Tag: oracle

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Java 8 will ship without Project Jigsaw, modular dependencies for the Java platform

Around this time two years ago, Oracle gave the Java community two options for the upcoming Java 7 release, Plan A and Plan B, which looked something like this:

Plan A: JDK 7 (as currently defined) Mid 2012
Plan B: JDK 7 (minus Lambda, Jigsaw, and part of Coin) Mid 2011
        JDK 8 (Lambda, Jigsaw, the rest of Coin, ++) Late 2012

Oracle went with Plan B based on community feedback, and we got Java 7 earlier, just with a reduced list of changes.

Now we’re on the verge of seeing the release of Java 8, Oracle has some rather upsetting news that the major changes, namely Project Jigsaw (to introduce modular dependencies into the Java platform), will not be included in Java 8 after all.

I don’t want to see any product released before it’s ready, there’s no point shipping something if its half-baked. But with the Plan A/Plan B approach it seems somehow that we’ve been short-changed. We agreed to delay significant changes to a future release just to keep the new releases coming, and now we’re at the point where we should have received the most significant platform changes that were originally planned for Java 7, to be included in Java 8, and Oracle is telling us ‘sorry, they’re not ready’.  At this point one has to wonder where Oracle’s priorities are with Java, because it’s certainly not looking very promising right now.

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Jury has partial verdict in favor of Oracle in case against Google

The Jury in the Oracle v Google case over Android has come to a partial verdict in favor of Oracle, but does not have a unanimous verdict for the other questions they were asked by the Judge to answer to arrive at their verdict.

To complicate the partial verdict, the verdict of the first question is only for 1 part of the question (“Has Oracle proven that Google has infringed the overall structure, sequence and organization of copyrighted works?”) and apparently the jury are not able to come to a decision on the second part (“Has Google proven that its use of Oracle’s Java documentation constituted “fair use”?”). Google’s attorneys  are therefore asking for a mistrial stating that this question cannot be partially answered.

It’s obviously not clearcut at this point where this is heading, and I imagine this could still swing either way.

If the end result of this case is that it is ruled that an API is Copyrightable, it will be interesting to see what the repercussions of this will be for other follow-on lawsuits.

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Oracle v Google court case started this week: in my own words, here’s a summary of the proceedings so far

If you haven’t been following, Oracle’s lawsuit against Google and their allegations that they ‘stole’ Java to develop Android is in court this week. Groklaw as usual are doing a stellar job to report on the proceedings (Monday, Tuesday, & Wednesday), although nothing earth shattering has happened so far.

Here’s the summary, wording is entirely my own, somewhat loosely based on my understanding of the facts 🙂

Ellison: you stole Java

Page: no we didn't

Ellison: ok, then you didn't license it

Page: we didn't license it because we couldn't come to an
agreement on the terms with Sun, so we developed our own
version based on Apache Harmony

Judge: did Apache Harmony license Java?

Page: no, because they didn't agree to Sun's
licensing terms either, in particular the 'field 
of use' restrictions that limited what types of 
devices a particular version (SE vs ME) of the JVM can run on, that
limits SE for example to only run on desktops and
not on mobile devices

Ellison: but the fact is, to develop your own version
of Java, you should have licensed the TCK to verify
that this was/is a valid version of Java

Page: but it's not Java, its Dalvik. We've
never said it is Java or is called Java

Ellison: ok, then you should have licensed Java to build
a new version of the language using the Java API spec

Page: is there a license for the API spec? The Java
language API is freely available without a license, is it not?

Silence.

Ok. In a nutshell this is my understanding of where the discussions are so far. There seems to be a disagreement whether a license is required or even available to take the API spec for Java and develop your own version of the language. Based on the summaries from the Groklaw site, I get the impression Ellison’s team are accusing Page of things that they’re not sure of themselves – is a license available and/or required to use/read the Java language API spec? I’m not sure, but this is what seems to be the current discussion point.

Also if you build something that is functionally similar to Java, but you don’t call it Java and you don’t pretend to even call it Java, is it Java? If you haven’t blatantly copied copyright code, you rewrote the code again yourself in a cleanroom environment, then have you broken the law? Stay tuned as the court case continues in the coming days (weeks… months….)

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