Jobs and Ellison are buddies -- I would find it surprising if Oracle went after Apple over some Java legal issue. My bet is on shoddy UI, plus the time invested vs. payoff balance.
I have found this thread blissfully flamewar free regards business motivations. That said, I think this first mention of business issues is both overdue and needing expansion.
How can one look at the deprecation of a particular runtime in isolation from (a) Apple's simultaneous announcement of increasing commonality of iOS and OSX, and (b) Oracle's aggressive enforcement of comm-related java libraries?
Since Apple sells and approves all app-store products, they bear plausible liability for an iOS app, if Oracle was lawsuit-minded. I would hardly be surprised to learn that Oracle will NOT sue Apple over runtimes that could trip up Google, thanks to Apple's agreement to remove possibly-offending code.
Or, alternatively, if you have an iOS app that wants to do comm in java, how could Apple field an alternative library to one that Oracle claims is theirs?
This makes Apple-supplied java runtimes a dead end. We'll see how interested Oracle is in licensing alternatives.
> I would hardly be surprised to learn that Oracle will NOT sue Apple over runtimes that could trip up Google
I think the difference is that Apple licenses/d Java and bundles a standard VM and framework, while Google did not do so - they just used the language with their own VM and framework distinctly different from, say, J2ME.
I think it's more that now Ellison owns Java/Sun, he wants control. Jobs was happy to hand over the resource-suck since he sees the future as iOS apps and appstore anyway.
