Oracle, to my knowledge, does not profit at all off of the JavaScript name or brand. I don't see the purpose of defending this lawsuit. They have an opportunity to create some goodwill here, hold a press release, and say "We're gifting the JavaScript trademark to the developer community!" But instead they're defending something that they literally do not profit off of. It's absurd.
> They have an opportunity to create some goodwill here
According to Bryan Cantrill, you don't need to be open minded about Oracle. It's a waste of the openness of your mind. He says what you think of Oracle is even truer than you think it is. He believes there has been no entity in human history with less complexity and nuance to it than Oracle.
Bryan warns, "Do not fall into the trap of anthropomorphizing Larry Ellison. You need to think of Larry Ellison the way you think of a lawnmower. You don't anthropomorphize your lawnmower, the lawnmower just mows the lawn. You stick your hand in there and it'll chop it off, the end. You don't think 'oh, the lawnmower hates me' -- the lawnmower doesn't give a shit about you, the lawnmower can't hate you. Don't anthropomorphize the lawnmower. Don't fall into that trap about Oracle."
This is so true. And in my experience Oracle's main business seems to be getting companies to sign complicated contracts, waiting a year or two, and then suing them for some infraction so that they can extort another contract from them. I haven't met an Oracle product yet that can't be done better by either free software or a less litigious company.
I personally have come to the conclusion that behind every major open-source or free software success story, there is a completely dysfunctional market. Without this, it would be impossible to find enough people willing to say, “Fuck that shit, we're going to recode this ourselves.”
The fact that there are so many people motivated to code alternatives to Oracle products says a lot about Oracle's business practices.
The only good SQL tooling I am aware of, really good with compilers, debuggers, IDEs, is MS SQL Server.
Then stuff like distributed transactions, raw disk access for databases, among other niceties that people reaching to Postgres or MySQL probably never heard of, but many Fortune 500 enjoy, even if one for checking bullet points on RFPs.
Postgres comes second, after getting all puzzle pieces together, some of them also commercial.
There is nothing I take more glee in than listening to bcantrill talk negatively of Oracle. Whenever Oracle comes up in one of his talks or a podcast, I know I'm in for a treat.
It doesn't "make sense" for a lawnmower to cut hands either, it isn't a meat grinder after all. However it is a blade attached to a motor and from a purely mechanical, non-human perspective it will cut whatever comes within reach.
They do, if the lawnmower believes "more trademarks good" (and which corporation doesn't?), and trademarks must be actively used and defended to be kept.
Like all machines in the real world, the Oracle machine intelligence is limited - it can't process every single thing to infinite detail. "More trademarks good" and "trademarks must be actively used and defended to be kept" are heuristics and explain this well if you tack on an "on average" to the former.
Apparently not everybody got the Lawnmower Memo, so thanks for posting that again, as a reminder to people like sprash who think I should have "sincerely asked if you are allowed to publish the [NeWS source] code". As if sincerity would help, and as if I haven't been sincerely asking since 1986.
I'll also sincerely ask: Does anybody at Oracle know how I can get in touch with their HR department to find out what ever happened to my Sun 401k plan? Because nobody will answer my calls, and it's a lot of money of mine plus 33 years of interest they owe me that they're holding on to, which they inherited from Sun and then disappeared from all known records (except for a record that says it once existed and Oracle has it, but no other info), and they won't pick up the phone or return my email, no matter how "sincerely" I ask or how long I wait on hold.
sprash 4 days ago | parent | context | flag | favorite | on: Ancient X11 scaling technology
> 1994
Apparently you have to be criticizing X11 for more than three decades now. Since you seem to know your stuff, could you please post a link to your git repository containing your personal display server that solves all the problems?
DonHopkins 4 days ago | prev | next [–]
Since they bought Sun Microsystems, Oracle now owns the rights to the NeWS source code, so unfortunately I'm not legally allowed to post the NeWS server source code on my Github page, although I spent many years unsuccessfully fighting to make NeWS free and evangelizing it to anyone who would listen, like RMS and my colleagues and customers at Sun:
> Oracle owns the rights to the NeWS source code so I'm not allowed to post it on my Github page.
They are certainly not making any money with it right now. All patents should be expired by now. Have you ever sincerely asked if you are allowed to publish the code? [...]
DonHopkins 4 days ago | root | parent | prev | next [–]
[...] Ha ha! Good luck, kiddo. Have you ever tried asking a lawnmower for favors? Do you really think "sincerity" would help?
They could reverse 90% of their brand damage in one swing by simply updating CDDL to allow integrating ZFS with GPL, which also wouldn't cost them anything as far as I'm aware, but we're both making the mistake of anthropomorphizing the lawnmower.
Ignoring how Sun/Oracle's shenanigans with ZFS don't nearly account for "90% of their brand damage"...
> simply updating CDDL to allow integrating ZFS with GPL
That can't be done at this point. Owing to a decision that arose right here from a discussion on HN, the ZFS maintainers adopted a policy in 2016 to opt out of the CDDL's built-in "any subsequent version" clause for new source files:
~/scratch/zfs$ grep --exclude-dir=.git -Ire "Common Development and Distribution License" -A 2 | grep -ie "\(Version 1\.0 only\|\<only\>.*\<version\>\)" | wc -l
821
(The CDDL is a file-based license. At the time of that decision, there were already roughly a hundred CDDL-licensed files in the source tree specified as available under "Version 1.0 only".)
Making a concession when they have not been forced to might indicate weakness to some. In that sense showing a speck of humanity might actually harm their stock.
My guess, is that the people who could break protocol are too busy to deal with a request to break protocol. Too busy to give it a thought.
And anyone who is sympathetic to the request, knows that campaigning for the protocol break would require disrupting two or three levels of management above them, forcing powerful people to deal with something they don't care about. And that would be interpreted as wasting important people's time.
So the organization, as a decision making entity, is incapable of recognizing, much less considering, requests for an exception to default behavior.
I worked with a business that operated this way for many years. Even when there were overwhelming reasons to break process, the spark and tinder never got anywhere near each other.
Everyone between the spark and tinder empathized, talked to "somebody" to demonstrate they "tried", and to create an alibi for the inevitable "no" response that came next, while quietly doing everything they could to smother that spark, before it burned them.
Yeah, but Microsoft also did a two steps forward and three steps back there. Things like shoving product ads onto the lock screen and preinstalling Candy Crush Soda Saga cost them more goodwill than any developer-facing effort earned them.
This one especially hurt only people who are inside Windows ecosystem. For people like me Microsoft is nice author of one product. I'm talking about VS Code.
Increasingly more of VSCode isn't open source. First-party Microsoft language extensions have been locking features up for quite some time now, and whenever that happens the license also prohibits running it on any VSCode fork.
Microsoft’s “core DNA” is still there firmly, though.
They successfully weaponized open source by giving something for free and clawing back step by step (i.e. closing open source VSCode plugins), and leaving parts which does drowns competitors most effectively open.
Also they act like their open source code is “Free”. They firmly control it, yet act like they don’t.
Microsoft’s image didn’t improve a bit in my eyes.
> Also they act like their open source code is “Free”. They firmly control it, yet act like they don’t.
They are responsive to the community and merge community PRs. That's already more "open" than, say, SQLite.
Sure, they don't give away merge rights and keep exclusive control over the upstream copy. But how many "open" projects have a second maintainer at all? I mean, more than one person (the original author) with merge access.
The code is free. You can always fork it and use it however you like. That's always been the deal you get with open source.
Sure, it's nice when the upstream maintainers always do only the things you like, and you never need to fork. But that's a separate quality, unrelated to the code itself being "free" or "open".
> They successfully weaponized open source by giving something for free and clawing back step by step (i.e. closing open source VSCode plugins), and leaving parts which does drowns competitors most effectively open.
And that's why people should be pushing for Free Software, rather than Open Source.
20 years in the game, and I ended up agreeing with steve ballmer: open source is cancer.
Look at how bad it went for ElasticSearch and Redis, and then look how well it's going for Grafana (whose software is Free Software - besides being just great).
This is so true that Redis did not go back to being "open source", it became Free Software (AGPL).
Pylance started as open source and moved to a closed source model. Relevant discussion is at [0].
Then, they closed the .NET ecosystem [1]. This is a bit more complex and convoluted. Closed source debuggers, changing plug-in licenses, removing nice features from open source .NET runtime, etc.
Since Oracle is not in B2C, there is no brand damage in openly being a net-negative rent-seeker. Rent-seeking is what shareholders crave. It makes line go up, it has electrolytes.
It only makes the line go up in the short term. In the long term companies will avoid Oracle, and sales will go down. But shareholders don't care about the longterm.
Oracle has demonstrated the long-term and their stock has never been higher. Their sales are finally heading higher again.. They're one of the oldest software companies and are approaching 50 years old. What is more long-term in their industry than what they have accomplished?
They're better positioned now than they have been at any other point in the past 10-15 years.
Just make sure you don't benchmark it. Comparing to the competition is a serious breach of contract.
Oracle is not an abusive relationship, it's just that you shouldn't be looking elsewhere, and infractions will be punished. They are very serious about audits.
The version of ZFS that everybody (besides the dwindling number of Oracle Solaris customers) uses now, OpenZFS, has been maintained completely independently of Oracle since they shut down OpenSolaris in 2010. This means that Oracle relicensing ZFS wouldn't do anything to help with getting it integrated into the Linux kernel, since there's been hundreds of independent contributors to ZFS since then who all own their own copyrights. Because ZFS is licensed under the CDDL, which has an automatic upgrade clause, Oracle could simply copy/paste the GPLv2 license text and call it "CDDL v2" if they wanted to make ZFS able to be included in Linux.
Swapping to an entirely new license rather than adding one sentence to the existing one is not simpler either in terms of linguistics or getting approval from their army of lawyers.
It would require getting all past contributors _and_ the current copyright owner to agree. Normally I'd agree that getting all past contributors to agree is the hard part, but the copyright owner here is Oracle. I'd have more confidence in getting the rest of the contributors to agree to a license in Pig Latin than getting Oracle to make literally any change to the license for this.
However, it is not legal to then redistribute this combination. Which essentially means linux distros cannot ship with OpenZFS: each user must combine the two on their own.
(This doesn’t necessarily stop people, but it is read by Debian as “illegal enough” to warrant a splash screen on installing OpenZFS that you’re losing the right to redistribute.)
Who would sue, and what damages would they demonstrate in this case? Both the Linux and ZFS source is available and you are allowed and encouraged to build and use them. Redistributing binaries can be thought of caching precompiled artifacts, merely speeding up what you can already do manually (and with reproductible builds the result should be identical). Nobody loses anything.
Let's say I built a magical compiler capable of compiling a Linux+ZFS kernel in miliseconds. I put it behind a web UI which accepts a Linux tarball and ZFS tarball and spits out the compiled kernel. Because of some mysterious bug I am still trying to solve, only specific Linux and ZFS tarballs work, so I put validation to hash the uploaded tarballs and only let through the ones that are known to work.
Let's peel back the curtain: there is no magical compiler and all this is doing is hashing the input kernel & ZFS source tarballs, using it as a lookup table in a cache of precompiled binaries, and spitting out the matching one, which is currently not allowed. But let's assume the compiler was real, in this case it should be fine, even though the functionality of the system is no different.
I would at least understand if one of the licenses explicitly restricted the right to distribute ready-to-use binaries as a way to carve themselves a moat so the authors are the only ones that would be able to do it (and thus charge for it). But that's not the case here, nobody is better (or worse) off whether I waste time building it manually vs reuse someone else's earlier effort of building it.
It would be the Free Software Foundation, for a copyright violation due to GPL licensing violation. (Technically the Linux Kernel Foundation, as they’re the copyright holders here, but the FSF is generally involved in suits to protect GPL.) It is not necessary to demonstrate damages for copyright infringement; there are statutory (assumed) damages for this tort.
WOULD they? It depends on how important it is to have a credible threat of enforcement for GPL violations. But it’s not zero, and it’s a pretty clear violation. Which is enough to scare off most major distros - if they receive a C&D, that’d be a breaking change they’d have to push retroactively. Not worth the risk.
ZFS is widely used with Linux in HPC (https://computing.llnl.gov/projects/openzfs). Is asking users to install ZFS separately really that much of a lift for ZFS's target audience?
Being out-of-tree means that kernel refactors break ZFS, and that it has a lot fewer hands and eyeballs available for the kinds of bugs that require internal design changes to fix (rather than paper over).
Nowadays, it's a lawyer company - not a technology/software company. Their only reason for existence is to keep selling licenses for the things they own for as long as they still can, so it's pretty natural they're holding on to anything (regardless of actual value) they can.
Part of me thinks that's just the Oracle equivalent of janitorial and catering staff, the people you need to keep around to ensure the people creating the company profit, the sales people and lawyers, can work most efficiently.
Yeah unlike other companies who keep technical staff on rolls to wash their feet and drink that water. Because profiting from technical work is unthinkable in industry.
> I think it’s kind of sad that you would have that opinion.
Yeah. I don't like it either, but that's the world we've built. I wish an industry as important as ours had some standards of ethics, like doctors and real engineers do.
> Are the engineers working on OpenJdk completely lacking of morals?
Oracle attempted to make clean room reverse engineering illegal by arguing that copyright applies to Java's ABIs despite our entire industry relying on that not being the case, all so Larry Ellison could buy yet another yacht. So yeah, someone continuing to work on Java after it was acquired by one of the most evil companies on the planet definitely is consciously choosing to make the world a worse place and should no longer be employable.
> How does working for Oracle compare to say working at Facebook or Google with all their privacy invasion tech?
Facebook is also on my personal blacklist, yes. Less for their privacy invasion, and more for their eagerness to make a buck by helping spread misinformation and bringing about the end of democracy in the western world.
I don't feel as strongly about Google personally, but I wouldn't argue if someone else on the hiring team felt it was disqualifying.
Harsh, but understandable. I’d make an exception for first job out of school people. They might not know better yet. If someone worked for an Oracle customer before going to work for Larry, though, I’d be convinced they were the devil incarnate.
I despise Oracle, and I think there aren't many companies out there as evil as them. I would be thrilled if they burned to the ground, figuratively speaking of course.
But that said, I think it would be dumb to jump to conclusions just based on having Oracle on the resume. You should at least ask them why they worked there, and why they left. For all you know, they had no idea how bad Oracle was when they started, and they left because they saw how evil they were. That is the exact kind of person that I do want to hire
I guess I consider it part of one's ethical duty to research the places you work and decide whether you are willing to put your life's efforts behind supporting the company's behavior. Oracle very famously attempted to completely undermine how the entire software industry works and make unapproved interoperability illegal with their Google Java lawsuit[1]. If an applicant supported the company that filed that lawsuit by working for them, and doesn't feel enough shame to leave it off their resume, then I don't want to work with that applicant.
I think this is key. When you hire people to do work, they'll find stuff to do even if it isn't really necessary or a long term good for the company.
My favorite other example of this is when I see a UI redesign that didn't actually benefit anyone and was more a style change than anything, and sometimes actively makes usability worse (cough Liquid Glass cough) In those situations I always think "well, some designers on staff needed to justify their paychecks".
I think this is actually a bit different than the principal agent problem, at least how the principal agent problem is normally described and envisioned.
E.g. you often imagine cases like a manager making a decision that causes a short term pop in stock price (and bonuses to the manager) to the detriment of the long term health of the company when thinking about the principal agent problem. In the cases I'm thinking about, though, it's more that people rarely can do nothing, even if that's sometimes the best thing to do. E.g. large companies need to have lawyers and designers on staff for lots of reasons. But sometimes there just isn't enough work for these folks to do (even if they need to be "warm" and ready when important work comes along). And if there isn't enough work to do, these people will find work to do.
This is another reason why I think that, even though layoffs are painful, having people "milling about" without clear direction and purpose is the worst for everyone involved. These people will just schedule meetings, insert themselves where it isn't helpful, etc., just to make it seem like they have a purpose.
This could be thought of as a "variant" of the principal agent problem I guess, but this instance of "idle hands are the devil's playthings" is different enough from the "standard" principal agent problem that I don't think it's helpful to conflate these two things.
> But sometimes there just isn't enough work for these folks to do (even if they need to be "warm" and ready when important work comes along). And if there isn't enough work to do, these people will find work to do.
It is possible to find work in a different area at the company for such in-between times.
For example at the company where I work, a (very capable) secretary whose original role was not needed anymore, but for who there existed a very role in the future was for the in-between time assigned to assist some other department in their reporting duties to regulating authorities.
Not all employees are willing to rock the boat, ask around and risk exposing themselves as superfluous. It's less risky to always act like - or tell yourself - that every task that ends up on your desk require throughout diligence.
I think this is especially true at big corps with little actually meaningful work and where most people who actually care about doing meaningful work has left a long time ago.
It's not even justify their salary. A lawyer's sole job is to advocate for the legal position of their client as zealously as possible. A really good chief counsel would go to the CEO and weigh up the merits of the marketing win of "losing" this case. A drone lawyer just files whatever is necessary (or even unnecessary) to fight the case even when it makes zero god damn sense. e.g. giving a person a 25 year prison sentence for stealing a slice of pizza.
Everyone who passionately defends a big company’s honor online needs to watch and understand that bit! Companies are not humans with feelings and empathy. They’re all lawnmowers. That they happen to be made of people doesn’t change their nature.
The only logical reason I can think of to fight to keep the trademark is that they specifically don't want any goodwill, and that want to maintain their reputation as ruthless litigators.
This is the wrong way to look at it from a business perspective. They don’t directly profit off licensing or support or anything like that, but they gain free advertising.
They gain absolutely nothing by handing over the name and brand - in fact they lose valuable brand recognition.
Obviously most people in the industry hate them with a passion (see this thread as evidence), but many see the association as evidence that they might at least have some expertise with that product set. I certainly don’t agree with their position, but it makes sense commercially.
How are they going to lose brand recognition, when a majority of people do not associate JavaScript with Oracle? The only language I associate with Oracle is Java.
> Oracle, to my knowledge, does not profit at all off of the JavaScript name or brand.
At this time, but their ownership and past behavior indicates that if Deno or anyone else tries to have a paid offering, there’s a non-zero chance Oracle will come sniffing for low effort money.
Isn't the entire reason because they funded JavaScript and in order to protect Java's trademark they maintain it just in case? I think that's the real simple answer. Feel free to educate me if someone knows different.
> They have an opportunity to create some goodwill here
This would be first event of that kind to my knowledge. I've been coding for 20 years and never heard anyone say anything good about Oracle other than their free hosting tier _is free_. Better late than never I guess!
How is it that Oracle gets to claim this trademark at all? They never created it, Netscape did. Oracle bought Sun which could have challenged Netscape for naming JavaScript after Java, but I don't think they ever did.
Only because you don't understand Trademarks. They are not copyrights.
Trademarks exists to protect consumers, so they don't mix together companies and products that have too similar name or branding. So somebody can't release a product called iPhona for $600 in the hopes that somebody will overlook the typo and order it instead of an iPhone for $600.
If a company is not offering a product based on a trademark, that trademark should actively be removed. Oracle is not using the JavaScript trademark.
I mean I get Oracle hate and stuff, but remember the great and lovely Sun Microsystems used all tricks in the bag against Microsoft with respect to Java late 90s/early 2000s.
So, is "X abuses IP law" hatred is out of principle or because folks seem to be in love with Sun and Google and hate Oracle and Microsoft.
I have a feeling that a lot of big corps somehow work as effective containment vessels for decent workforce this way. It feels like a conspiracy but it doesn't make sense as one to me.
