sun – Page 2 – Kev's Development Toolbox

Oracle has been rather busy last few weeks. First, news that the Solaris and SPARC teams from Oracle’s acquisition of Sun Microsystems have reached the end of the road, and the majority of the teams have been laid off. The layoffs started at the start of this year, and the recent round apparently leaves only a small team left.

Last month there was a blog post to The Aquarium suggesting that Oracle would be open for another group or organization to drive stewardship for the Java EE spec. Looking back at past events, it’s no surprise that some significant changes were coming. Things started changing with the layoffs of the majority of the Java evangelists back in September 2015 and the letter assumed to be from one of the evangelists to InfoWorld stating that “… Java has no interest to them anymore”. Oracle’s lack of involvement in the development of Java EE started to gain notice by the other JCP members in minutes of the JCP Executive Committee in May and June 2016 leading to statements in the public minutes such as:

“…concern that Oracle, despite its role as steward of Java, has not made any public statements or explanations for the apparent lack of activity on Java EE”

There was also a formal statement by the JCR Executive Committee directed to Oracle formally voicing their concern with recent lack of JSR activity and involvement by Oracle:

“EC members expressed their serious concerns about the lack of progress on Java EE. They believe that Java EE is critical to the Java ecosystem and to their organizations and customers. They fully accept Oracle’s right to direct its investment where it wishes, but expressed the hope that they and other members of the Java community be permitted to step in and help with the ongoing development of the platform, particularly in areas where Oracle wishes to reduce its investment. They therefore requested a dialog with Oracle about how to make such a transition.”

This was followed in June 2016 by a statement by ‘Oracle spokesman’ Mike Moeller that Oracle were still committed to Java EE and were planning on a proposal to the community a t JavaOne 2016. This proposal turned out to be a ‘refocusing’ of the changes in the Java EE 8 proposal, namely dropping new features and changes that were not aligned with current industry trends (particularly microservices, so the MVC spec and a number of other proposals got dropped from the EE8 JSR).

From last month’s post that Oracle was open to consider another organization to drive future development of Java EE, yesterday it was announced (more here) that the Eclipse Foundation will be the new stewards of Java EE. Given Oracle’s recent lack of involvement, it’s great that they even considered this move, and hopefully the future of EE will be in good hands with the Eclipse Foundation.

If that news was not enough, Mark Reinhold also posted recently that after the slow release schedule of the past few major Java SE releases, they’re considering a twice yearly major release cycle moving forward after the planned release of Java 9 on September 21 (after many delays already). Two major releases a year is a massive change compared to the 3 year current release cycle (between Java 7 to Java 8 and between 8 and the upcoming Java 9 releases). Hopefully this means some good things are going to be coming to Java across the board, SE and EE, in the near future.

June 26, 2013

12 years after legal action to stop Microsoft’s development of their own Java version, they offer hosted Java support

I find this somewhat hard to believe. 12 years ago, legal action by Sun Microsystems against Microsoft halted Microsoft’s development of their own flavor of Java, which was only partially compatible with Sun’s Test Computability Kit (TCK). In order to develop an implementation of Java and compatible JVM, the license requires the developed product to pass the TCK in order to maintain cross platform compatibility of different implementations of Java.

This week Microsoft announced that it has added support to host Oracle Weblogic and Oracle databases on it’s Azure cloud, allowing developers to host Java based solutions on Microsoft’s hosted platform.

How times have changed 🙂

April 19, 2012

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….)