James Gosling, creator of Java, writes about Sun, Oracle, Google, Java, and technical topics from his career.
HN links it for his account of Sun's decline, his views on Oracle v. Google, the Fallacies of Distributed Computing, and x87 accuracy.
OK, you're a happy Clojure user (I'm not familiar with Groovy and haven't heard of Solr). Clojure is very functional and I expect idiomatic memory usage patterns are different than those of Java and other imperative OO languages.
Oracle's patent lawsuit against the Dalvik VM has cast a cloud on deep innovations in JVMs, such as GC implementations tuned for Clojure.
Is there going to be a long term problem? Who knows, who can say? All we know is that Oracle's lawyers were eager to sue Google whereas "patent suits [were] never in Sun's genetic code" (http://nighthacks.com/roller/jag/entry/the_shit_finally_hits_the); what follows will depend on how that goes and who knows what else.
At the very least I'm pretty sure this is having a chilling effect. If you have various areas in which you can do things, why do deep JVM innovation. E.g. for Clojure, perhaps Clojure-in-Clojure targeting another platform, most especially x86_64? (This is not idle speculation, BTW.)
Buying AMD would have been great.
There's always more to the (inside) story. Meaning I have no idea what's going, so should stay humble if I can't keep my mouth shut.
James Gosling's shared one theory for the downfall of Sun: radioactive packaging of the hot new UltraSparc-II chips cost the company billions.
http://nighthacks.com/jag/blog/336/index.html
I so wish Sun had survived. Jini, JavaSpaces, JXTA, grid computing... I recently had to do some AWS Lambda work (serverless & nodejs) and wanted to kill myself.
Thank you for sharing your views, theories. It's actually therapeutic.
Here is what James Gosling had to say about one of the patents Oracle alleged Google infringed:
Oracle finally filed a patent lawsuit against Google. Not a big surprise. During the integration meetings between Sun and Oracle where we were being grilled about the patent situation between Sun and Google, we could see the Oracle lawyer’s eyes sparkle. Filing patent suits was never in Sun’s genetic code. Alas….
I hope to avoid getting dragged into the fray: they only picked one of my patents (RE38,104) to sue over.
source: http://nighthacks.com/roller/jag/entry/the_shit_finally_hits_the
Except Sun never charged for handset/embedded deployments. They charged for access to the J2ME trademark. This case is neither about trademarks nor J2ME.
That means they wouldn't have gotten any money from SavaJe like phones either.
The only people who "torpedoed" Sun was Sun themselves.
And yes, switching from an interoperabilty argument to 'they were morally obligated to buy Sun' is very much pivoting to a different argument.
Also, here's James Gosling later saying that APIs should not be copyrightable. http://nighthacks.com/jag/blog/397/index.html
So it is that time of the year again for me to quote Gosling:
"We were all really disturbed, even Jonathan: he just decided to put on a happy face and tried to turn lemons into lemonade, which annoyed a lot of folks at Sun."
Source: http://nighthacks.com/roller/jag/entry/my_attitude_on_oracle_v
But believe on whatever Google sells.
One year almost to the day since he quit Sun/Oracle (see http://nighthacks.com/roller/jag/entry/time_to_move_on).
That probably means he had a 1-year non-compete built into his employment agreement which he had to wait out (which makes me curious about what he could be working on at Google that could trigger that)