So Larry Ellison is sitting in his chair and thinking, Hmmm...it's been a quiet summer. So he looks at his dart board and decides to make it exciting. His dart hits Google and decides to sue them!
So, the world goes Topsy-Turvy with this news and camps from both ends starts a global war each supporting it's camp.
The fact is few people knows the facts.
So here is what I know.
Android uses Java? Um... NO
I've seen a lot of misinformation over the weekend, talking about the Oracle/Google lawsuit. Many of these blog posts and article talks about how "Android uses Java". That simply isn't true.
Android applications are written using the Java programming language. True. But those applications run on the Dalvik virtual machine. Not the Java virtual machine. Source code is owned/copyright by the author and is entirely unbound from any intellectual property concerns based around the syntax/grammar of that language.
Class libraries? Not Java either. Much of the core libraries come from Apache Harmony, and the rest are libraries that Google wrote. Given that Apache was never provided access to the Java Compatibility Kit, Harmony is not labeled as "Java-certified". Also note that Harmony is a clean-room implementation of the Java class libraries.
So, people: stop saying that Android "uses Java". It doesn't.
The sorry part is that Larry Ellison after acquiring Sun Microsystem has decided to go after companies using Java which is Open Source in the first place? I am not sure who is next on his dart-board?
Thursday, July 29, 2010
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