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Authored by: Anonymous on Thursday, April 26 2012 @ 02:44 PM EDT |
That's excellent. There's probably a bit of scope for drawing the
analogy
between the TCK and a licence to practice at some particular bar, or
plead in
the Supreme Court?
I actually did omit this simply just
to keep focused.
But the analogy to TCK would be kind of easy.
First, a small excursion to the world of Java (or any other modern
programming language).
It is important to remember that Java is the
"ecosystem", similarly like the USA "legal industry" is also kind of ecosystem
where public ant private actors interact.
Public actors (i.e.
"officials", broadly described as "government") define rules and also actively
participate in execution, for example they employ judges, court staff an so
on.
Private actors are lawyers, experts, law firms together with their
"backoffices" etc.
It is crucially important to understand, that when
we speak of Java platform, it is NOT ONLY the stuff provided by Sun/Oracle like
Java compiler, VM and Libraries with their APIS. It is not even the biggest
chunk of it.
Of course, at the very beginning it was. Actually, the
Libraries provided by Java are there just as a bootstrap, to attract the initial
developers. To seed the ecosystem. Without Libraries and nice APIS Java would be
simply ignored and would vanish like countless other programming
languages.
The real "treasure" of the Programming Platform are the
libraries (and their APIS) developed by various 3rd parties. I can gladly
explain why, if it is not entirely clear.
So, if 20 years later Oracle
subverts the promise "write once - run anywhere" to "write once - run only where
we allow you to", they will take the whole ecosystem as a hostage. This is the
true tragedy of this sad story.
Anyway, let's go back to our TCK
analogy.
Let's say Oracle is the "government" of the USA. TCK is a
series of compliance checks any government structure should pass to be able to
participate. Like the court, judge etc. Then and only then they can legally call
themselves "USA Supreme Court", "USA Judge" etc. This title also has
restrictions, like someone with "USA Judge" title is not allowed to work where
government does not allow him (analogy to TCK and JavaSE restriction for "mobile
devices").
So, if you want to be a "USA Judge", you are required to
promise you won't fly to the moon (Germany, Australia whatever) and work there
as Judge.
This is why Google was forced to produce their own judges etc
in the cleanroom.
Now, what "government" (Oracle) tries to do is to
claim copyright on a way lawyers interact among each other, judges and so on. In
essense, on a whole legal system.
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