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| Authored by: jvillain on Wednesday, April 25 2012 @ 05:13 PM EDT |
| I'm curious did you just +1 your own comment? Is this Florian Mueller? [ Reply to This | Parent | # ]
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| Authored by: Anonymous on Wednesday, April 25 2012 @ 05:38 PM EDT |
Story's simple:
Google: Yo Sun. Wanna build us out Java for Android?
Sun: Sounds great. It'll cost you.
Google: Tech needs to be open-sourced and extendable.
Sun: I dunno...not wild about losing control. (dithers)
Google: Well, it's open source, right? We'll just build an
interpreter. Kind of like Harmony...don't worry..we won't
call it Java...just like you said.
Sun: Sounds great...but I would have preferred the
cash...sigh...I'm dead broke.
Google: Yah. I know, but we're in a bit of a hurry and you
haven't made up your mind. Besides, y'know, you did open
source the project. Either you give us what you want, or
we'll just do it ourselves.
Sun: Oh well. Probably better to have the project built out
on mobile than not. (I mean, consider Objective C as an
alternative for Android...)
Oracle: I got me some money and needs me a new wife.
Sun: Sigh. Fine. (holds nose)
Oracle: That Google done you wrong? I hate them. Let's sue
the pants off of them. I just know they're getting into
database eventually*. Odds on, they'll pay us to get us off
their backs...and if not...we'll still waste their time.
In the end, Google's path certainly appeared mostly legal.
Was it nice? Not especially - Sun did a lot of work on Java
and probably deserved more monetary reward than they got.
That said - Google was in a hurry to get things going and
Sun appeared to be stalling - so I wouldn't call their
decisions evil or even particularly harmful to Sun.
Did they infringe on copyright? Probably not to any
appreciable degree. Given Sun's prior statements and
behavior, believing that Sun approved the Dalvik project (or
at least wouldn't sue) was reasonable.
Did they infringe on patents? Probably. Valid patents?
Maaybe. Will this be a big deal? Dunno. Could this have
been avoided? Of course not. Given the current state of US
patent law - the only viable approach is to build your
product and make reasonable guesses as to the amount of
infringement you'll be doing.
Did Google do anything evil? No. Anything slightly unkind?
Yes.
Did Sun do anything evil? No. Anything slightly shady? Yes.
(Stalling)
Did Oracle do anything evil? Yes. Of course. There's a
real difference in character here. Not saying Google's
perfect, but Oracle and MSFT are both companies that are
perfectly comfortable with evil acts.
--Erwin
*Personally, I hope that Google eventually funds a software
division with the sole purpose of providing nearly free
business software simply to kill Oracle's profits.
Oh...right...is that Google Apps? (Lovely company,
Oracle...seems to have just lost ~0.5B based on having been
found to defraud the government.) Time to widen your moat
Google. [ Reply to This | Parent | # ]
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