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A comment on Oracle Wins Revival of Billion-Dollar Case Against Google. Parent comment

Re:Oracle Wins Revival of Billion-Dollar Case Against Google by lmm on Tuesday March 27, 2018 @11:46AM (#16689604)
Google believed they could implement their own VM and get something cheaper (and/or better) than they would get by licensing one from Sun. That seems like a perfectly legitimate business decision for them to make. A clean-room reimplementation of an existing API had long been thought to be legally clear, going all the way back to Compaq reimplementing the IBM BIOS and starting the "IBM-compatible" competitive ecosystem that our whole industry is built on.
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Re:Oracle Wins Revival of Billion-Dollar Case Against Google by monocasa on Tuesday March 27, 2018 @12:59PM (#16690465)
> better

That's it. The VMs on the market at the time we're absolutely terrible for phones. John Carmack was commenting on how JavaME gave you worse performance than an original IBM PC, and HotSpot's strategies absolutely destroy battery life.

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Re:Oracle Wins Revival of Billion-Dollar Case Against Google by pjmlp on Tuesday March 27, 2018 @01:13PM (#16690633)
Except that wasn't the only approach available.

There are OEMs selling commercial JDKs for embedded use, with their own VM, JIT and AOT compiler variations, and library extensions.

Contrary to Google, they always played by the rules.

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Re:Oracle Wins Revival of Billion-Dollar Case Against Google by carussell on Tuesday March 27, 2018 @02:30PM (#16691404)
The whole subthread focusing on the Android VM is completely irrelevant. The entire argument at this point has to do with the inclusion of the Java APIs. Not even Oracle or the appeals court are harping on Google's custom VM.
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Re:Oracle Wins Revival of Billion-Dollar Case Against Google by pjmlp on Wednesday March 28, 2018 @01:57PM (#16700091)
The VM is used as an excuse by Google supporters why they should get excused to help drive Sun into the floor.

Java still exists today thanks Oracle, not Google.

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Re:Oracle Wins Revival of Billion-Dollar Case Against Google by Zigurd on Tuesday March 27, 2018 @03:34PM (#16691974)
Android does not have a Java VM, and it does not run Java bytecode. Dalvik bytecode is more compact, and more CPU efficient, and the more recent ART runtime is even more efficient and performant. But it isn't a JVM.
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Re:Oracle Wins Revival of Billion-Dollar Case Against Google by pjmlp on Tuesday March 27, 2018 @05:23PM (#16692850)
Just like all the vendors selling commercial JDKs for the embedded market.

They also offer customized versions fine tuned for their deployment scenarios, doing Java bytecode to either native (AOT) or their own proprietary bytecode format when generating the firmware image.

Or for example, IBM Java running on IBM i mainframe, where Java bytecodes used to be translated into the TIMI bytecodes, just like any other IBM i application.

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Re:Oracle Wins Revival of Billion-Dollar Case Against Google by Zigurd on Tuesday March 27, 2018 @06:34PM (#16693415)
The Dalvik and ART runtimes differ in that the do not run Java bytecodes. Every commercial embedded jvm, open source jvm, and me jvm I have seen all run Java bytecodes and you can use any toolchain that makes .jar files with these vms. Unless the translation you mention can happen at runtime, it isn't a jvm.
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Re:Oracle Wins Revival of Billion-Dollar Case Against Google by pjmlp on Wednesday March 28, 2018 @01:27AM (#16695554)
It happens at deployment time, as mentioned.

Firmware does not change during runtime.

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Re:Oracle Wins Revival of Billion-Dollar Case Against Google by monocasa on Tuesday March 27, 2018 @01:15PM (#16690653)
In 2008, none were as good as Dalvik for the use case.
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Re:Oracle Wins Revival of Billion-Dollar Case Against Google by pjmlp on Tuesday March 27, 2018 @01:37PM (#16690889)
That's the story Google likes to sell.

Nokia and Sony-Ericsson flagship phones were quite good.

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Re:Oracle Wins Revival of Billion-Dollar Case Against Google by monocasa on Tuesday March 27, 2018 @01:42PM (#16690933)
No they weren't, I developed for them.
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Re:Oracle Wins Revival of Billion-Dollar Case Against Google by pjmlp on Tuesday March 27, 2018 @02:02PM (#16691108)
Me too, alumni from that little company located in Espoo.
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Re:Oracle Wins Revival of Billion-Dollar Case Against Google by geodel on Tuesday March 27, 2018 @02:43PM (#16691524)
I hope that little company does not come under pressure to make Android phones.
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Re:Oracle Wins Revival of Billion-Dollar Case Against Google by pjmlp on Tuesday March 27, 2018 @03:07PM (#16691756)
It is hard to compete against a free beer OS originally developed with tech unlawfully taken from other companies.

So one either swims or joins the graveyard of companies that tried to fight it.

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Re:Oracle Wins Revival of Billion-Dollar Case Against Google by monocasa on Tuesday March 27, 2018 @03:39PM (#16692015)
> It is hard to compete against a free beer OS

I'd argue that it's next to impossible. OSes are a commodity now. Even Microsoft is coming around to that idea.

> tech unlawfully taken from other companies.

All of the previous caselaw said that this was fine.

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Re:Oracle Wins Revival of Billion-Dollar Case Against Google by monocasa on Tuesday March 27, 2018 @02:25PM (#16691359)
I was third party. Maybe your close association is blinding you.
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Re:Oracle Wins Revival of Billion-Dollar Case Against Google by hcknwscommenter on Tuesday March 27, 2018 @01:27PM (#16690775)
Google did not do a clean-room reimplementation. They copied. This is not disputed by Google.
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Re:Oracle Wins Revival of Billion-Dollar Case Against Google by michaelmrose on Tuesday March 27, 2018 @04:14PM (#16692304)
They copied literally a handful of lines of code that an intern could have written in a few hours.
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Re:Oracle Wins Revival of Billion-Dollar Case Against Google by hcknwscommenter on Tuesday March 27, 2018 @06:02PM (#16693166)
But they didn't just write their own APIs. They copied them. Thousands of them.
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Re:Oracle Wins Revival of Billion-Dollar Case Against Google by cromwellian on Tuesday March 27, 2018 @09:40PM (#16694473)
Copying an API is what software developers call "implementing an API"

When you create your own USB cable, or electric plug, you aren't copying the API specs, you're implementing them.

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Re:Oracle Wins Revival of Billion-Dollar Case Against Google by ben509 on Tuesday March 27, 2018 @06:02PM (#16693165)
Once they admit to copying some of it, it throws the whole clean room process into doubt. I think the courts are working on the "where there's smoke there's fire" principle.
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Re:Oracle Wins Revival of Billion-Dollar Case Against Google by pbhjpbhj on Tuesday March 27, 2018 @03:23PM (#16691892)
IYO did they copy an artistic work?
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Re:Oracle Wins Revival of Billion-Dollar Case Against Google by hcknwscommenter on Tuesday March 27, 2018 @06:04PM (#16693188)
Copyright covers subjective work, not just "artistic" work. In the same sense that the choice of how to paginate a phone book and where to put the guidewords on each page is copywritable, yes APIs are copyrightable.
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