Seeing as Google has its own Java-like VM, what would stop Google from creating its own spec and Apache, and the rest of the Java community, following this spec? Can Oracle's patent arsenal stop the Java community from forking?
To me (and IANAL), this sounds like a stern response to Google's claims that Sun/Oracle are supporting such projects (not a very good response, mind you). It is a shame that it has to play out this way, but it seems Oracle thinks this is in its best interests somehow. Maybe destroying Java is somehow beneficial to them (I have no idea how besides getting rid of the responsibility)? Does Java-as-a-product have a positive cash flow?
Java has been on life support for a while now. The majority of the "innovation" over the last few major(!) releases has been playing catchup with other languages, other virtual machines, and other bytecodes. If C# hadn't played the Firefox to Java's IE, I'm not convinced that many of Java's linguistic advances would have ever seen the light of day.<p>Perhaps the single greatest contribution of Java has been limiting the impact of poorly-written Visual Basic applications on the business software landscape, though the alternative it provides is poorly-written Java applications, which in addition to being slow, unmaintainable spaghetti code look visually distinct enough from each platform's native widget set to be jarring.<p>I have little experience with mobile development so perhaps this is a monumentally bad idea, but a set of well-defined APIs, a clean windowing and widget layer with its own APIs, and native bindings for a handful of the more popular languages (Python, Ruby, C++) plus perhaps one or two more specialized languages the platform developers want to support (Clojure/Scheme/CL, Go) would provide enough flexibility to let developers do what they want.<p>(Although come to think about it this seems to be the approach that Maemo used, and that platform never saw the uptake I thought it deserved. So I'm probably relying on wishful thinking rather than actual reality.)
It seems Google has a problem on their hands. If I undstand it correctly, Android relies on the Harmony implementation of the Java standard library. So Google will now have to carry those libraries forward on their own.<p>What I don't quite get is why Google isn't just using V8 to power Android apps. Also, why isn't Android apps development more like writing Chrome extensions?<p>The main attraction of Java on Android is that so many people know Java. However, a lot of poeple know JavaScript as well, particularly those involved in client side programming. So replacing Java with JavaScript on Android seems like a no-brainer to me. (The threading model might be an issue)<p>Replacing Java with Go would be more interesting to me personally, but it's a stretch as very few people speak that language yet.