Java is dead.

A lot of developers have thought they were too hip for Java, but I still liked it. I implemented SAX in Java first of all, and have developed software in Java and encouraged my enterprise customers to use it for many years, sometimes in 9-figure projects at Fortune-500 companies — it’s a great, mature platform, with a lot of tools for managing large projects and development teams, and it has unit-testing and IDE support that is second to none.

But now, Oracle (which recently bought Sun) has decided to sue Google for using Java in Android, even though (a) Sun long ago open sourced Java, and (b) Google built its own VM anyway. I very much hope that Oracle will suffer the same humiliating, crushing, well-deserved defeat that the SCO group suffered when it went after Linux with its own bogus law suits, but it will take years for that to happen. The Android and Blackberry mobile operating systems will be fine, and Java (of a sort) will live on there (though I still recommend web apps instead of phone apps), but the days of Java and Eclipse in the enterprise are finished.

In the meantime, there are lots of open alternatives to Java, and the litigation risks of using Java have suddenly become far too high. In my consulting work, I’ll reluctantly have to advise customers not to use Java for any new projects, and to consider migrating older projects to a different platform. If you’re a big company or government, you just can’t afford the risk that Oracle will come after you, too.

I’m sorry the end was so sudden and messy, but still, it was a great 15 years. Thanks to James Gosling and all the other people in the Java community for the memories and opportunities.

So what happened last week?  Did Google backtrack after getting caught trying to be evil about net neutrality and the mobile internet, or were they a victim of a misunderstanding (gleefully amplified by blood-thirsty Apple and RIM supporters)?

Net neutrality is a crucial issue for those of us who care about open information.  We believe that the Internet is a public thoroughfare, where every information provider has the same access.  Competing web sites shouldn’t have their traffic slowed down because Google or Microsoft paid more money to Verizon, Rogers, or Bell, any more than you should have to pull to the side of the road to let someone in a more expensive car pass you.

Carriers in search of a business plan

For obvious reasons, the Internet providers don’t see it that way. They’ve ended up stuck in the rut of commodity service, with the inevitable race to the bottom for price, and are desperate to find some new revenue.  The mobile Internet providers are a little better off because they can at least lock customers into three-year contracts by giving them subsidized smartphones, but it’s still clear that someone like Verizon would be thrilled be able to take a big bag of money from Google in exchange for letting Google sites load a little faster than anyone else’s.

It turns out, though, that that’s not what Google was trying to do.

Neutral in what sense?

The Google-Verizon kerfuffle draws attention to a different, and trickier part of the debate.  What if, instead of discriminating by provider (Google vs Facebook), carriers discriminated by traffic type? In other words, what if streaming audio and video got priority handling to avoid jerky playback, while e-mail was delayed an extra 2-4 seconds? All streaming video would get the same treatment, whether it comes from YouTube or a student’s dorm-room start-up, and all e-mail would get the same treatment, whether it’s from IBM or a LOL cats fan list.

According to Google’s CEO, Eric Schmidt, this is what Verizon and Google were talking about all along: not favouring one provider over another, but favouring one content type over another.

Is it still evil?

I expect that many people who support net neutrality for providers won’t feel so strongly about net neutrality for content types, because it doesn’t have the same appearance of unfairness.

Going back to the thoroughfare analogy, we have sidewalks where only pedestrians are allowed, paths where only cyclists are allowed, crossings that pedestrians aren’t allowed to use, and superhighways where only motor vehicles are allowed. Buses and carpoolers are sometimes allowed to use a faster lane, trucks are sometimes required to stay in the slower lanes, and so on.  Why can’t we have different lanes for different kinds of network traffic, too?

Net neutrality makes sense for content types, too

There are, however, four compelling arguments in favour of net neutrality by content type as well as provider:

1. Pandora’s Box — it seems straight-forward enough to give streaming video priority over email, but how far might carriers take it? Will carriers throttle IM during the next G8 summit to make it harder for protesters to organize? Will government regulators prefer content types that are more popular among the old than the young?
2. Business/content-type alignment — as the owner of the world’s top video site, Google has a strong interest in making video on the mobile web faster, even if it means that its competitors’ videos are faster too. This kind of thing could turn evil fast — imagine Adobe and Apple in a bidding war to determine whether Flash should be delivered faster or slower than other content types, or the recording industry lobbying to throttle bittorrent so much that it becomes useless.
3. Innovation — the Internet already existed when HTML and HTTP arrived on the scene 20 years ago. If the net hadn’t been neutral then, perhaps priority would have gone to important existing protocols like telnet and FTP, and HTTP (and HTML) might have been slow enough to turn off early adopters. We don’t know what The Next Big Thing will be, but we do know that regulators respond slowly to change. Why shut the door on innovation?
4. Routing around censorship — seriously, how long will it take a few enterprising developers to realize that they can build an “accelerated download” app that allows other traffic to masquerade as video (or whatever has top priority). Seconds? Less? You can make anything look like anything else on the Internet, and everyone thinks that his/her traffic is most important.

It’s OK to be wrong sometimes

Google is a company that embraces failure, which, perhaps, is why it has so many successes: Google puts products out early, lets us play with them, then feeds the ones that succeed (e.g. Gmail) and kills the ones that don’t (e.g. Wave).

Perhaps Google is willing to try the same thing with ideas — they’re not necessarily evil for suggesting dropping net neutrality for content types, but they are wrong. Let’s treat the whole thing as a failed project and move on, concentrating on making the net (mobile or desktop) faster for all providers, and all content types.

I left this comment on Simon St-Laurent’s interesting and thoughtful post How dare Apple … (which, in turn, was partly a response to Tim Bray’s post Nothing Creative).

I don’t believe that most things, including the iPad, are obviously right or wrong, but I do have serious concerns that go beyond simply not being able to code on an iPad (at least, until there’s an app for that). I’m copying my comment here to give it a more permanent home. If I hadn’t posted this yet, I’d edit it to tone down the emotional language 10% or so, but still, it’s a fair reflection of my thoughts and concerns, not about the iPad itself (it’s just another consumer device), but about the way people are starting to talk and think about issues that are very important to me, like software freedom:

The thing about creativity is that it responds poorly to central planning and central control. I have no problem with the fact that the iPad isn’t developer-friendly — I can buy a Netbook with twice the power for half the price and code on it (and, BTW, that netbook makes just as simple a consumer device).

My problem is the idea that a single Apple politburo controls everything that can appear on the device. Is that the future? Even in the bad old days of TV, before cable, there were 3 1/2 US networks to choose from, not just one – you had to watch TV outside the US to see just how bad things could get with a single, government-controlled broadcaster (I grew up in Canada, but close enough to watch the US stations, thank god).

Apple’s obsession with central control goes beyond software to hardware. There must be some kind of port for the optional keyboard to plug into, but no way it’s going to be USB or Firewire, because that might let someone use an *unplanned* creative device on the iPad, someone creative daring not to give Apple its cut (and veto). If I build something clever for creative people using a USB interface, it will work with desktop towers, notebooks, netbooks, and even some small portable devices, but *not* with the iPad.

Apple has some smart people working there, but they won’t always have the best ideas, and Apple has thrown up too many barriers to other people with smart ideas. The best apps in the future are going to come from a couple of students coding in a dorm room, and they might just be so annoyed by Apple censorship that they defect to a freer platform. It’s sad that things have gotten to the point that even Windows is a freer platform than Apple.

Case in point: in the information technology world, the greatest accomplishment of the most talented coders and business people in GenX was replacing the Baby Boomers’ nasty old platform-dependent shrink-wrapped computer applications with open web applications that could run anywhere, from a Windows desktop to a Linux cell phone. Write once, run all over the place on any hardware/OS you want. GMail instead of Eudora. Wikipedia instead of Encarta. Cool, eh?

So GenY comes along and says “hey: instead of encouraging people to browse the web with open standards, let’s build proprietary applications that run on only one type of mobile phone. And we’ll allow only one store to sell those applications for each type of phone, and every proprietary, platform-specific app will have to be preapproved and precensored by the phone manufacturer, who will extort^H^H^H^H^H^H be gladly offered a cut of sales.” Even Microsoft in its monopolistic hey-day — before it became the toothless lion it is today — never had the balls to try anything like that with Windows apps.

Who, ten years ago, would have predicted an IT catastrophe like this after so much progress and hope? It’s enough to make a person cry. Let’s encourage those GenY’ers who taken up the torch and continue to work on the dream of an open web.

Dual-licensing is a popular Open Source business model, especially using the (very restrictive) Gnu General Public License (GPL). Popular opinion, as reflected (for example) in the comments on this blog posting, says that it’s either forbidden or highly questionable to do things like linking non-GPL things with GPL things, so enterprises will have to buy a dual-licensed version (instead of using the free GPL version of the software) to take advantage of closed-source enterprise components.

Image: Thomas Penn, second proprietor of Pennsylvania, not as nice as his dad William.

Almost a year ago, I wrote that Open data matters more than Open Source — it doesn’t matter (to you, the end user) whether a web site is using Open Source software or not, if they still keep your data locked up.

Here’s a nasty example: Robert Scoble has just had his Facebook account disabled for running a script to try to scrape his personal information off the site (since Facebook doesn’t provide him with any other way to get it).

I understand that Facebook needs to protect against malicious bots — and they might decide to restore his account once they know what Robert was actually trying to do (though for now all traces of him have vanished) — but do we really want to have hope for the good will of social sites and beg for our own data every time we want it? Are web site owners the new version of the Proprietors in the early American colonies, who can grant rights as favours when they see fit?

What happened? This customer had a large mailing list that they used for announcements, etc. My guess is that they sent out an announcement, a lot of other gmail-users flagged it as spam, and whatever weighting algorithm gmail uses tipped it over so that the messages were no longer considered legit by default. I was able to train gmail not to treat those messages as spam (for me, specifically), but it took a week or two before I could trust that some of them weren’t being sent to the spam box.

Hard-core spammers have always had to deal with this kind of thing, and they spend a lot of time trying to figure out a way around it. What’s happening now, though, is that companies with legit (or semi-legit) e-mail lists are also starting to get into trouble, because web-mail makes it possible for hundreds or thousands of people to get together and all vote your e-mail to be undesirable.

Here’s one easy way: via TechCrunch, Deutsche Grammophon, the gold standard in renaissance/ baroque/ classical/ romantic/ orchestral/ opera/ etc. music (often confusingly referred to collectively as “classical”, roughly equivalent calling all popular music since 1890 “rap”), will start selling their catalogue as unprotected MP3s at midnight German time tonight (6:00 pm in New York City) at their new site dgwebshop.com.

As a teenager in the late 1970s, I used to visit the House of Sound in Kingston (Canada), where they had thousands of DG records — probably most of the catalogue — packed in tight on on shelves lining a wall of the store. I couldn’t always afford them, but I loved being able just to pull them out and take a look at the covers of the different famous recordings. These days, the so-called classical music section of any but a couple of specialized stores in big cities like New York or London have maybe one or two rows of worthless classical-pop compilations hidden behind the DVDs of TV series nobody watched in the 1980s — no wonder people don’t shop at record stores any more.

We tech types have been claiming for a while that music companies could make more money selling unprotected digital music, so here’s the test. I plan to give them a lot of my own money if the site actually works, though I should note a couple of caveats:

1. Many current DG buyers are audiophiles who won’t be satisfied with the sound quality of MP3s (which are optimized more for boom-boom music), so this will probably open a new market for DG rather than leaching their current one.
2. DG’s market is mostly affulent people outside the intense social environment of high school or university, so people will be less likely to share these MP3s — and even if they do, it will probably just act as a promo for the higher quality recordings.

I hope the site can handle the traffic. Rock on, Deutsche Grammophon!

But is that true?

When I read blogs and other stuff written by lawyers, VCs, and other similar professionals, I’m usually struck by the lack of legal disclaimers — they don’t seem to worry so much when it’s their own necks on the line, or are satisfied with one very brief, casual-language disclaimer instead of pages of B.S.

That leads me to two questions:

1. Do disclaimers and long EULAs actually work? Does the amount of legal text have any correlation (positive or negative) with the likelihood of being successfully sued?
2. Is legal mumbo-jumbo something that lawyers push on companies, or something that paranoid company execs demand from their lawyers (maybe because everyone else has it)?

I’d be interested in pointers to any studies, etc.

Granted, anonymity has its ugly sides, like the disgusting online threats against Kathy Sierra and online abuse of Maryam Scoble, but it’s also sometimes the only conduit around the abusive authority of a government, employer, or even one’s peer group. As even Western democratic governments have become more authoritarian since 9/11, keeping these conduits open is more important than ever.

Granted, 99% or more of anonymous information is simply stupid or malicious, but if that’s the cost of freedom, it’s a relatively small cost to pay compared to the sacrifices our ancestors made to win us the freedoms in the first place.

… how much value do you think there is to be had from a snapshot of the source code for eBay or Facebook being made available? This is one area where Open Source offers no solution to the problem of vendor lock-in.

When trying to explain the absurdity of software patents, I’ve often used the example of books and movies. Imagine if someone could patent the idea of, say, a guy starting out badly and then redeeming himself, or of a man and woman appearing to hate each-other and then falling in love. While the Brown case used copyright rather than patent law, it came terrifyingly close to my example, since two authors (who do not deserve to be named or linked to here) accused Brown of stealing the idea of Jesus marrying Mary Magdalene and having kids, etc. from their book. Fortunately, the judge seems to have laughed the plaintiffs out of court, even referring to them as “authors of pretend historical books.”

There’s something else here that you might initially miss, however. Not only did the plaintiffs lose, but the judge ordered them to pay Brown’s publisher’s legal costs — that’s very common in Canada, and apparently also in Great Britain (where this case took place), especially when a judge believes that a lawsuit was unjustified. The two authors who sued Brown will have to pay a few hundred thousand pounds now. If U.S. courts commonly did the same thing, then maybe spurious law suits fishing for big settlements would be a lot less common down there.