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Oracle Sues Google For Infringing Java Patents
Bruce Perens writes "Oracle has brought a lawsuit against Google claiming that Google has infringed patents on the Java platform in Android. Scribd has a copy of the complaint. But there's a patent grant that should allow Google to use Java royalty-free. Has Google failed to meet the terms of the grant?"
Google should have bought Sun. They had all kinds of interesting projects, people, patents and research happening. Plus they also would have had the SPARC platform (not big iron, but the CMT implementations) that, given enough investment, could have paid off in the long run for their commodity datacenters.
For 7 billion, Sun was worth it. I wonder why they just let it pass.
Your satire is well taken. Here's an example, Rare Sharing of Data Leads to Progress on Alzheimer's, that shows how much can be accomplished when everyone agrees to share and work together. Perhaps this collaboration is not perfect and the outcome not certain, but perhaps it's a start. We accomplish more when we work together.
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
So much for all the people who said that Java was open, free, and not patent-encumbered. The Java patent grant set up conditions that you can essentially not meet unless you use Sun/Oracle's version. And the fact that Sun was going to be taken over was obvious for years. I had just hoped it was going to be IBM, who wouldn't have done this sort of thing.
It was Sun who never submitted Java to ISO or ANSI, it was Sun who created a dual-licensed Java, it was Sun who filed hundreds of patents on Java-related technologies, and it was Sun who created the limited patent grant under conditions that nobody could meet.
And it was predictable that Sun would eventually fail and get bought by someone who might start to enforce those patents; in fact, the reason Oracle was willing to outbid everybody else was probably because they realized that these patents hadn't been placed fully into the public domain.
I had been warning about this for years, but all the Java fanboys were arguing that Sun was the good guys, that they would never sue, and that Java was a free and open platform.
Do your homework people: what has happened was predictable, and the evil seeds were sown by Sun itself.
It will be hard to find out whether Oracle planned this kind of aggression when buying Sun, but it can certainly be stated that the free software/open source community hasn't benefited from the acquisition.
There's a number of important questions that Oracle's patent attack raises:
This is a patent dispute with very wide-ranging implications.
Just for the record: What Sun said (now Oracle still says) about reading Oracle Java source code and creating a clean room implementation: JAVA RESEARCH LICENSE FAQ Question 18
18. Does the JRL prevent me from being able to create an independent open source implementation of the licensed technology?
The JRL is not a tainting license and includes an express "residual knowledge" clause which says you're not contaminated by things you happen to remember after examining the licensed technology. The JRL allows you to use the source code for the purpose of JRL-related activities but does not prohibit you from working on an independent implementation of the technology afterwards. Obviously, if your intention is to create an "independent" implementation of the technology then it is inappropriate to actively study JRL source while working on such an implementation. It is appropriate, however, to allow some decent interval of time (e.g. two weeks) to elapse between working on a project that involves looking at some JRL source code and working on a project that involves creating an independent implementation of the same technology
Android has its own VM called Dalvik. You use Java tools to compile to JVM bytecode and then there's a translater to Dalvik bytecode.
Maybe Oracle believe Dalvik implements their patented techniques.
Most are saying that they are going after google's jme which is quite interesting since google built (Dalvik) themselves to get around these licensing issues, although if they did use ip from Sun for Dalvik then maybe they have a case, although only the code will tell. Here are also some interesting reads on the matter besides those in the summary:
http://www.itworld.com/071116googlesun
http://www.betaversion.org/~stefano/linotype/news/110/
Miguel de Icaza gives a pretty good guess about what's happened.
The gist is that Sun very carefully licensed Java under the GPL with an agreement that anyone who implements Java 100%, without supersetting, would get access to the patents. Apparently Sun's embedded implementations have some special functionality not included in the GPLed version. This is where the "very carefully" bit comes in -- it means others can't implement their own embedded versions (adding that special functionality would be supersetting), and would have to license Sun's version. Their embedded implementation generates the bulk of the cash for them, and they wanted to protect that.
Google wanted to use Java but didn't want everyone to need to license the embedded version. So they implemented their own. To get around the supersetting issue, they changed their implementation (Dalvik) to not infringe on Sun's patents -- even going so far as to change the bytecode format and implementing a Java->Dalvik bytecode translator.
Now Sun sees everyone hopping on the Android train for all sorts of devices, and no licensing fees coming in from any of them. And they're suing.
It sounds plausible to me but Miguel is the author of Mono, so take this with a grain of salt. He's usually the one having an argument against someone saying how everyone should use Java because Microsoft will pull the same type of stunt against Mono some day, so this must be a humorous day for him.