So, now it looks like Oracle's new business model for actually making money out of their investment in Sun is to become a patent troll. They seem to be going out of their way to make themselves pariahs in the Open Source world, as hated as SCO. Personally, I was always sceptical of their ability or intention to act well. They are simply not an organization that is geared to operating in this milieu. And there are plenty of people who should be at least a bit scared by this development, as Steven J Vaughan-Nichols points out.
I spent a year or two writing Java, and I get a bit impatient with people who like to rag on it. Their information is often out of date and ill-informed, in my experience. But anyone who now bases a major application, especially one which they sell, on Java would need to be very careful about how they proceed. And that involves a world of trouble and disputation. Surely it would be much simpler for any new project simply to say "OK, we'll use other technology, where there is less risk of running foul of patent lawsuits." That would be my reaction.
Incidentally, this is similar to the reasoning that led me to get involved with Postgres years ago. The company I was working for looked at shipping MySQL as a reference database with their product, and we were not interested in paying for a commercial license. Some people said we could, some said we couldn't. Our take was that we didn't want the hassle. Unless it was beyond dispute, we'd look elsewhere, and the next place we looked, naturally, was Postgres. By the time we decided against using Postgres, because there was then no Windows port, it was too late - I was hooked![:-)]()
I spent a year or two writing Java, and I get a bit impatient with people who like to rag on it. Their information is often out of date and ill-informed, in my experience. But anyone who now bases a major application, especially one which they sell, on Java would need to be very careful about how they proceed. And that involves a world of trouble and disputation. Surely it would be much simpler for any new project simply to say "OK, we'll use other technology, where there is less risk of running foul of patent lawsuits." That would be my reaction.
Incidentally, this is similar to the reasoning that led me to get involved with Postgres years ago. The company I was working for looked at shipping MySQL as a reference database with their product, and we were not interested in paying for a commercial license. Some people said we could, some said we couldn't. Our take was that we didn't want the hassle. Unless it was beyond dispute, we'd look elsewhere, and the next place we looked, naturally, was Postgres. By the time we decided against using Postgres, because there was then no Windows port, it was too late - I was hooked
