Jury Begins Deliberations in Oracle-Google Trial

Ladies and gentlemen, place your bets.

The federal case in San Francisco centers on Oracle's allegations that Google's popular Android software for mobile devices relies on technology stolen from Java. That's a programming platform that Oracle Corp. acquired in 2010 as part of its $7.3 billion acquisition of Sun Microsystems.

Click to expand...

Bets on Google winning it up!

Google will win if the judge and jury know their stuff. Google used the free Java platform, not the paid mobile Java platform.

The fight shouldn't be about stolen tech, but whether Google should have used the mobile version or not.

Sounds like SCO's lawsuit. There will be serious implications if Oracle wins.

Oracle for the win on the flawed, stupid logic that Google is engaged in suspiciously invasive profiling. Nevermind about the far-reaching legal issues this would cause! Let's make Creepy Uncle Lester Google have to pay chump change to the most causitc, closed software company out there.

I think Google will Win. The problem for Oracle is that they are Oracle. The spirit of the letter is that Sun and Google had what I would call a Gentlemen's agreement and with Oracle purchasing Sun they tried to take that back. I think Java as a platform sucks due to the amount of processing power it still requires to run anything on. For example, Minecraft. If it had a native C++ binary vs a Java Package, the C++ Binary would kill the Java Package many times over.

soulman901 said:

I think Google will Win. The problem for Oracle is that they are Oracle. The spirit of the letter is that Sun and Google had what I would call a Gentlemen's agreement and with Oracle purchasing Sun they tried to take that back. I think Java as a platform sucks due to the amount of processing power it still requires to run anything on. For example, Minecraft. If it had a native C++ binary vs a Java Package, the C++ Binary would kill the Java Package many times over.

Click to expand...

People like to claim that's no longer the case. The rumor running around the web perpetuated by Oracle is that the Java VM is now extremely efficient AND increases in processor power have mitigated much of the on-the-fly translation slowdown, but I tend to agree with you. Converting bytecode to a machine's native language during execution eats up some compute time that would have otherwise been spent during the compile and not passed on to the executing platform. However, Java has the benefit of allowing coders (if you want to call a Java developer a coder) the ability to write software that's platform agnostic without worrying yourself with learning anything about the actual hardware that'll execute the code. The sad part is that colleges are cranking out Java programmers in droves which exacerbates the problem of modern computer scientists knowing no actual computer science while making Java developers into the dime-a-dozen web page designer of the programmer world.

Then again, if colleges aren't teaching introductory programming with Java, they'd be shoveling out heaping helpings of Visual Basic....

Oracle.

Whatever else people may think should happen or did happen one thing clear from the discovery so far is google was aware of licensing issues and went ahead anyway without resolving them first.

SkribbelKat said:

Then again, if colleges aren't teaching introductory programming with Java, they'd be shoveling out heaping helpings of Visual Basic....

Click to expand...

Probably true. That being said any university worth its bricks is teaching C, C++, Linux, Makefiles, maybe some Visual Studio, and advanced programming techniques. During my undergraduate years Java was a last minute add-on so that we were at least aware of it -- even the professor said this isn't a true computing language and shouldn't be used as such.

Perhaps the only useful application of Java is if an enterprise application was running on frequently upgraded hardware where in one generation the cheapest solution is Apple, another Linux, and another Windows. Cross platform compatibility does have its advantages (rarely).

Or maybe you're deploying a product that absolutely has to have cross-platform support but you can't afford enough programmers to port (this is a really difficult condition to meet as I've rarely seen C or C++ code that couldn't just be recompiled after 15 minutes of effort changing some environment specific code).

Last time I had to update a Java application for an employer it was because the latest update actually broke the program (which was using standard API, documented features, the works). Cross-platform compatibility FTW. Cross-version compatibility FTL.