Let Them Fight: My Thoughts on #Googacle

It's wonderful to have the Oracle vs Google trial in San Francisco, so I can have the mental image of Google's Bugdroid and Java's Duke laying waste to the city like Godzilla and the MUTOs. Because, ultimately, that's what this is; two kaiju companies fighting it out at tremendous cost, and a man in a black robe taking the Ken Watanabe role saying "Let Them Fight".

Please, someone who can draw, put this up on DeviantArt. I need to see this.

I've said "I'm biased; I like every Google product I've worked with, and hate every Oracle product I've worked with." But this isn't true, because, on the one hand, VirtualBox and MySQL, and on the other, Google Wave.

B)

But I admit my biases, and I do question them. Sun had the philosophy of "Software is free, hardware pays the bills", and licensed in accordance with that. This is why, after Oracle bought Sun, the Sun team in charge of MySQL could fork the GPLd code, leave to form MariaDB after (as I understand it) little more than a name change, and leave Oracle barely maintaining a direct competitor to their core product.

Sun open-sourced Java. Soon after I started CS, it became the language with which programming is taught at the college level. I think this is stupid, because the main benefit of Java is "write once, run anywhere", which is a direct response to the Unix Wars, where companies would make small weird incompatible changes to differentiate their kit from their competitors. Linux won the Unix wars, and now, you make one ELF-formatted executable and package it in DEB or RPM and you basically have 97.3% of server rooms, or more, once you factor in virtual machines.

"Write once, run anywhere" is a dead concept.

Java is still a core language, though, and Google, moving into a new, untested environment with a new, untested operating system, wanted something that programmers would feel comfortable with, so they went with Java.

But Java runtimes, as they existed at that time, were not up to the task, and they chose to re-implement Java, or at least a small subset of Java, so it behaved like Java to the Java devs they wanted to be Android devs.

This is where the question is. Oracle says "You didn't license it". Google says "We did license it; it's called the GPL". Or, at least, that's my understanding of the arguments; a big lesson of this trial is that developers shouldn't talk like lawyers and lawyers shouldn't talk like developers; that way lies to legal troubles.

The GPL is what makes Linux free, and so much else. There's a LAMP stack (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP*) that allowed so much of the changes in the last 20 years. Without LAMP, without GPL, there's no Amazon, no Google, no Facebook.

(Let's pretend, for the purposes of this rant, that this is all good, okay?)

This is a battle between kaiju. Google cares about me as little as Godzilla cares about Elizabeth Olsen. But we still want Godzilla to defeat the MUTOs and Mecha-Godzilla and whatever comes up, and, because it uses as tools the things I associate with freedom, I still want Godzilla ... I mean Google, to win.

Death of a Project

Years ago, I learned some R. When I was doing so, I had decided to move from just being a vi man to trying something a little more modern, so I was using ActiveState's KomodoEdit.

A problem was that KomodoEdit had syntax highlighting for many languages, but not R. So, I did some digging, found some code that did what I wanted that someone else abandoned, adapted it some and made it work. Then I made it a GitHub repo called RLangSyntax. I had an itch, I scratched it, I made the backscratcher available to others and I went on with my life, eventually moving to SublimeText.

Until ActiveState released Komodo(IDE|Edit) 9, and I started getting issues in my repo. Those issues were solved by incrementing maxVersion from 8 to 9, and then by remembering and documenting the build process and adding a release download of the resulting xpi. And, because I've gone on to other languages and editors, I left it.

Until ActiveState released KomodoIDE X for 10. I figured that, as with 9, I'd eventually get issues, and so I decided to jump ahead of it. I installed KomodoIDE, tried to install RLangSyntax to see what the errors were. I contacted the support team and asked them a few questions, like "can I just assume Komodo will keep the same engine for syntax highlighting, so I can set maxVersion as 20 or something and let it go?"

Here I wish to say that, for both the 8->9 and 9->X conversions, the Komodo support team was helpful, friendly and intense. A bit more intense than I like, but being helpful and friendly leads me to forgive a lot. I use Sublime Text and vi for my editing needs, but I certainly feel that Komodo could work for me. I like how KomodoIDE takes it's cue from Sublime Text and Atom.

But I make the minimum changes to get it to install and start waiting for the automated checking of their version of Package Manager will take place, and I get this comment:

"Hey guys, I do want to point out that as of Komodo 9.3 we have built-in support for R lang syntax."

Ahem.

I'm happy that happened. I really am. R is really not a thing I touch anymore. I look at ggplot2 and think "Hey, I could make really pretty plots with that", but I don't have reason to make new plots or change old plots right now. And, I'm very happy with my Sublime Text environment. This is an important change for both R and KomodoIDE, and I'm happy.

But, of all the toys I released on GitHub, this is the one that had the most interaction, which implies the most use. One measure of value as a programmer is the number of users your code has, and the change, while of use to those who code in R with KomodoIDE, makes me a programmer of lesser import. But, really, not so much, because beyond packaging and iterating maxVersion, I didn't add much.

So, that repo's documentation now reads: "You probably don't want to use this project. So long, and thanks for the fish."