For some reason I was inspired today to post a comment on the NYTimes Bits bLog's post on the Oracle-Google lawsuit. I thought I didn't make it through the Time's idiot filter, but they actually put my comment online. Crazy. Here it is again:
I think Google got itself into trouble, because rather than simply build on top of java (write code with the java language and libraries), and contribute to the java community; Google decided to "fork" java to make its own language that is nearly identical to java, but with various differences (security model, libraries, bytecode) at a time (pre-openJDK) that java was not open sourced. Often non-UI code (networking, database, ...) written in java can be easily recompiled for Android's "Dalvik" runtime, so Google gained instant access to the java developer community and programming tools; but the two systems are not the same.
There's something slimy about what Google did - forking java for Android without respecting the time and money Sun invested. Sun Micro sued Microsoft years ago when Microsoft released a version of java with incompatibilities to improve java on windows. Google was very careful to never call Android's runtime "java" to avoid the issues Microsoft ran into, but everybody thinks of Android as running java. Google should have just bought Sun Micro when it had the chance ...
Oracle is slimy too for trying to insinuate itself into the Android smart phone and tablet market. Oracle and Sun didn't have the vision of Apple, or the skill to imitate Apple quickly like Google; so now Oracle is trying to sue its way into the market.
Anyway - the best outcome when two corporate monsters fight is that they both get cut up and bleed ... ;-)
No comments:
Post a Comment