as strategy. The aforementioned Ruby on Rails, it runs on Windows, but it's easier to set up an optimal environment on Linux, so, people with Windows Servers fire up a Linux VM, if they don't just use a Linux host os.

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

Write once, debug everywhere
Authored by: Anonymous on Friday, April 20 2012 @ 05:47 AM EDT

Reading the Serevan testimony I so wished I had been Google's lawyer. I would have torn him apart and made sure the jury wouldn't believe Serevan if he told them the time. Was he intentionally misleading or just incompetent?

Oracle: Has Oracle ever redesigned the APIs?
Edward Serevan: No. There is no reason for Oracle to redesign the APIs, and it would be a lot of work (and a lot of expense).
Hellooooo? As any Java developer who's been in the field for a few years knows, there have been extensive redesigns of the API during the development of Java, in particular with respect to the older APIs (which make up most of the 37 APIs at issue). One quote from the documentation to the java.util.Hashtable class:
As of the Java 2 platform v1.2, this class was retrofitted to implement the Map interface"

And this is not the only example. There have been many redesigns of the API where new interfaces were introduced (and even new language features) and other classes (such as Hashtable) were changed to fit in with the new design. The specifications of these classes have changed.

This is particularly important with respect to another piece of misinformation he spread:

Oracle: Asked about the different editions of Java-- Are there edition forks or fragmentation?
Edward Serevan: No. It's all about the capabilities of the device on which the software runs.

This and his other testimony suggests that it's just different subsets of a greater whole, that there's simply some classes which will not work on one device because it lacks the respective capabilities. This is simply untrue. I have personally developed for J2SE and J2ME. It's not simply a matter of only using the subset of features supported by both devices. You can NOT write a Java program which will work on both without using wrappers and adapters (not part of Java). Not only do the 2 platforms have different classes. The classes that exist in both are often different, have different specifications.

But it's even worse than that. You can not even write a J2ME program that you can be sure will work on different Java-enabled phones.

In the mobile world Java has always been deeply fragmented, even if only Sun's original J2ME releases were used. That's because J2ME consists of so many optional parts which a device may or may not support. Talk to any developer of mobile phone games BEFORE Apple and Android. It was the complete horror. You developed your game and then you gave it to your testing team which tested it on FIFTY different phones and would report back with at least TEN different failure modes.

With respect to mobile, Google did not fragment Java. Quite the opposite. Finally it's possible to write a program in Java that will run on all phones right away.

I hope we soon get to hear the true form of "Write once, run anywhere", the way almost every actual Java programmer out in the field knows this principle:

Write once, debug everywhere!
See this article from 2002.

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

Serevan on field of use
Authored by: Ian Al on Friday, April 20 2012 @ 08:21 AM EDT
He also said Big Oracle bought Sun because the Java platform was so important to
the Oracle database products. Since that product doesn't run on smartphones,
mobile devices must have been an afterthought.

Why would smartphones fragmenting their Java be a problem for Oracle database
products with Java front-ends.

He also said that he would want to extort money from folk for using Java. He
said that Sun kept on and on at Harmony to get a licence and licenses cost
licensees money.

I might have misremembered 'extort'.

---
Regards
Ian Al
Software Patents: It's the disclosed functions in the patent, stupid!

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

Groklaw © Copyright 2003-2013 Pamela Jones.
All trademarks and copyrights on this page are owned by their respective owners.
Comments are owned by the individual posters.

PJ's articles are licensed under a Creative Commons License. ( Details )