[cwillu]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_LLC_v._Oracle_America,_.... is not what I would call “good stewardship”

[gf000]

What relevance does it have at the topic at hand? Can you give an example of what could happen that would make sense to worry about?

[TimTheTinker]

It's a lawsuit by Oracle against a FAANG company that relates in some (even tangential) way to the FAANG company's use of Java.

That's all that's needed to create a sense of caution for would-be adopters.

[gf000]

Running Java is not remotely the same as copying the API interface of the whole standard library and providing an alternative implementation, just to avoid paying Sun, who specifically intended on getting money from mobile usage.

Oracle lost the lawsuit and I do agree with the decision in that APIs should be freely replicated, but let's not pretend that Google was some saint good guy here fighting the good fight, they were just cheap and aggressively capitalistic.

[sroussey]

Doesn’t every open source implementation just “copying the API interface of the whole standard library and providing an alternative implementation”?

[lenkite]

But Google did NOT copy the open source implementation. Google copied parts of the closed-source proprietary Java SE API specifications in order to have compatibility and without taking a license. Kindly remember that Android started using OpenJDK very late - around 2015–2016.

Legally the case was about copying declaring code from a proprietary product, not an open source one.

[cwillu]

And they lost, because it was fair use, which was obvious to most people in the field. The fact that the lawsuit happened in the first place is why I will never trust Oracle.

[vrighter]

But they didn't copy code. Because the code was proprietary and they didn't have access to it.

Reimplementing an interface != stealing code.