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or RIM), agreed to this. At the time, it made sense—when the early versions of BlackBerry OS
came out, mobile CPUs were slow, and memory was limited, so a tiny “LCDUI” made sense.
When Google wanted to expand into the mobile space to expand the reach of its advertising busi-
ness, it soon found—and bought—a company called Android that had a Linux-based OS with a
rewritten Java implementation. Android's developers had tried to reason with Sun about using
more complete Java on mobile, given how mobile device CPU and memory was growing, but
were rebuffed. So they went off and built the Android user interface, which has since become the
most widely used Java platform. But during this time, Sun was acquired by Oracle.
Live on stage at the first JavaOne conference after the acquisition, Larry Ellison welcomed
Android as part of the Java ecosystem. But when Android continued its meteoric rise, Oracle's
lawyers thought they could muscle in on this, and Oracle sued Google for a billion dollars, al-
leging copyright, trademark, and trade secret violations. The suit was very complex, but one of
the most important aspects was Oracle's claim that it could copyright the API, separately from the
code. Thus, anybody ever wanting to write a class called
String
with the methods described in
the
String
class' javadoc page would have to apply for permission from Oracle. Needless to say,
several old-line software companies like Microsoft lined up with Oracle, while the entire open
source world lined up with Google, fearing the “chilling effects” this would have on the entire
open source world. And, fortunately for Android and for the open source world, so did the judge.
This suit was won by Google, but Oracle has since launched an appeal, which is moving through
the courts as this topic goes to press.
Oh, and back to BlackBerry. Unfortunately for BlackBerry, as time and Moore's Law marched on
in tandem, Java ME did not keep in step, and was left behind. BlackBerry, obligated to stay on the
ME platform, and unable to modify the Java ME classes, had to spend billions of dollars in R&D
through the late 1990s and the 2000s building a parallel package structure to provide modern GUI
and device capabilities, which it did all through OS versions 5, 6, and 7. When it finally dawned
on RIM management that the JVM+OS combination itself was the bottleneck, they first tried to
make their current JVM run on QNX, a Unix-based operating system from a company of the
same name, which RIM acquired. This was doomed to failure, but a skunkworks project within
the company took the open source Android and made that run in a matter of weeks. Managment
decided to abandon JavaME, and to abandon Java as their main app development language, but to
allow Java-based Android apps to run as almost-first-class citizens in the BB10 environment.
Alas, then the company took a year and a half to get QNX working well enough on its new
“BlackBerry 10” devices so that it could release it. During this time of uncertainty its sales
tanked. BB10 is now available, and works well enough (and runs most Android 4.2 apps). But
again, the jury is still out on whether BlackBerry can recover its destroyed market share, or will
fade away or be absorbed into another stream of development.
