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Google Android Businesses Oracle The Courts

Inside Oracle's Cloak-and-dagger Political War With Google (recode.net) 86

schwit1 shares a Recode report: The story that appeared in Quartz this November seemed shocking enough on its own: Google had quietly tracked the location of its Android users, even those who had turned off such monitoring on their smartphones. But missing from the news site's report was another eyebrow-raising detail: Some of its evidence, while accurate, appears to have been furnished by one of Google's fiercest foes: Oracle. For the past year, the software and cloud computing giant has mounted a cloak-and-dagger, take-no-prisoners lobbying campaign against Google, perhaps hoping to cause the company intense political and financial pain at a time when the two tech giants are also warring in federal court over allegations of stolen computer code. Since 2010, Oracle has accused Google of copying Java and using key portions of it in the making of Android. Google, for its part, has fought those claims vigorously. More recently, though, their standoff has intensified. And as a sign of the worsening rift between them, this summer Oracle tried to sell reporters on a story about the privacy pitfalls of Android, two sources confirmed to Recode.
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Inside Oracle's Cloak-and-dagger Political War With Google

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  • by rahvin112 ( 446269 ) on Thursday December 07, 2017 @02:36PM (#55697299)

    Cut off your nose to spite your face, that's the Oracle gameplan 101. They are mad at Google so they will try to destroy android, the only software keeping Java relevant.

    Smart as always.

    • by tomxor ( 2379126 ) on Thursday December 07, 2017 @02:50PM (#55697403)

      Cut off your nose to spite your face, that's the Oracle gameplan 101. They are mad at Google so they will try to destroy android, the only software keeping Java relevant.

      Smart as always.

      Regardless of the truth of your Java statement (I'm not a Java fan FYI), this is just not how Oracle operates, and no i'm not an Orcale expert either - but it's clear from their history that they don't care about long term investments, they care about buying up and cashing out all IP possible, often through litigation... they are run by lawyers and salesmen alone without any concern for more than their bottom line.

    • Look at the world of big data. What do you see? A ton of Java SE without the bullshit of Java EE holding it back. Aside from Go, try writing most of those products in the hipster-approved platforms like Python and NodeJS.

      • A ton of Java [...]

        ...but called Scala. I don't see a lot of bare Java in the big data stores I'm around.

        Aside from Go, try writing most of those products in the hipster-approved platforms like Python

        ...which had its first public release 26 years ago. Python can rent cars and it would buy a house if it wasn't a millennial. Its kid sister, Java, just turned 22.

        But yeah, I see way more Python than (again, plain ol') Java in big data. JVM languages other than Java are pretty popular, and Spark/Hadoop are often coordinating efforts behind the scenes, but the software running on the cluster is probably going to be Python/Nu

    • Comment removed based on user account deletion
  • And as a sign of the worsening rift between them, this summer Oracle tried to sell reporters on a story about the privacy pitfalls of Android, two sources confirmed to Recode.

    That's not exactly a tough sell, given Google's revenue stream is dependent on tracking as much as possible about their users, to serve "more relevant" advertising.

  • by bobstreo ( 1320787 ) on Thursday December 07, 2017 @03:04PM (#55697483)

    Then you'll see how much per CPU in your phone/tablet/android device it will cost extra for your Oracle licensing.

    \s?

  • by PPH ( 736903 ) on Thursday December 07, 2017 @03:47PM (#55697773)

    That's sort of like peeking at the exam paper of the dumbest kid in class.

  • by 140Mandak262Jamuna ( 970587 ) on Thursday December 07, 2017 @03:51PM (#55697803) Journal
    Develop a database product that is 10 times faster than Oracle using MapReduce, and make it perfectly backward compatible with existing Oracle database. Oracle destroyed Sun, destroyed Java, destroyed PeopleSoft.... It is the worse company than even Microsoft.
    • Google just has to buy EDB, make their Oracle compatibility layer OpenSource and part of PostgreSQL.

      • Google already has a Mysql/Postgres compatible cloud SQL solution. If they added Oracle compatibility to that, it would be a good start (and no open sourcing required).

        I know banks use Oracle, as do some wanna-be banks. Banks are slow to move, so your sales cycle mostly runs to years, so Oracle have at least another 5 years before they see any major decline there. I also know some companies who really shouldn't have ever used Oracle for their application, but thought that it would be a safe choice. Those ar

    • by Anonymous Coward

      Yeah, great. They'll get right on that. And when they do, nobody that matters would be stupid enough to use it, because of Google's love of randomly killing projects and products arbitrarily.

      Who in their right mind would trust their core data strategy to the mercurial shifts that Google has displayed? People running big data need to know they will still have support for all that data in two years.

    • Well, they already have Spanner [google.com], MySQL and Postgres [google.com]. And that's just their relational database offerings. They have Cloud Bigtable [google.com] too.
  • Comment removed (Score:4, Interesting)

    by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Thursday December 07, 2017 @04:09PM (#55697933)
    Comment removed based on user account deletion
  • All this because Jobs wanted to go thermonuclear on Google for stealing iPhone market share and Mr. Larry vowed to avenge his lost friend?

  • PostgreSQL (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Tablizer ( 95088 ) on Thursday December 07, 2017 @06:08PM (#55698619) Journal

    All Google has to do is invest R&D into PostgreSQL (including UI's and documentation), and maybe some marketing. It could trigger a big drop in new Oracle sales, and knock the company into a panicky death spiral as investors flee. Novell redux.

  • Who has the best office furniture, Oracle or Google?

Understanding is always the understanding of a smaller problem in relation to a bigger problem. -- P.D. Ouspensky

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