The first thing I see on the Planet Apache feed is the news that Oracle are suing Google over Dalvik and, implictly, Apache Harmony
This is really going to cause fun in the open source world. I can see a fork coming on. Can you trust Oracle not to add features to Java just because they have patents on it?
Google Android must be wonderful and terrible for the Java team. Wonderful, because it finally supported the Java language on mobile phones on a platform that was actually good, finally built an application ecosystem. This was the reason why when Sun open sourced Java, they made sure the mobile version was GPL, so anyone embedding it in a phone would be motivated to pay $ for the real thing. Even if it was $0.15 a phone, at scale, that becomes profit. Which is why Sun wouldn't give Apache the test kit for the Harmony Runtime unless the ASF said "not to be used in mobile/embedded devices" (as if they could), and it's hence why Java 7 development has stalled (trouble in the Java oversight group). What development does go on uses the term "JDK 7" to get around the stalemate. Did all that posturing help Sun get Java into phones? Nope.
Android ships with Dalvik, which is not quite Java, according to Stefano, and I believe him.
However, there are patent issues, and had Sun given the ASF access to the TCK -as I believe they were obliged to do- those would have gone away, as compliant implementations get rights to those patents when they pass the tests. But by keeping the TCK, Harmony couldn't pass the tests, could it?
The other funny is that if you look at the complaint, you see at the top the names "BOIES, SCHILLER & FLEXNER". If I am not mistaken, they are the lawyers behind SCO's copyright lawsuit against IBM and Novell about Linux being based on Unix. Well, that was successful wasn't it? I consider, as I type this on my home laptop running Ubuntu 10.4 as every physical computer I use at work also does, from the desktop to the datacentre. It was such a good idea it created a whole web site Groklaw.
Looking forward to this. It could be entertaining.