On 8/31/2010 6:52 AM, Fabrizio Giudici wrote:
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On 8/31/10 13:28 , Jess Holle wrote:
What about heavy pressure on Oracle via all possible venues so
that they feel they need to establish a different tone in their
JavaOne keynote?
I don't think Oracle cares much about upsetting a small minority
of the community. If they get the impression that those who are
concerned/upset are either not a small minority or are
sufficiently vocal to upset the rest of the community, then I
believe they'll adjust their approach (as little as they feel they
can get away with, of course).
I think that one possibility is that Oracle doesn't care about
upsetting the whole community, since the community itself is the
minority. You bet that a large corporate such as Oracle has got tools
(market research, etc...) to have some decent figures about who like
and don't like them. Unfortunately, we, the community, don't have any
such tool (we use the blogs to pretend to measure our size, but this
is just bullshit that leads to gross overestimates).
Frankly, I'd accept Kevin's provocation: if you get bored by Ellison's
keynotes, it would be practical to move to another VM ecosystem such
as LLVM (and, of course, forcing yourself not to be bored by Jobs'
keynotes).
Of course Oracle's lawsuit here is really based on the notion that other
VM implementations violate their IP. It really has nothing to do with
Java per se -- but rather with VM technology. Thus they may well pursue
any/all alternative VMs, including .Net's if they have the stomach for
an all out war with Microsoft (which is highly doubtful).
The chilling effect for Java is the message that if you try to do
something other than the way Oracle wants you to -- including paying
Oracle, of course -- they may come after you with patent suits even if
you do a completely cleanroom implementation, don't call it Java (or
J2EE or anything else trademarked by Sun/Oracle), etc. If you believe
software patents make sense, then I guess you'd find nothing wrong with
this. I don't believe software patents make sense -- and believe that
Oracle's willingness to use them in such a destructive fashion has a
chilling effect on the community and on innovation not only in the Java
community but also potentially in parallel communities (i.e. based on
other VM technologies).
--
Jess Holle
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