I'm going to call Occam's Razor on this one. Oracle want licensing fees from Android, pure and simple.
Java (™) is very healthy in the EE space, still present on the desktop (although having JavaFX a year or two earlier would have helped no end), and rapidly becoming irrelevant in mobile. Assuming it isn't too late for Oracle (I think it is) then going after Google is the only play they can make. We currently have four significant operating systems in mobile - iOS, Windows Mobile Blackberry and Android. iOS will never run Java. Windows Mobile (in the shape of 7) appears to be heading down a closed route and it is not at all clear if any existing flavour of Java will be available on day one, or if Microsoft will allow a Java runtime to flourish on its new platform - and that's before we talk about what future Microsoft has in mobile. Blackberry uses Java ME and therefore already licences from Oracle. But it is licensing what appears to be a dead end technology (ME, that is). Android is a big seller, will only get bigger and it is the only platform that runs Java that Oracle don't get a licence fee from (no ™ here). If Oracle want Java (™) to have any presence on (read income stream from) mobile devices in the future then it can only target Android. Its objective plain and simple will be to extract a licence fee per handset and it will be looking to achieve that in one of two ways: get handset manufacturers paying a licence fee for using Java in Android, or force Google/OHA into bundling JavaFX Mobile in as part of Android and charge a fee for that (double benefit there - income plus a large user base for JavaFX). If Oracle can't get influence in the Android space then JavaFX will never make an impact in mobile, but worse, Java (™) will not earn any significant revenue in mobile going forward. the OHA has done such a good job with Android that it's too late for Oracle to 'do a Google'. It can come up with a phone OS that sports Java as its development language but it will be years behind Android. Without some kind of legal action the iOS situation will not change, ever. As it appears that these two operating systems will have the lion's share of mobile devices over the next few years, Oracle are in a tight spot and must go after Android. There is no back-up plan that will get Oracle back in with influence inside ten years because of the head of steam behind both iOS and Android. Sell Java to Google? That's like Red Bull lending their car to Ferrari. You don't give your best business assets to your rival. Possibly, you might consider another settlement approach: Sell Java to a new OHA-style body formed by the members of the JCP if that's the way to achieve the end-game of a licence fee from Android phones I'm sure people can pick holes in the detail of what I have written, but I'm interested in how people feel about the overall business strategy. Will Oracle and Google end up in court? I hope not, and I don't think they will. Ironically I missed this story breaking because I was busy putting my first Android marketplace application together... -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "The Java Posse" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected]. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/javaposse?hl=en.
