Wednesday, November 14, 2007

Stefano's Linotype ~ Dalvik: how Google routed around Sun's IP-based licensing restrictions on Java ME

Hmmm....

Today Google released the Android code and I took a serious look at its internals... and found the solution for the licensing problem. It's called Dalvik and it's the new name of Sun's worst nightmares.

Dalvik is a virtual machine, just like Java's or .NET's.. but it's Google's own and they're making it open source without having to ask permission to anyone (well, for now, in the future expect a shit-load of IP-related lawsuits on this, especially since Sun and Microsoft signed a cross-IP licensing agreement on exactly such virtual machines technologies years ago... but don't forget IBM who has been writing emulation code for mainframes since the beginning of time).

But Android's programs are written in Java, using Java-oriented IDEs (it also comes with an Eclipse plugin)... it just doesn't compile the java code into java bytecode but (ops, Sun didn't see this one coming) into Dalvik bytecode.

Read the full post for more details.

Via Miguel de Icaza

 

Stefano's Linotype ~ Dalvik: how Google routed around Sun's IP-based licensing restrictions on Java ME

No comments: