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Will Google Stop Using Java?
Google is so hacked off with Oracle’s java antics it is seriously considering taking it out of Android and replacing it with Apple’s open sauce Swift software.
While we would have thought that there would be little choice between Oracle and Apple as evil software outfits, the fact that Apple uncharacteristically made Swift open source might make life a bit brighter for Google. At the moment Oracle is suing Google for silly money for its Java use in Android.
Swift was created as a replacement for Objective C, and is pretty easy-to-write. It was introduced at WWDC 2014, and has major support from IBM as well as a variety of major apps like Lyft, Pixelmator and Vimeo that have all rebuilt iOS apps with Swift.
But since Apple open sourced Swift, Google, Facebook and Uber have al said that they are interested in it. Taking Java out of Android is a big job. Google would also have to make its entire standard library Swift-ready, and support the language in APIs and SDKs. Some low-level Android APIs are C++, which Swift cannot bridge to. Higher level Java APIs would also have to be re-written.
Of course if it did all this, Apple might realize that its biggest rival was using its own software to club it to death. It might not be be so nice about allowing Swift out to play and eventually Google have to fork Swift and dump the Apple version. This would probably result in an anst-ridden moan album about how life is so unfair which makes a fortune while scoring passive agressive revenge on the dumpee.
Courtesy-Fud
Can Oracle Make Money Off Android?
Database outfit Oracle’s moves to try and copyright APIs appear to be part of an attempt for Oracle to make money on Android.
Oracle has asked a U.S. judge for permission to update its copyright lawsuit against Google to include the Android which it claims contains its Java APIs.
Oracle sued Google five years ago and is seeking roughly $1 billion in copyright claims if it manages to convince a court that its APIs are in Android it could up the damages by several billions.
Oracle wrote in a letter to Judge William Alsup on Wednesday that the record of the first trial does not reflect any of these developments in the market, including Google’s dramatically enhanced market position in search engine advertising and the overall financial results from its continuing and expanded infringement.
Last month, the US Supreme Court upheld an appeals court’s ruling that allows Oracle to seek licensing fees for the use of some of the Java language. Google had said it should use Java APIs without paying a fee.
Amazon Web Services Goes Zocalo
Amazon Web Services (AWS) has announced two much-needed boosts to its fledgling Zocalo productivity platform, making the service mobile and allowing for file capacities of up to 5TB.
The service, which is designed to do what Drive does for Google and what Office 365 does for software rental, has gained mobile apps for the first time as Zocalo appears on the Google Play store and Apple App Store.
Amazon also mentions availability on the Kindle store, but we’re not sure about that bit. We assume it means the Amazon App Store for Fire tablet users.
The AWS blog says that the apps allow the user to “work offline, make comments, and securely share documents while you are in the air or on the go.”
A second announcement brings Zocalo into line with the AWS S3 storage on which it is built. Users will receive an update to their Zocalo sync client which will enable file capacities up to 5TB, the same maximum allowed by the Amazon S3 cloud.
To facilitate this, multi-part uploads will allow users to carry on an upload from where it was after a break, deliberate or accidental.
Zocalo was launched in July as the fight for enterprise storage productivity hots up. The service can be trialled for 30 days free of charge, offering 200GB each for up to 50 users.
Rival services from companies including the aforementioned Microsoft and Google, as well as Dropbox and Box, coupled with aggressive price cuts across the sector, have led to burgeoning wars for the hearts and minds of IT managers as Microsoft’s Office monopoly begins to wane.
Amazon Intel Zeon Inside
Amazon has become the latest vendor to commission a customized Xeon chip from Intel to meet its exact compute requirements, in this case powering new high-performance C4 virtual machine instances on the AWS cloud computing platform.
Amazon announced at the firm’s AWS re:Invent conference in Las Vegas that the latest generation of compute-optimized Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) virtual machine instances offer up to 36 virtual CPUs and 60GB of memory.
“These instances are designed to deliver the highest level of processor performance on EC2. If you’ve got the workload, we’ve got the instance,” said AWS chief evangelist Jeff Barr, detailing the new instances on the AWS blog.
The instances are powered by a custom version of Intel’s latest Xeon E5 v3 processor family, identified by Amazon as the Xeon E5-2666 v3. This runs at a base speed of 2.9GHz, and can achieve clock speeds as high as 3.5GHz with Turbo boost.
Amazon is not the first company to commission a customized processor from Intel. Earlier this year, Oracle unveiled new Sun Server X4-4 and Sun Server X4-8 systems with a custom Xeon E7 v2 processor.
The processor is capable of dynamically switching core count, clock frequency and power consumption without the need for a system level reboot, in order to deliver an elastic compute capability that adapts to the demands of the workload.
However, these are just the vendors that have gone public; Intel claims it is delivering over 35 customized versions of the Intel Xeon E5 v3 processor family to various customers.
This is an area the chipmaker seems to be keen on pursuing, especially with companies like cloud service providers that purchase a great many chips.
“We’re really excited to be working with Amazon. Amazon’s platform is the landing zone for a lot of new software development and it’s really exciting to partner with those guys on a SKU that really meets their needs,” said Dave Hill, senior systems engineer in Intel’s Datacenter Group.
Also at AWS re:Invent, Amazon announced the Amazon EC2 Container Service, adding support for Docker on its cloud platform.
Currently available as a preview, the EC2 Container Service is designed to make it easy to run and manage distributed applications on AWS using containers.
Customers will be able to start, stop and manage thousands of containers in seconds, scaling from one container to hundreds of thousands across a managed cluster of Amazon EC2 instances, the firm said.
Google Goes To The Supreme Court
Google has asked the U.S. Supreme Court to rule on contentious litigation against Oracle arguing that the high court must act to protect innovation in high tech.
Google’s request seeks to overturn an appeals court ruling that found Oracle could copyright APIs of its Java programming language, which Google used to design its Android smartphone operating system.
Oracle sued Google in 2010, claiming that Google had improperly incorporated parts of Java into Android. Oracle wants $1 billion on its copyright claims. Oracle claimed Google’s Android trampled on its rights to the structure of 37 Java APIs. A San Francisco federal judge had decided that Oracle could not claim copyright protection on parts of Java, but earlier this year the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit in Washington disagreed.
In its filing this week, Google said the company would never been able to innovate had the Federal Circuit’s reasoning been in place when the company was formed.
“Early computer companies could have blocked vast amounts of technological development by claiming 95-year copyright monopolies over the basic building blocks of computer design and programming,” Google wrote.
SkySQL Joins IBM On SQL Merger
SkySQL has announced a line of MariaDB products that combine NoSQL and SQL technology, offering users the ability to handle large unstructured data sets alongside traditional database features to ensure data consistency.
Available immediately, MariaDB Enterprise 2 and MariaDB Enterprise Cluster 2 are based on the code used in the firm’s MariaDB 10 database server, which it also released today.
According to SkySQL, the availability of an enterprise grade SQL database system with NoSQL interoperability will be a game changer for developers building revenue generating applications and database administrators in charge of large, complex environments.
The two new products have been developed with support from other partners in the open source community, including Red Hat, IBM and Google, according to the firm, and are aimed at giving IT managers more options for managing large volumes of data.
In fact, Red Hat will use MariaDB Enterprise 2 as the default database for its enterprise customers, while Google has also moved large parts of its infrastructure to MariaDB, according to Dion Cornett, VP of Global Sales for SkySQL .
Cornett said that customers have been using a wide variety of databases over the past few years in order to meet the diverse requirements of applications.
“The types of applications have evolved over time, and the challenge we now have today is that people have different IT stack structures, and trying to integrate all that has been very challenging and required lots of custom code to be created. What we’re doing with MariaDB is introduce an array of features to combine the best of both worlds,” he said.
The features are designed to allow developers and database administrators to take many different data structures and integrate them and use them in a cohesive application, in the same way that standard database tools presently allow.
These include the Connect Storage Engine, which enables access to a wide variety of file formats such as XML and CSV files, and the ability to run familiar SQL commands against that data.
A key feature is dynamic columns, which enables MariaDB to “smartly interpret” incoming data and adapt it to the data structure that best fits, according to Cornett.
“At a technical level what you’re actually looking at are files within the cells of information that can vary in size, which is not a capability you’ve traditionally had in databases and that flexibility is a big leap forward,” he said.
The new MariaDB products can also plug into the Apache Cassandra storage engine, which can take a columnar data store and read or write against it like it is a traditional SQL table.
An example of how MariaDB Enterprise 2 might be used is if a service provider has a large-scale video server and wants to combine that with billing information, Cornett said.
“The customer’s video history and what they’re consuming could be very unstructured, but the billing structure will be very fixed, and it has been something of a challenge to bring the two of those together up to this point,” he explained.
Particle Accelerator Put On A Chip
Researchers at the Stanford Linear Accelerator (SLAC) National Accelerator Laboratory have demonstrated a “particle accelerator on a chip”.
The Stanford University facility believes that the tiny particle accelerator has applications in science and medicine. A series of the miniature accelerators 100 feet long potentially could be more powerful than SLAC’s existing two mile long linear accelerator, despite each little segment being a glass chip smaller than a single grain of rice.
In a statement, experiment leader Joel England of SLAC said, “We still have a number of challenges before this technology becomes practical for real-world use, but eventually it would substantially reduce the size and cost of future high-energy particle colliders for exploring the world of fundamental particles and forces.”
At a practical level the accelerator could power tiny portable X-ray scanners used for treating military casualties in the field, as well as for use in security operations in airports and a wide range of scientific research.
Before we get too excited, it is worth pointing out that at the moment there is no compact way to get electrons up to the speed that the accelerator can work with, so at this stage, we have a two mile long machine with a tiny working part, but this is a major leap forward toward finding an alternative to microwaves in particle accelerators and making the process more portable.
Stanford University professor and principal investigator Robert Byer added, “Our ultimate goal for this structure is [one] billion electron volts per meter, and we’re already one-third of the way in our first experiment.”
We hope that this could also lead to the ability to create wormholes into other galaxies. But we doubt it.
Oracle Issues Massive Security Update
Oracle has issued its critical patch update advisory for July, plugging a total of 89 security holes across its product portfolio.
The fixes focus mainly on remotely exploitable vulnerabilities in four widely used products, with 27 fixes issued for the Oracle Database, Fusion Middleware, the Oracle and Sun Systems Product Suite and the MySQL database.
Out of the 89 security fixes included with this update, the firm said six are for Oracle Database, with one of the vulnerabilities being remotely exploitable without authentication.
Oracle revealed that the highest CVSS Base Score for these database vulnerabilities is 9.0, a score related to vulnerability CVE-2013-3751, which affects the XML Parser on Oracle Database 11.2.0.2 and 11.2.0.3.
A further 21 patched vulnerabilities listed in Oracle’s Critical Patch Update are for Oracle Fusion Middleware; 16 of these vulnerabilities are remotely exploitable without authentication, with the highest CVSS Base Score being 7.5.
As for the Oracle and Sun Systems Products Suite, these products received a total of 16 security fixes, eight of which were also remotely exploitable without authentication, with a maximum CVSS Base Score of 7.8.
“As usual, Oracle recommends that customers apply this Critical Patch Update as soon as possible,” Oracle’s director of Oracle Software Security Assurance Eric Maurice wrote in a blog post.
Craig Young, a security researcher at Tripwire commented on the Oracle patch, saying the “drumbeat of critical patches” is more than alarming because the vulnerabilities are frequently reported by third parties who presumably do not have access to full source code.
“It’s also noteworthy that […] every Oracle CPU release this year has plugged dozens of vulnerabilities,” he added. “By my count, Oracle has already acknowledged and fixed 343 security issues in 2013. In case there was any doubt, this should be a big red flag to end users that Oracle’s security practices are simply not working.”
Oracle Changing Berkeley
Oracle has changed the license of its embedded database library, Berkeley DB. The software is widely used as a key-value store within other applications and historically used an OSI-approved strong copyleft license which was similar to the GPL.
Under that license, distributing software that embedded Berkeley DB involved also providing “information on how to obtain complete source code for the DB software and any accompanying software that uses the DB software.”
Now future versions of Berkeley DB use the GNU Affero General Public License (AGPL). This says “your modified version must prominently offer all users interacting with it remotely through a computer network … an opportunity to receive the Corresponding Source of your version.”
This will cause some problems for Web developers using Berkeley DB for local storage. Compliance has not really been an issue because they never “redistributed” the source of their Web apps.Now they will have to make sure their whole Web app is compliant with the AGPL and make full corresponding source to their Web application available.
They also need to ensure the full app has compatible licensing. Practically that means that the whole source code has to be licensed under the GPLv3 or the AGPL.
Will Oracle Retire MySQL?
The founder of MySQL Michael Widenius “Monty” claims that Oracle is killing off his MySQL database and he is recommending that people move to his new project MariaDB. In an interview with Muktware Widenius said his MariaDB, which is also open source, its on track to replacing MySQL at WikiMedia and other major organizations and companies.
He said MySQL was widely popular long before MySQL was bought by Sun because it was free and had good support. There was a rule that anyone should get MySQL up and running in 15 minutes. Widenius was concerned about MySQL’s sale to Oracle and has been watching as the popularity of MySQL has been declining. He said that Oracle was making a number of mistakes. Firstly new ‘enterprise’ extensions in MySQL were closed source, the bugs database is not public, and the MySQL public repositories are not anymore actively updated.
Widenius said that security problems were not communicated nor addressed quickly and instead of fixing bugs, Oracle is removing features. It is not all bad. Some of the new code is surprisingly good by Oracle, but unfortunately the quality varies and a notable part needs to be rewritten before we can include it in things like MariaDB. Widenius said that it’s impossible for the community to work with the MySQL developers at Oracle as it doesn’t accept patches, does not have a public roadmap and there was no way to discuss with MySQL developers how to implement things or how the current code works.
Basically Oracle has made the project less open and the beast has tanked, while at the same time more open versions of the code, such as MariaDB are rising in popularity.