Oracle refuses to accept pro-Google “fair use” verdict in API battle

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2017/02/oracle-refuses-to-accept-pro-google-fair-use-verdict-in-api-battle/

by nkurz • 9 years ago

281 313 9 years ago

Oracle is at that stage where they didn't invent or do anything right in the last 5 years but try to get money from lawsuits.

Thrillington• 9 years ago

Only 5 years? Seems like it's been longer than that

meddlepal4• 9 years ago

From what I've been told by a contact in their database sales team is that there pipeline for on-premise licenses is drying up quickly but their SaaS business is doing well.

derefr2• 9 years ago

That explains a lot about their recent behavior, e.g. dropping Solaris. If everyone is consuming their software over a network, it doesn't matter precisely what it's running on any more (so even if Oracle DBs could scale better on Solaris than on Linux or a BSD, a 1.3x SaaS shared-cluster size costs less than an OS development team.)

prokes• 9 years ago

Just to add a little nuance - the difference is in flow vs stock of customers. Very few existing EBS customers are reimplementing in Cloud because of the time, cost, and loss of customizations. It doesn't make sense.

New customers are being forced into Cloud by the Oracle sales team. The sales reps literally receive no compensation for on-prem (EBS) deals, and they must go through a lengthy approval process just to offer a prospect the on-prem solution. Thus everyone is being guided to Cloud, whether or not it is the right solution for the customer.

sjwright• 9 years ago

pipeline for on-premise licenses

Sorry for being a grammar nazi, but this one is a serious pet peeve. The singular of "premises" isn't "premise", it's "premises".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Premises

Maarten88• 9 years ago

...pipeline for on-premise licenses is drying up quickly but their SaaS business is doing well...

I hear they are desperately pushing new cloud offerings, but they are having lots of problems with customer retention, as their cloud technology is really not ready so they are actually just selling hosted versions of the existing products that lack any cost advantage.

bogomipz2• 9 years ago

This is actually not true. Their cloud offering is doing really well. There's some impressive figures here:

http://realmoney.thestreet.com/articles/09/15/2016/oracles-c...

KirinDave• 9 years ago

A more trickily written article you could not find. Oracle is busting their humps to get major ESC on their clouds but they've missed the chance on some of the really outlandishly big fish.

Time will tell if they manage to met BofA or a similar ultrabig FI and that could be called a success, but short of that all they can do is pay folks to write wrongheaded quarterly analysis and say "gosh isn't this better than Amazon?"

Which is totally absurd. Comically so.

And from the perspective of actually using their tech, you're better off scooping a mug of old compost and dumping it in a sizzling pan of oil and letting the oil spatter burn you. It will be a more enjoyable experience.

empath75• 9 years ago

Growth rate is a nonsense metric. If you're starting from nothing and invest a shitload of money in sales you'll have an amazing growth rate. IBM and Oracle are both way behind azure, google and aws.

revelation• 9 years ago

Just like IBM is the leader in cloud solutions, did you hear? It's smoke and mirrors to make sure that when the next quarter rolls around, they have some growth to show in what the market believes is "the next big thing".

nitwit005• 9 years ago

I'd view their numbers with some doubt, given that there has been a whistle-blower lawsuit related to it: http://www.reuters.com/article/us-oracle-lawsuit-accounting-...

claudiug• 9 years ago

they have graal, sulong, I also cloud is doing fine :)

pikachuisntcool2• 9 years ago

I hope Oracle wins. The sooner Java dies, the better.

grenoire• 9 years ago

Are you that hateful of Java that you are blind to the implications of an Oracle win?

It won't be just Java 'dying.'

pikachuisntcool2• 9 years ago

Our laws governing software are so fundamentally broken already lol. It doesn't matter anymore.

technofiend4• 9 years ago

Let's assume Oracle wins on appeal... What's next? Is everyone suddenly writing .Net code? Or are we left to find languages with lapsed copyrights? Fortran IV and Snobol are the new hotness! Everyone in to the pool!

meddlepal4• 9 years ago

So edgy.

sddfd• 9 years ago

I still don't understand why Google did not buy Sun Microsystems. They hired a lot of the staff anyway, and could have avoided the lawsuit.

uiri• 9 years ago

Hiring the staff and handling the lawsuit - Google has their own in-house law firm anyways - has likely worked out to be cheaper for them than buying Sun Microsystems would have been.

meddlepal4• 9 years ago

It's $7.4 billion they didn't need to spend. The legal fees are a fraction of that.

snarfy• 9 years ago

The entire software industry should be boycotting Oracle over this case. If they win it will ruin software development in the US.

TheRealDunkirk• 9 years ago

Except that Oracle has become so successful because they've captured the largest customer(s) of all: the US federal government.

gohbgl• 9 years ago

Well isn't that a coincidence. Extracting money through state granted limited monopoly rights and lobbying for big government contracts at the same time. Oracle is really living the crony capitalist dream.

ddebernardy2• 9 years ago

One coyld also argue the opposite: if Oracle wins, lawyers will start burning the software industry to the ground to an extent such that US lawmakers will be forced to reform copyright and patent laws.

koolba2• 9 years ago

Is there anyone that's not on Oracle's payroll that sides with them on this case?

paulddraper2• 9 years ago

Microsoft probably wouldn't mind Oracle winning.

breakingcups• 9 years ago

Someone made a great point about the WSL (Linux) layer in Windows in this thread.

jpkeisala• 9 years ago

They would be the real winners since it would slap both Google and Oracle.

ktRolster6• 9 years ago

You aren't going to like the answer to that question, but the appeals court seems to favor Oracle in this case.

They specifically said that Oracle had a strong position, but that they were required to give Google a chance to present full evidence on the fair use issue.

ddebernardy2• 9 years ago

I'm suspicious that Oracle winning would be such a bad thing in the long term. Lawyers would go nuts and start hurting IT companies, for sure. But the bleeding of angry voters who lost their jobs or their millions would then hopefully convince US lawmakers to reform their country's inane IP and patent laws.

golfer• 9 years ago

Is Oracle the biggest troll in Silicon Valley right now? Can't think of anyone else that would claim the title. Maybe Theranos.

ultrahate• 9 years ago

At least Oracle has actual products though. I don't wanna stick up for Oracle by any means, but comparing them with theranos just ain't right.

koolba2• 9 years ago

Is Oracle the biggest troll in Silicon Valley right now? Can't think of anyone else that would claim the title. Maybe Theranos.

I'm not aware of Theranos being a troll. Fraudster for sure, but troll has a different meaning.

ryanobjc• 9 years ago

Who has better connections with Trump?

Sadly to say, that is not an irrelevant fact anymore. Trump is clearly the kind of president that would reach in to legal rulings he's paid not to like.

lazugod• 9 years ago

Why would he care about two companies he doesn't own? I don't think this is a big concern.

mwfunk• 9 years ago

Oracle's CEO is on his transition team, and Oracle is one of the few big tech companies to not publicly support the legal challenge to the travel ban.

GFK_of_xmaspast• 9 years ago

Oracle does:

"Oracle's clout will come in part from the presence of its CEO, Safra Catz, who did not join the pro-Hillary Clinton chorus of other Silicon Valley honchos, and who is now working on Trump's transition team. " (http://fortune.com/2017/01/17/oracle-trump/)

paulddraper2• 9 years ago

What specifically could he do?

exabrial• 9 years ago

Another thought too: Oracle kicking the hornet's nest on this may end up being a "good thing". Their verdict was dubious at best, they might get overturned and lose even more ground and $.

Spivak10• 9 years ago

Okay, either I'm crazy or everyone else is. Assuming the court isn't trying to set a new precedent with regards to software it seems like Oracle should have easily won this case. There is an argument to be made that APIs shouldn't be copyrightable but surely it's not fair use -- Google's use of Java doesn't even come close to meeting the criteria.

technofiend4• 9 years ago

This is tricky because if you declare any API no matter how trivial copyrightable then the first guy to copyright a function to compute sqrt, tan, atan, etc wins. And if you can't copyright trivial interfaces then the question becomes where the line is drawn.

There's far more at stake than Oracle trying to squeeze money out of Google.

seibelj2• 9 years ago

Someone should write a program that generates all possible function names and argument types and declares them copyrighted, then release them all to the public.

Spivak10• 9 years ago

I completely agree, but I don't really know what to do about it. Surely a document describing a useful software interface (GUI, CLI, API) is a creative work and takes effort to produce. Unless we just agree that it's a necessary exception for the purposes of interoperbility I'm not sure how I would argue that it shouldn't fall under copyright protection.

saghm• 9 years ago

After the original trial verdict was overturned by the appeals court, I joked about copyrighting every single signature I could think of for print functions so that I could claim royalties from virtually every program in existent.

seibelj2• 9 years ago

I understand the logic of saying that the API itself is a creative work and should be copyrighted. Creating a solid, logical API structure isn't simple.

But I believe the API signature itself (function name, argument types, return type) should not be copyrightable, in the interests of the industry as a whole. Google didn't steal the implementation, they just reused the same function signatures to make their drop-in replacement of the JVM work with existing software.

If developers can't even have the API signature without being sued, you are seriously hurting competition. It's just reality.

Spivak10• 9 years ago

But, and I think this is really the main point, Google didn't just use the API signatures they used the API documentation to preserve the semantic meaning of those signatures which are necessary to make the API actually useful.

I think Google could argue very successfully that literally just the API signatures should fall under fair use but that's not really what this is about.

ak4g• 9 years ago

Why wouldn't it be fair use? What exactly is your understanding of what the criteria are?

Spivak10• 9 years ago

* Purpose of the use -- Gogole's use wasn't transformative, in fact it was explicitly the opposite.

* Nature of the use -- Google could try to argue that their use was for the public benefit, but since the Android platform exists for business interests it probably shouldn't qualify.

* Amount and Substantiality -- Google basically took it all. There's no case here. They took not just the signatures but their semantic meaning (i.e. the thing that makes an API useful) as well. There's really not much else to an API design document.

* Effect on the market -- This one should be obvious. This directly hurts Oracle. Their implementation diminishes the market for the original. At least that's what their lawyer claims.

Google concedes it put that code to the same use in the competing Android platform, for what this Court already has deemed "entirely commercial" purposes. And Google reaped billions of dollars while leaving Oracle's Java business in tatters.

AsyncAwait6• 9 years ago

Google was found in violation of copying some source code if I am not mistaken, but this is about whether the concept of an API itself should be copyrightable, (how many ways can you write an API for a function that adds two integers together?) and that's the big problem here. If handled badly, it can literally kill the software industry.

What I don't get is Oracle not realizing that this could kill their SQL business if IBM decides to do some suing.

Spivak10• 9 years ago

I mean the courts aren't exactly robotic in this sense. It has to be a creative work, for the same reason you couldn't try to copyright a trivial sentence you wouldn't get copyright protection on a method description that adds two numbers. Also, it's the whole work that's copyrighted, not its individual parts. It's not that Google just borrowed a few method signatures, it's that they took all of them along with their relationships and meanings.

bitmapbrother4• 9 years ago

That source code was a 7 line range check method that was developed by the same developer that coded it for Sun (Joshua Bloch)

helthanatos• 9 years ago

Oracle is in no way correct. Putting ridiculous barriers on software MADE FOR making software is ludicrous. Google is not making money because of the APIs, they simply used them because they already existed. Copyright is in a sorry state as it is. This IP nonsense is nonsense.

jimnotgym5• 9 years ago

Courts in a common law jurisdiction (like the UK and US) don't have to try to set a precedent, each ruling tends to set a precedent. That is what makes common law common, the same law is applied everywhere, so any new ruling would be applied everywhere. This is exactly why judges avoid making rulings that would set a new precedent! I hope I haven't oversimplified a complicated subject!

technofiend4• 9 years ago

Although Oracle denied they bought Sun just to sue Google you have to wonder since they are claiming "billions" in damages and only paid $7.4 billion after IBM dropped their $7.0 billion bid.

This purchase was such a seminal moment for the industry you have to wonder what an alternative history would look like if say IBM or Google made the purchase not to mention some dark horses like Amazon or Red hat.

snarf21• 9 years ago

They absolutely bought Sun just to sue. I used to know someone personally involved on the case. Oracle is a horrible company.

To be fair, Google's "don't be evil" is also a bunch of crap. They've done their fair share of shady and exploitive things.

apathy• 9 years ago

Google wasn't evil, at least not before the IPO (which is when I worked there). People took the slogan seriously and based decisions on it. I don't know what happened.

teen• 9 years ago

like what?

technofiend4• 9 years ago

I meant dark horse only in the sense of unlikely winner. Nothing derogatory was meant by my statement.

moomin2• 9 years ago

Let's slap a great big IANAL on this before I start:

The fair use decision was wrong. It relied on a fundamental misunderstanding of the term transformative where the use of the code was considered rather than merely the implementation. So Oracle has a huge case here.

Moreover, practically it doesn't matter. Even if fair use is established in this case, the door has been left wide open to hordes of API copyright trolls. If you thought patent trolls were bad, you ain't seen nothing yet.

If you care about the economy, the only sensible outcome would be that API surfaces aren't subject to copyright. Sadly the horse has bolted a long time ago.

Retric2• 9 years ago

There is a long history of the API around chips not being copywritable. EX: The IBM clones needed 1 chip that at the time was not off the shelf. So, people figured out what it did then implemented that.

Method signatures would appear to represent the same situation because the chip needs to respond correctly not just respond to those inputs.

iopq2• 9 years ago

If implementing an interface is against copyright, then every Java program is infringing on Oracle's copyright.

jolux10• 9 years ago

http://www.fosspatents.com/2016/05/googles-fair-use-defense-...

moomin2• 9 years ago

This is a very good point. Oracle (or any other platform owner) may not be suing you for license violations now, but give it time...

ktRolster6• 9 years ago

No because the Java license lets you do that.

magicalist3• 9 years ago

Even if fair use is established in this case, the door has been left wide open to hordes of API copyright trolls

FYI, this is not actually the case; this case established no precedent for copyrightable APIs.

Because of the history of this case (it originally involved patents as well), it was appealed to the Federal Circuit, which doesn't normally handle copyright cases.

This was a gift for Oracle since the Federal Circuit loves expanding IP rights, but also helpful to the rest of us because the Federal Circuit has no jurisdiction over copyright cases. Future copyright cases will go up through whatever circuit you're in, which will not have to treat the Federal Circuit's ruling as precedent.

WildUtah3• 9 years ago

Anyone can make any case appealable to the Federal Circuit just by throwing in any claim arising under the patent laws. You can add an obviously bogus and unrelated patent claim in initial filings and then drop it in pre-trial and still guarantee biased CAFC jurisdiction.

You could probably force a random criminal trial into the CAFC with a little creativity. It's really easy to go to CAFC if you want to. And if you're abusing intellectual property law, you really want to because they're corrupt like a Venezuelan payday loan used car dealer.

danjoc• 9 years ago

How does OpenJDK stay out of violation if Oracle wins? Doesn't OpenJDK basically copy the API as well?

alcari• 9 years ago

OpenJDK was created by Sun.

tlogan2• 9 years ago

Code for OpenJDK can run unmodified on Oracle Java.

Code for Android Apps contain unrelated public APIs so cannot run on Oracle Java.

wtallis2• 9 years ago

What does copyright law care about software compatibility?

punctilio2• 9 years ago

Oracle owns copyright on OpenJDK, so it can't 'violate'.

Maybe more precisely, if you regard the API in question as copyrightable, Oracle has clearly licensed it under GPLv2 plus the Classpath Exception.

Also, the issue of copyrightability of the Java SE API has already been definitively decided in this case, in Oracle's favor.

faragon• 9 years ago

Oracle should stop that, in my opinion. That attitude could kill Java in the long term.

CydeWeys• 9 years ago

One wonders how much the taint of Java factored into the decision to invent Go.

AsyncAwait6• 9 years ago

Not much actually, the developers of Go mainly wanted shorter compile times than C++ offered.

twblalock• 9 years ago

My impression is that the Go team had two targets, both based on languages in common use at Google: C++ programmers, and programmers using languages like Python who wanted more type safety but didn't want to use a language with a massive ecosystem.

geodel• 9 years ago

There is nothing on GUI side in Go and it does not seem to be priority of core team.

niftich• 9 years ago

I wish intent and end result counted more strongly. Andoid's compatibility isn't transitive: once code goes through the Android build pipeline to produce an Android Application it cannot be meaningfully used in the context of Oracle Java; it's a one-way transformation to remain "talent-compatible" with a large pool of Java developers and reuse the base of Java libraries.

Projects like OpenJDK and WINE are efforts to provide an alternate execution environment for code that is mutually beneficial to the ecosystem, although perhaps not the wallets of the original owner. A commercial venture ought to qualify here if the intent is to compete on equal footing -- code targeting OpenJDK can run unmodified on Oracle Java, code targeting WINE can run unmodified on Win32, thereby not limiting the original creator's rights.

However, Android Apps contain unrelated public APIs as part of the exported code, and a full packaged Android App cannot meaningfully run on Oracle JDK, despite portions of the standard library looking and behaving alike. This fragments the ecosystem and essentially allows Android to benefit from the works of the Java rightholders without making those contributions equally as useful to Oracle Java itself.

orangecat• 9 years ago

once code goes through the Android build pipeline to produce an Android Application it cannot be meaningfully used in the context of Oracle Java

Android apps typically have an MVC-like structure where the UI uses Android-specific APIs, but the model is straight Java. As an example, I created an Android game and later decided that I wanted to make a level editor as a desktop Java application. I was able to reuse the model code in Oracle's JDK with no changes, even though I didn't have that use in mind when I originally wrote it.

a full packaged Android App cannot meaningfully run on Oracle JDK

That's true of any platform-specific Java API.

saurik2• 9 years ago

Right: and if you remember, the entire concept of a "platform-specific Java API" is what was at stake when Microsoft lost this very similar lawsuit when Sun sued them over J++. Either what Google is doing is horrible or what Microsoft did shouldn't have been a problem :/.

AnthonyMouse• 9 years ago

Except that all of the Android code is open source and you could port its runtime or API to any platform you like.

The argument you're making is that Oracle is the only party who should be able to extend Java, despite their also releasing it under an open source license. Which, if they hadn't done, no one would have used it to begin with -- as seems to be the direction things are headed given their recent behavior.

Oletros8• 9 years ago

This fragments the ecosystem and essentially allows Android to benefit from the works of the Java rightholders without making those contributions equally as useful to Oracle Java itself.

Java SE, Java EE and JavaME are incompatible. Java was already fragmented by their creators

sangnoir3• 9 years ago

Java SE, Java EE and JavaME are incompatible.

Hell, JavaME wasn't compatible with JavaME, depending on which vendor versions you were comparing. Sony Ericsson had classes totally different from Samsung or Nokia. Add CLDC versions and varying CPU and memory capabilities to that toxic hellstew to effectively kill the WORA dream.

Sun/Oracle can't blame Google for their abysmal mobile strategy.

Zigurd3• 9 years ago

Re "This fragments the ecosystem and essentially allows Android to benefit from the works of the Java rightholders without making those contributions equally as useful"

Not based on licensing. There is no licensing barrier to making an runtime with the same semantics as ART or Dalvik that runs Java bytecode and is fully compatible with Oracle Java.

Also not by intent. Dalvik bytecode was designed for running without a JIT compiler in a battery powered device - a very specialized and critical design goal.

Oracle is the party that's playing games with standards and licensing, intentionally keeping openness and licensing requirements opaque and intentionally vague. I know this firsthand.

rbjorklin• 9 years ago

Curious to hear your reasons for calling Red Hat a dark horse. (Which I presume is some kind of slur/holds a derogatory meaning)

bradyd• 9 years ago

It's actually not derogatory: "A dark horse is a little-known person or thing that emerges to prominence, especially in a competition of some sort, or a contestant that seems unlikely to succeed."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_horse

champlinRyan• 9 years ago

Dark horse in this context means other companies unlikely to actually buy it, or win the bidding war. Its not any sort of slur that I'm aware of.

halestock• 9 years ago

Per wikipedia: "A dark horse is a little-known person or thing that emerges to prominence, especially in a competition of some sort, or a contestant that seems unlikely to succeed."

In this case I would imagine it's because Red Hat is pretty tiny compared to IBM/Google/Oracle and could not put up a comparable amount of money for the purchase.

ben_jones• 9 years ago

Dark Horse is the horse in the race nobody thinks has a chance of winning, but comes out near the front in the final seconds (surprising everybody). You could've just Googled it.

IgneousPneuma• 9 years ago

dark horse just means not a main favored candidate

mindcrime• 9 years ago

"Dark horse" isn't a slur or pejorative in general. It's roughly equivalent to "long shot" or "underdog" or something like that.

dizzystar• 9 years ago

my goodness, this is probably not a native English speaker, or perhaps never heard the expression before... why be so harsh?

wtbob• 9 years ago

Not understanding is fine: assuming that something one doesn't understand must be a slur is not fine.

dang• 9 years ago

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13624340 and marked it off-topic.

throwaway30121• 9 years ago

Oracle is such a shit company. There are still some great hackers there but Larry Ellison is an asshole, and I don't envy anyone who has to work for him even indirectly. "Left Oracle's Java business in tatters" eh? Where was their mobile OS? Their Dalvik?

The wounds to Java have all been self-inflicted. If they succeed in copyrighting the API then where does this leave OpenJDK? Operating at the mercy of Larry fucking Ellison, which means not at all.

I've got 17 years of Java experience under my belt, but frankly with Docker + Kubernetes for deployment and new system languages like Rust and Go I'm thinking it's time to jump ship. Or even to C# since apparently MS got the memo on Open Source (not to mention the need for integrated platform modularization - no more Maven hell! Yay!).

ghuntley• 9 years ago

fsharp |> welcomes all alienated Java veterans and newbies with open arms!

ed_blackburn2• 9 years ago

If you don't like maven, you're going to need a padded cell when you move to nuget.

Gonzih• 9 years ago

Is it still painful to do F-Sharp on Linux?

ledgerdev• 9 years ago

Any good walk throughs for fsharp on coreclr with vscode?

blub• 9 years ago

Maybe he is an asshole, but at least Larry Ellison didn't build a company to spy on half the planet like Page & Brin.

nine_k• 9 years ago

He failed to make half the world use his company's products, among other things.

BTW I'd appreciate if you gave an example of a highly successful and ethically impeccable company.

toyg2• 9 years ago

Ha, pretty ironic statement, considering the CIA was Oracle's first real customer: http://www.businessinsider.com/the-cia-made-larry-ellison-a-...

EDIT: downvoted for pointing out facts...?

mschuster91• 9 years ago

Maybe he is an asshole, but at least Larry Ellison didn't build a company to spy on half the planet like Page & Brin.

The toolbars and other crap which the JRE installer / autoupdater tries to sneak on to unwitting users' systems ARE spyware.

gribbly• 9 years ago

Or even to C# since apparently MS got the memo on Open Source

Actually Microsoft was with Oracle on the whole 'API's should be copyrightable' and lobbied on their behalf during the case.

Microsoft claimed that: "If Google's position that APIs can't be copyrighted stands, it will "destabilize" the entire software industry"

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2013/02/microsoft-forese...

curt15• 9 years ago

One wonders where they stand now that they've reimplemented the Linux kernel APIs in Windows 10.

jyrkesh• 9 years ago

I'd imagine that was a Ballmer-era policy. I would be interested to see if there's anything like that coming out of Nadella's Microsoft (keeping in mind that Nadella's Microsoft hired the guy behind Mono).

userbinator• 9 years ago

They mean "destablilize" as in "the fat pigs at the top will lose power", which is incidentally what everyone else wants.

tzs• 9 years ago

It's more subtle than that. The way United States copyright law is structured is that it tends to have simple, broad rules for what is subject to copyright, and then has several exceptions that limit the copyright owner's exclusive rights.

The tendency is to put the complexity and special cases in those exceptions and to keep the basic rules for what is subject to copyright simple.

Under current law and current Supreme Court precedent, for written works (including computer programs) that standard is essentially that if it is original and it has some creativity it is subject to copyright. The level of required creativity is very low. I believe the Supreme Court used the phrase "modicum of creativity" or something similar.

Microsoft's argument was that APIs can qualify under these simple, broad rules as interpreted by current precedent, and so the district court went too far in saying that APIs cannot be subject to copyright.

They did not argue that this means that Oracle should be able to prevent Google's copying. They believed that one or more of the exceptions (fair use, the merger doctrine, and some others they mention in their brief) could apply.

Their argument on destabilizing the software industry didn't have anything to do with APIs specifically. Essentially it was that the reasons the district court used to exclude the APIs from being copyrightable would likely apply to much more, calling in question a large part of the idea of copyright for computer programs. That would undermine pretty much all software licensing, both proprietary and open source.

It's worth reading their brief, as I've done some summarizing and simplifying that probably distorts some of the arguments. The Ars article you cited links to it.

panarky• 9 years ago

Oracle is such a shit company

Oracle is a parasite, milking the innovations of years ago through customer lock-in and aggressive litigation.

They are a black hole in the tech ecosystem, extracting hundreds of billions of value for themselves, profiting from open source while contributing very little back to the community.

If they win this lawsuit it will be a dark day for innovation and a big loss for shared knowledge and progress.

bitmapbrother4• 9 years ago

The sequence, structure and organization of those method signatures, in those 37 Java packages, were all GPL'd in the OpenJDK in 2007 by Sun. Regardless of whether API's can be copyrighted or not, Google had every right to use the code Sun GPL'd.

Oletros8• 9 years ago

Google didn't use OpenJDK, they used Apache Harmony implementation

mjw10073• 9 years ago

That's true, but the availability of OpenJDK (which, after all, Google have now switched to) weakens Oracle's argument on the "Effect on the market" factor.

anigbrowl• 9 years ago

This is turning into the Bleak House of copyright cases.

matt_wulfeck• 9 years ago

I'm really looking forward to the next 5 or 6 years, when all of the software patents created in the 90s and 2000's expire. It can't come soon enough.

glenneroo• 9 years ago

Or wait until some conglomerate lobbies hard enough to make software patents last as long as the copyright on Micky Mouse.

edraferi• 9 years ago

Oh dear God please no

binarymax• 9 years ago

If only this had to do with patents. Oracle is claiming breach of copyright - which lasts over a hundred years.

DannyBee• 9 years ago

They originally claimed patents too, which is why this keeps going to the federal circuit instead of the 9th, who would have ended this silliness

diebir• 9 years ago

Oracle is set to repeat the trajectory of SCO. Their primary product (the Oracle DB engine) is being displaced by the NoSQL and things like Postgres. The "next generation" of developers equals SQL engines with "old and bad", and when forced, it ends up with Postgres anyway.

Oracle used to survive in significant part by the support of the "database administrators" class. This layer of support is also becoming thinner and older.

There's essentially no way forward for Oracle. They can use hostage tactics to squeeze money out of exiting customers for a few more years, but otherwise they are irrelevant in the tech landscape.

Except for Java, that is. The current tech is powered by Linux and there isn't really anything as big as Java on Linux. Python has been pretty significant and Go is making inroads, but the default is all Java. It is going to be interesting to watch how this will play out.

gaius• 9 years ago

This layer of support is also becoming thinner and older.

It's not about age(ism) it's that Oracle stabbed them in the back by pushing cloud over on-prem where these guys (and gals) were employed. Now Oracle's biggest supporters are re-skilling to Postgres et al and stopped recommending Oracle to their organisations...

UseStrict• 9 years ago

Agreed, we were stuck using Oracle at my job and it's an pain to maintain. Their cloud solutions are awful and on-premises suffered greatly. Their database engine might be solid, but everything around it was terrible. Things like PL/SQL being an unruly mess, even things like auto-incrementing columns were missing until the most recent release (12c R1). Coupled with insane licensing (arbitrarily changing the core factor for licensing) and auditing (soft limits, lots of hand-waving). It serves them right that they'd be losing out to Postgres.

tluyben2• 9 years ago

This is what is important to note; Oracle screwed their consulting partners as much as they could by pulling support and 'dev' in-house and simply taking over contracts of big clients. My previous company was hurt quite a lot when Oracle ate BEA. I still talk to clients from back then who miss our support and products as now Oracle is bleeding them dry providing crap. But it seemed like a good idea at the time I guess.

pjmlp6• 9 years ago

Maybe for startups, on the enterprise space I am yet to see any customer move away from Oracle, SQL Server, DB2 and similar.

BinaryIdiot3• 9 years ago

When I worked government contracting they had broad goals handed down which they must work toward without it being an explicit requirement. One of these goals? Get on top of an open source only stack for security, cost and future interoperability between other groups.

I worked on several projects where they were originally using Oracle or MarkLogic and we transitioned them to Postgres or various other, open source tech.

If the slow moving government is moving various projects away from Oracle, I would be shocked if some businesses weren't doing so as well. Now I don't know if moving away from proprietary is a trend or the more frequent than moving to them.

jimnotgym5• 9 years ago

SAP have their own tech in HANNA now of course

Edit: SAP have a DB called HANA, not HANNA as I incorrectly typed

diminoten• 9 years ago

You simply can't find Postgres DBAs in VA, whereas you can't swing a cat and not hit an Oracle DBA with 10+ years of experience.

jakewins• 9 years ago

Speaking as someone with good insight in enterprise NoSQL sales - vast majority of revenue is coming from Fortune 500s shifting off oracle systems.

Oracle customers have been very easy targets - solve the technical problem, and then give them sales people that care about their success and support people driven to solve any hurdles. I've been on the phone with ex-oracle DBAs crying from happiness, trying to explain how working with a support team that's genuinely there to help them get their job done has changed their professional lives. Those people become lifetime advocates and friends, making up a foundation that will keep the current NoSQL winners healthy businesses for a generation.

X86BSD• 9 years ago

Search YouTube, for "Yandex oracle to PostgreSQL". You would be shocked at how the enterprise space is just sick to death of oracle and once they actually TRY moving off it to PG how much insanely easier, cheaper, and better performance it is for most workloads that people thought they HAD to have oracle for.

mulmen2• 9 years ago

You should look harder. If you have Oracle experience then brush up on Postgres and cash in because specialization in just that specific migration can probably carry you into retirement.

bdcravens2• 9 years ago

Their primary product (the Oracle DB engine) is being displaced by the NoSQL and things like Postgres.

Worth noting they own MySQL (via Sun acquisition)

metachris• 9 years ago

The developers moved to MariaDB, which is what everyone uses nowadays anyway rather than MySQL.

tlogan2• 9 years ago

The problem is the following: problems that Oracle products are solving are very hard.

On other hand, our SV startup culture is all about making some quick websites and get rich schemes.

So the conclusion is: Oracle is here to stay.

sb82442• 9 years ago

What hard problems are they solving that can't be solved with OSS today (tech problems)?

I've heard things about their business apps division (business problems) and I can't say I particularly believe in their future there versus smaller focused companies.

StreamBright3• 9 years ago

It is so hard that a handful of opensource projects and 1x other companies solved it successfully (talking about the DB) and they bought most of the other tech instead of developing in-house. I am not sure which hard problem they are trying to solve but I am pretty sure that most of their offerings are overpriced. Oracle is here to stay as much as any other dinosaur from the past. They might be able to pivot to the cloud era (not too successfully yet) or they revenue is slowly going to decrease together with their significance.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oracle_Corporation

yomly• 9 years ago

Don't forget Amazon Aurora, and Redshift. With the number of big name customers AWS, these products are the most scary to direct enterprise Oracle DB. Though the smaller and new tech giants of tomorrow will probably be running your Postgres and MySQLs as you mention

ehsankia• 9 years ago

Basically, instead of innovating, or as the hip kids nowadays say, "pivoting", they just want to make easy money with stupid copyright claims and harmful tactics.

I find this strategy extremely toxic and malicious. Google may do a lot of stupid things, and people often make fun of their "don't be evil" motto, but let's be honest, the shit Oracle keeps pulling here over and over is the real definition of evil.

It's purely for profit and doesn't help in anyway to advance technology or humankind.

tempodox• 9 years ago

Microsoft's move to build their own version of Java with C# proved rather smart in that light.

bbanyc• 9 years ago

I wouldn't count Oracle out just yet. They're still much bigger than SCO or its predecessors ever were. They're also under the same management that built the company up from nothing, whereas SCO was a new management team that took over Caldera and was trying to pivot them to the product they'd just bought from the former Santa Cruz Operation, had no idea what they were doing, and eventually settled on litigation as a business model.

(SCO, amazingly, is still continuing its litigation, despite having no products, employees, or assets remaining. Oral arguments on probably-the-last-appeal are March 22 in Denver.)

coolgeek• 9 years ago

The "next generation" of developers equals SQL engines with "old and bad"

I think that what you mean is:

  - they don't understand the relational model
  - they don't understand the tradeoffs of ACID vs BASE
  - they never bothered to actually learn SQL
  - they *think* that they have "big data"

Don't get me wrong - there are compelling use cases for, and decent products for, every class of non-relational database.

But there's nothing out there that can handle the general use case like an RDBMS.

Anybody who doesn't understand that isn't qualified to be making organization-wide decisions.

WallWextra• 9 years ago

They don't have to be right, they just have to exist in sufficient numbers.

secstate• 9 years ago

PostgresQL is an RDBMS and has increasingly been demonstrated as able to hold it's own against closed source rivals.

I think the OPs tossing NOSQL in there was poor form, and I think "SQL engines" could be replaced with DBAs. The world still needs RDBMS and we desperately need people who understand them from an engineering perspective.

But as an average app developer, I can scale my product to serve hundreds of thousands of people with really shitty DB architecture by simply throwing RAM at Postgres. That means Oracle corporate promises and hoards of query-optimizing DBAs are not the default for most fast (and even some moderately fast) moving startups anymore.

nikanj• 9 years ago

Most of these concepts are introduced only in the second year of a CS degree or later. Everyone knows that the truly gifted rockstar ninja founders drop out by christmas time first year.

pinpelipon3• 9 years ago

To be fair, most of the developers raving about ACID I have met have had trouble naming other valid use cases requiring full ACID besides the "transferring money from an account to other" that nearly every course and school uses. The thing is, most of the applications just don't need that kind of guarantees, if they can at least detect (when using BASE) when something went wrong.

daniel_iversen• 9 years ago

You may not like Oracle, but I bet they'll be around, thriving for decades.. Sure the Oracle DB is being replaced somewhat by other technologies and a shifting market to SaaS, but they are transforming the company rapidly and acquiring a very impressive and diverse portfolio of companies and starting to make large dents in the SaaS market: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_acquisitions_by_Oracle

Spooky232• 9 years ago

No way. Oracle owns enterprise ERP.

Every public company needs to run Oracle/Peoplesoft or SAP.

nl• 9 years ago

Oracle has a perfectly good business model which doesn't rely on OracleDB at all: they buy vertical enterprise software companies and then milk their customers.

Worked for Sun, MySQL, Sieble, Peoplesoft, etc.

StreamBright3• 9 years ago

> Their primary product (the Oracle DB engine) is being displaced by the NoSQL and things like Postgres.

I am not sure about the NoSQL part. I see it as more and more companies providing data access to different most-definitely-SQL databases other than Oracle. Postgres even has a migration page: https://wiki.postgresql.org/wiki/Oracle_to_Postgres_Conversi...

alecco• 9 years ago

I like seeing this sociopathic company circling the drain

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2016/06/oracl...

essentially stopping development work on anything that is not directly tied to revenue generation

F_J_H• 9 years ago

All of the largest corporations in the world run on financial or ERP systems such as SAP, Oracle financials, Microsoft Dynamics etc., which sit on top of relational databases.

While in the SV start-up world it may seem like NoSQL is taking over, the Enterprise database market is massive, and replacing the relational databases behind corporate ERP systems with NoSQL based solutions, (to the extent that is even possible/wise), will be a long time coming.

Oracle has a giant footprint in a huge number of organizations across multiple industries. Love them or hate them, (and right now there is good reason to hate then), they are not going away anytime soon, and calling them "irrelevant in the tech landscape" seems premature/myopic given their massive install base and influence in the corporate/enterprise IT space.

cosatelo• 9 years ago

I really hope they win just because I hate using java for android development. Maybe if they win we'll swift will become the native language.

AsyncAwait6• 9 years ago

Agreed, but I do find Kotlin[1] to be a good compromise in the meantime.

1 - https://kotlinlang.org

ptrptr• 9 years ago

I hope google just abandons java altogether if this is gonna continue.

Jean-Philipe• 9 years ago

It might put off not just Google, but also other companies using Java.

quantumhobbit• 9 years ago

And I sort hope it does.

BinaryIdiot3• 9 years ago

While that could be a great direction I'm not so sure about its implementation. You'd have to create a new set of APIs accessible to another language to work with Android and then convince people to move codebases that have existed for years at this point to a new language.

Granted they can work to make bridges, support both, etc but if the ultimate goal is to transition it's going to take a very, very, very long time.

But I'd love to see what they would come up with for this hypothetical transition :)

on_and_off• 9 years ago

I suspect that they are preparing such a jump, at least as a trump card for Android.

There are only a few details about this, but some googlers are working on Fuchsia, a new OS for constrained devices, with apps written with Flutter.

Flutter can also be used to write Android apps by embedding its own runtime in the apps. In both cases, apps are written in Dart.

This would be a huge transition though ... it means rewriting the apps from scratch in another language with a completely different tooling.

gime_tree_fiddy• 9 years ago

Maybe, this is a little bit off-topic.

But anyone, who tried to use JetBrains IDEs on Ubuntu, might have faced the problem uglier font rendering with OpenJDK and the fix to it is to use the JDK from Oracle.

I thought the different with OpenJDK was largely about the licensing. Anybody with some insight on it ?

pjmlp6• 9 years ago

The closed source JDK has quite a few components that aren't the same as the OpenJDK.

For example OpenJDK 9 will get a new Java 2D render, due to the differences between the two that were in use http://openjdk.java.net/jeps/265

RandyRanderson• 9 years ago

Oracle is starting to remind me a lot of SCO:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SCO/Linux_controversies

That hasn't worked out well for them.

IMO, successful technology companies do not correlate with the value dollarsSpentOnLitigation/overallRevenue.

I think selling ORCL and buying QQQ will be a profitable trade in the next 5 or so years.

shmerl• 9 years ago

Some just never learn. Oracle is a massive troll.

leotravis10• 9 years ago

Just as I thought this is over, Oracle just threw another curveball. I feel this will be upheld but never know with these courts.

iamnotlarry• 9 years ago

I got a sales call from Oracle out of the blue a few weeks ago. I have no idea what brought my company to their attention.

I explained to the sales person that I am an Oracle-certified DBA with years of experience managing Oracle servers. I then told him there was absolutely no chance I would ever recommend switching to Oracle. In answer to his questions, I explained that I could not trust Oracle. I don't mean Oracle the RDBMS, I mean Oracle the company. He should be able to understand the need to trust your RDBMS. It would be crazy to use RDBMS software with you data if you didn't trust it. I think it would be crazy to trust a developer with your RDBMS if you don't trust the developer.

I don't want to make sure I have the right lawyers and all my legal ducks in a row to battle Oracle for the heart and sole of my company (what company doesn't have data at its core these days?). I want to solve problems and create great things. I want partners in that effort who I trust. I don't trust Oracle. They do not want what is best for me. I don't want to end up as roadkill on there quest to be more profitable. I'd rather work with those who think that my success is their success.

sanatgersappa• 9 years ago

Fuchsia can't some soon enough.

Oracle refuses to accept pro-Google “fair use” verdict in API battle

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