[oceante]

This entire article is bullshit clickbait designed to appeal to select baseless biases.

It offers no meaningful content except for this single sentence:

"The Register has learned of one customer in retail with 80,000 PCs which was informed by Oracle it was in breach on Java."

There are no further details about why this customer was "targeted" or the nature of their licensing deal with Oracle.

I would think after all these years people would know that (a) the Register is a well-known source of fake news/clickbait/misleading headlines (b) Java is open-source (full-stop) and wholly free software and (c) products like "Java SE Advanced Suite" have nothing to do with the Java language or the JDK. (Though I can see why (c) would be confusing, though Sun started this product of calling everything Java XXX (tm).)

It's a shame that such an article gets written to feed advertisers useless clicks but it's really disappointing to see it on the hacker news front page.

[drvdevd]

Yeah I'm not in love with Java, but let's also not forget that Google has successfully extracted Java from Oracle's hands at this point, to a billion-or-so installation extent.

[owaislone]

By essentially re-implementing Java. That doesn't apply to the rest of the world.

[VonGuard]

And Oracle sued over that. Still is suing over that. The suit threatens all of software by declaring APIs exempt from fair use.

[BoorishBears]

It's not like Google didn't do anything wrong, the fragmentation created by dividing Java into Java, and "Android Java", is damaging

[drvdevd]

One could argue that the Java ecosystem was already pretty fragmented and weird anyway: Java Card, Java in the browser, all the many versions of the JVM on every platform, and open source JVM "forks"... right?

[BoorishBears]

Sure, but then Google went and added another billion plus installations of a new fork that only shares very superficial ties with normal Java (in reference to Dalvik, which has been replaced but still defines the intentions Google had as far as staying compatible).

And to add insult to injury, they've gone and fragmented Java on that platform too.

Right now on Android you can have:

Java "6.5" hybrid, Java 6 with some Java 7 features

(Overwhelming majority of developers are stuck with this, and this is where an Android project defaults to.)

Java 6 with some Java 7 and 8 features but no Java 8 APIs

(Retrolambda)

Java 8 without the proper Java 8 APIs, but breaking several popular tools for Android development

(Jack + Devices not on Android N)

Java 8 with proper Java 8 APIs, but breaking several popular tools for Android development

(Jack + Devices on Android N)

I've always felt that Oracle should have some legal recourse for what Google did. It honestly doesn't feel that different than what Microsoft did with Visual J++ and we saw how that went down. It's a shame it's come down to the case for copyrighting APIs instead of the case for punishing Google for subtly breaking Java's maturity on their platform while benefiting from calling it "Java".