Does Oracle's patent suit make any of you feel uneasy? There's a bit of restlessness among Java developers. Microsoft may be a lot of things, but they've left Mono/.NET relatively free.

Larry Ellison takes business personally. It's not just enough for him to see his competitors go away; he wants them to burn alive.

For now, we're just fortunate we're using Ruby for our projects. The irony is that people use Java for its track record stability (not just in performance, but in stable licensing arrangements that Sun always honored). We were considering JRuby so we could deploy a single WAR, but now we're just watching to see how Oracle plays the game.

I think we knew good things wouldn't come of the Oracle merger. But I don't think any of us knew it would be _that_ bad.

Java is the new COBOL and Oracle wants to leverage that for all the enterprisey bullshit. Not a big shock.

The bigger shock was when Oracle bought Sun. Now Java developers worry about the future. Not much of a choice though. It's either Big Blue or Larry Ellison.

The Oracle/Google suit doesn't have much to do with enterprise Java usage. Those J2EE JVMs are licensed, but Google's Dalvik JVM was neither licensed nor fully J2ME compatible.

That nuance is important. People are missing that part and making a much bigger deal of this than it is.

Imagine you created a feature-incompatible/incomplete version of Rails and marketed it as Rails and the only way to develop for your platform. DHH/37Signals would probably come after you any way they could too.

The Oracle/Google suit doesn't have much to do with enterprise Java usage. Those J2EE JVMs are licensed, but Google's Dalvik JVM was neither licensed nor fully J2ME compatible.

You're right that the suit has--at the moment--nothing to do with enterprise but with Dalvik, but I wouldn't put it past Oracle to find a way to screw enterprise users of Java. It's Oracle's modus operandi. If there's a way to screw people, they will. These are the guys that invented the 15% maintenance fee on top of the initial license buy-in for no new features.

We'll see. Java 7 was to be released soon, but people still using Java should be very careful when the terms and SLA are released for Java 7.

And even if this suit has nothing to do with Dalvik, I somehow think Oracle will find a way to screw enterprise. Not that the big enterprise can't afford it or haven't learned from past lessons. Oracle has more lawyers than you have family members by an order of a magnitude. If they want to screw you or just outright make your life miserable, they can, and they will.

Imagine you created a feature-incompatible/incomplete version of Rails and marketed it as Rails and the only way to develop for your platform. DHH/37Signals would probably come after you any way they could too.

Your logic is flawed here. Dalvik doesn't attempt to market itself as Java. It's compatible with much of Java, but it's not a trademark issue.

Rails is OSS, but the trademark is owned by DHH/37S. The difference is Dalvik is a patent issue, not trademark.

From the website:

It is optimized for low memory requirements, and is designed to allow multiple VM instances to run at once, relying on the underlying operating system for process isolation, memory management and threading support. Dalvik is often referred to as a Java Virtual Machine, but this is not strictly accurate, as the bytecode on which it operates is not Java bytecode. Instead, a tool named dx, included in the Android SDK, transforms the Java Class files of Java classes compiled by a regular Java compiler into another class file format (the .dex format).

Unless you're telling me that this is a trademark issue. You're free to do with whatever you want with the Rails source, including forking it to a new branch, as long as your rename it. But Java is encumbered with patents. So explain to me the Rails analogy again?

Dalvik doesn't attempt to pretend to be Java. If you're forking Rails, why wouldn't you rename it? Have you ever heard of an OSS fork that refused to rename itself and wanted to be confused from whence it forked?

Google definitely positions Dalvik as Java, or at least turns a blind eye to others who are. Just look at the recent thread about iPhone vs. Android development where Kelraz listed Java development as a point in favor of Android. Most people think Dalvik Java is "real" Java, and that branding is great for Google even though they didn't license it and Dalvik isn't actually J2ME compliant.

That's what Oracle's suing for; to prevent the dilution of their brand. Keep in mind that Sun sued MS for exactly the same thing around J#. This isn't just an evil Oracle thing.

Part of the Java suit includes copyright. It's not just patent. Basically, Oracle's just throwing everything at them they can. 37s would throw the trademark at you just the same if you tried to copy/steal/dilute their brand too.

<--- Happy .Net developer.

I think this is related.

chromeaix: Analysis of how the impact of Oracle acquisition of Sun has changed the dynamics of the server business http://tinyurl.com/292j4vn #AIX Original Tweet: http://twitter.com/chromeaix/status/21327758508

My concern isn't so much about JAVA as I'm not a developer or programmer. But I can tell you that as an AIX/SAN admin I have been brushing up as much as I can about Oracle fundamentals and basic SQL/DBA stuff. In my own company we have merged the "oracle" group into the tech group and while we don't let DBAs have free reign over the OS, we let sys admins have free reign over the databases. It's necessary to be able to configure the damn things to run on my hardware. :)

I personally sensed this coming a long time as I watched how oracle evolved on the server platform. ASM, RAC, etc all ways to do oracle magic without the OS or SA level. Until the day comes that oracle is no longer allowed to run on other hardware I don't see them competing very well with IBM. Mostly b/c their shit sucks and is too high priced. (personal opinion!)

Fildien, you're on the mark. Oracle's not a nice company to buy software from--coming from the company that invented the 15-20% maintenance fee of your software cost for doing virtually nothing but bug fixes. When Oracle purchased Sun, I think it became immediately obvious that things would change for the worse.

yes, this is why we don't have RAC b/c they want to charge 2mil per CPU for our main clinical database that's running 16 CPUs/32 cores.....we can suffer the 5min downtime to fail over :D

To be fair we pay IBM in the neighborhood of 50k a month for maint. but we have allot of IBM hardware. They're both cash hogs but oracle is retarded when it comes to licenses for those magical products on top of the inflated software maint. costs.