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Comment by iwwr | Hacker News Reader

If anything, Google's desire to reinvent the world has held them back here. They could have just forked OpenJDK and made their lives easier, in retrospect. Into this went their irrational fear of GPL (describing it as 'viral' or 'infectious').

The fact remains that not even Google can reinvent the world in their image. Building a whole new language at the same time as a legacy-prone ecosystem requires too many moving pieces to fit together quickly. They picked some middle ground, java allowed them to tap into the large java talent pool (then and now). Reinventing the guts allowed their ambitious engineers to show off, which they did, but maybe not as effectively as if they'd built on top of the work of others.

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OpenJDK was released around the same time Android was announced as imminent, and only a little before Android was released. Google could not have forked OpenJDK for Android at launch without doing a bunch of rework and delaying the launch, because the work they did getting Android ready mostly predates OpenJDK.

According to the Wikipedia, there is a 2-year diff between the two release: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenJDK https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Android_%28operating_system%29 .

No, May 2007 to September 2008 isn't two years, it's 1⅓ years. And Android had been in the works for years before that. (Even before the 2006 promise by Sun that Java would be released as open source.)

> Into this went their irrational fear of GPL (describing it as 'viral' or 'infectious').

Why irrational? If they used the GPL, a lot more of Android would need to be open source today, yes? Including proprietary hardware things that can't be open sourced?

This is not true. You could link the libraries as normal while maintaining your proprietary code. The GPL only asks you to release the code if a) you mix your proprietary code without separation from the GPL code b) you distribute the software to 3rd party. b) rarely happens if you sell the device as a closed/embedded system.

Also, they could use BSD code as well that comes with a more permissive MIT licence.

This is not true. Only the LGPL allows you to link to an open source library. That is why OpenJDK has a classpath exception (http://programmers.stackexchange.com/questions/119436/what-d...).

GPL requires you to release the source code to the customer of your software upon request. The person who buys the phone is the customer.

Correct in some way. Given the source code, e.g. Drupal (GPL v2), if you develop a proprietary module that can be shipped independently but relies on the Drupal Core or other GPL module, you still not violate GPL. It doesn't matter you need to compile it or not, at the end, most scripting language is compiled to bytecode in some for of JIT.

I mentioned GPL in general, not dissecting to the various version, because the parent reply was about Google's fear of GPL (in general).

OpenJDK was not pure GPL but rather GPL+classpath exception.

Ah, I see, my bad

I'm not sure I understand why forking OpenJDK would have been legally distinct from a from-scratch re-implementation. In both cases, Google is re-using the APIs that Oracle is claiming ownership over.

EDIT: I just realised that OpenJDK is released by Oracle. Never mind!

Exactly. And, let's be honest, the position Google took would have been supported by Sun. They would have wanted other implementations of their API.

Oracle is only doing this because they can. They have the money. They have the desire (to fuck with Google). So they do it.

I really don't get the anger toward Google. I don't think they did anything wrong here. If they did, it will haunt a lot of other companies than just Google.

> I really don't get the anger toward Google. I don't think they did anything wrong here.

If you check the internal email records, I suspect you'll find that Google thought that it was doing something wrong....

http://www.fosspatents.com/2016/05/heres-mountain-of-willful...

Just because people inside Google thought it was wrong doesn't make it so.

True. But the fact that Google staff felt guilty about ignoring copyright notices and spent years removing evidence from their code is a pretty good indication that they knew they were doing something wrong, even if technically they weren't...

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