Despite the "good news" that Oracle "won", their stock price is off
half-a-point today. This might be one of those buy-on-the-rumor,
sell-on-the-fact things (though it continues a trend from last week). But this
"good news" will not carry a sweet smell of success for long as Oracle has no
chance of recouping their cost of litigation.
Whether or not Oracle can use
this to threaten others, they are assuredly hurting themselves with existing and
potential customers. If they are unable to learn the lesson from SCO "the easy
way" that suing your customers generally reduces profits, then they will simply
have to learn it the hard way.
But more importantly they've lost any
goodwill in the Java community they acquired in the Sun Microsystems
transaction.
The "write one, run anywhere" pitch was attractive in the late
90's precisely because it appeared to be about platform independence, a form of
developer freedom if you will.
It no longer appears that way. The new pitch
"we copyrighted the API" resembles nothing like developer freedom. Rather it
amounts to a platform lock-in broader and more brazen than any historical
precedent, a literally intolerable affront to coders.
If Ellison thinks
there's no other game in town besides Java, he's been misinformed. If Oracle
continues to flog the "APIs are ours" talking point, they will risk it cutting
into their cash-cow RDBMS business as well.
--- "Prolog is an
efficient programming language because it is a very stupid theorem prover." --
Richard O'Keefe [ Reply to This | Parent | # ]
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