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Analogy: let's try lawyers :) | 396 comments | Create New Account
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Analogy: let's try lawyers :)
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.

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

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