java community process

It turns out , as Stefano Mazzocchi so nicely illuminates here, there's more story to be told concerning Google's use of their own, proprietary java VM (Dalvik) and their end-run around the Java Community Process.

There's a licensing angle here, and Google's is playing the game like a Grand Master.

Java, you see, is now licensed under the GPLv2 - this wins open-source friends for Sun. However, it's only the platform itself that's GPL'd; code written in Java does not have to adhere to the same licensing - there's an exception built into the licensing allowing the user code to be exempt from the GPL.

Unless it's Java Mobile Edition. Apparently In this case the basic Java ME licensing requires that all software written on that platform be open sourced as well. There is, however, a commercial version of Java ME that is licensed differently - it's this commercial version that many for-profit software developers go for, because it allows them tighter control over what their IP.

Got all that? If so, you're smarter than me, 'cause it took me a while.

So now Google comes along with Android, and Dalvik, and licenses the whole thing under Apache v2. How? Well, by creating their own proprietary VM for running the Java code, and having the Java code compile into their own bytecode. They use the Java syntax, some Java-friendly dev tools (Eclipse), but the underlying engine is all their own, and they're very careful not to describe the language as "Java".

Slick moves on Google's part.

A different angle here at articlesmodern.com, concerning Android's new Dalvik Java Virtual Machine.

Dalvik, is, you see, completely Google's invention, which as alright, I guess. Problem is, Android and Dalvik are not part of the Java Community Process, the standards group Sun put together to keep track of standards around new Java features. Apparently Google thought it would show Sun how it should be done:

“We wanted the platform to be open in a lot of different ways,” said Mike Cleron, a Google senior staff engineer working on Android. “The idea is that anybody can come along and replace the pieces of the Android experience on a very fine-grained level. The existing APIs didn’t really allow the level of openness we were hoping to achieve in Android.”

This fragmentation has some worried, apparently, and for good reason, as evidenced by my favourite part of the article:

Mauro Lollo, CEO of mobile phone video-streaming company Movidity, saw Google’s work similarly. “In essence, they’ve created another standard. Standards are great, but the challenge is that there are so many of them,” he said.

Well said, Mr Lollo.