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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?"
There's more info on en.swpat.org at:
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Not for MySQL (to kill) or their overpriced shitty hardware (to commoditize). They bought Sun for Java - you know how many other companies Oracle might have by the short and curlies now?
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
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I wonder if this could be as big and as interesting(for the geek community) a fight as SCO v Novell
There's an interesting comment on James Gosling's blog http://nighthacks.com/roller/jag/entry/the_shit_finally_hits_the
"Not a big surprise. During the integration meetings between Sun and Oracle where we were being grilled about the patent situation between Sun and Google, we could see the Oracle lawyer's eyes sparkle"
And yet more money get syphoned out of the IT industry into the lawyers pockets. Sigh
N.B. this user is far too lazy to write a witty and intelligent sig.
> The text of their lawsuit isn't available
Yes it is. I put it here:
Other info:
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That the first competing VM to be throttled by the patent holder would be a Java-based one, not a .NET-based one. I bet Steve Ballmer is laughing his ass off right now saying, "even I'm not that stupid."
Did you miss the part where SUN has (succesfully) sued Microsoft for the exact same thing?
God, it's like SCO & IBM again.
Stepping on the toes of just one the world's largest corporations not enough for them?
Isn't this exactly what Stallman warned when he suggested that Open Office should be forked because it used Java?
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.
- Software patents are not considered valid in the majority of the world, precisely because they get in the way of perfectly reasonable actions.
- Software patents on an "open" standard might not be enforceable if those patents are required to implement that standard, and are the only sensible way to do so. Interoperability with an existing product can't be protected by a patent if that patent is the only (or only sensible) way to do things.
- All the mentioned patents have prior art except one, which is so far worded towards Java only use that it falls foul of the previous statement (I didn't think you *could* patent something that specific to a particular product).
- The Oracle patents are particularly weak, most of them re-iterating 1980's knowledge of programming.
- Google probably has one of the largest patent profiles ever, especially in the area of collating huge amounts of data into a database - this is commercial suicide for Oracle who could well see a retaliatory attack that they just can't afford to defend against (yes, THAT many patents). Google's patents are likely to be MUCH more substantial than these Oracle ones.
- Sun never had a problem with IP protection. You don't need to protect your IP when "Java" is in everything from mobile phones to servers - basically Sun *WAS* Java and not much else before it was taken over, and saw no need to sue anyone at all substantial over patent infringement when it could have done at any time for even more cash.
- Going for Google first is commercial suicide - there will be other, smaller, players using third-party Java VM's.
- Suing immediately is a sign of desperation. Much more conducive to receiving compensation would have been quiet negotiations (there hasn't been ANY time for that since the Oracle takeover) and/or asking them to work around the patent at least. The path chosen is the most stupid and expensive.
- The lawyers here are Boies, Schiller & Flexner - the same ones that handled the SCO case's IP side. That went well for them. *fall into fits of derisive laughter*.
Much more likely is a quiet settlement involving cash, or Google saying "Go for it" and filing a counterclaim for a whole host of patents they own. Google can pretty much take Oracle to the cleaners if it wants. It makes me wonder why Oracle has set itself up to be that target.
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.
The GPL is irrelevant. It contains a patent grant that only applies to derived works of the GPL'd work. Dalvik is an independent implementation and so is neither bound by the GPL nor covered by the extra grants of rights that it contains.
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Google isn't really "using Java"; they are using the Java language, but almost none of the implementation or libraries.
Which is why Bruce Perens' blog entry is irrelevant. If he'd bothered to read the text that he quoted, he'd see that the patent grant only applies to complete implementations of the Java SE environment. Android uses Java-the-language but not Java-the-platform, so is not covered by the patent grant. This was intentional on the part of Sun: the aim of Java was 'write once, run anywhere' and this is not possible if various implementations have incompatible standard library implementations.
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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
Oracle may win in court or force a settlement, but I don't think in the long view they will "win" because of this. Potentially they get some money out of "owning" Java, but they make that property less valuable in the process. Java having been picked for Android development is currently breathing a lot of life into the language -- for a while now Java has been one of the top choices for business app developments, but how long has it been since Java was associated with something cool? And what are the odds it'll be picked for something cool ever again now that people see how litigation-happy Oracle is about it?
Being used for cool, high visibility projects buys language mindshare in a way few things do.
*chop* *cut* There, take that, nose! That'll show my face.
Actually, didn't Sun sue Microsoft for their usual Embrace, Extend, Extinguish tactics when they added proprietary extensions to their Java version and claimed it was still Java, thus violating Suns patents/trademarks/copyright/license terms/whatever?
They didn't sue just because MS created their own runtime/JVM, they sued because MS distributed an incomplete Java implementation, and then passed it off as the Java, something which only Sun had the legal right to do.
"Necessity is the plea for every infringement of human freedom. It is the argument of tyrants; it is the creed of slaves
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/
Java is a spec and NOT an implementation. You are free to make your own implementation of the spec (IBM, Apple and many others do).
IBM and Apple have not "made their own implementations"; they have licensed Sun/Oracle's implementations and created derivatives.
You are not free to make your own implementation of the spec; you need to pass Sun's compatibility tests if you don't want to get hit by patent lawsuits because Sun hold essential patents for creating a conforming implementation.
For years now, there has been no implementation of Java conforming to the Java spec except for those derived from Sun's source code. That's not an accident: it's pretty much impossible to meet Sun's compatibility requirements without licensing their source code.
This would not be true if Apple cheated and did not implement some part of Java spec (which is the case with what Google did).
Google didn't "cheat", Google implemented their own platform and runtime; they just happened to use the Java language to do it. In principle, Sun/Oracle couldn't have done anything about that: Sun doesn't hold a patent on the Java language itself. But it appears as if the Android designers may not have been careful enough to avoid all of Sun's patents.
Google have implemented 1 and 2 according to the specs.
No, Android does not implement the JVM. Android's Dalvik VM is a register based machine, just like the CLR. In part, that's probably because they wanted to minimize the risk of getting successfully sued by Sun. Let's hope they did their homework.
Not even Sun/Oracle is insane enough to propose that you should use the java standard edition on mobile phones.
No, instead they want you to license their embedded Java implementation, which isn't covered even by the hokey J2SE specs/licenses.
What follows is a short association to each patent where I already heard of it (so like 10 minutes / patent .. something the patent office
obviously wasn't able to do .. )
The legal standard for denying a patent application isn't "I totally heard of something like this, here's a mention of something that may possibly be related, but I leave it as an exercise for the reader to determine."
The legal standard is that:
(i) a claim is anticipated under 35 USC 102 if each and every limitation as set forth in the claim appears, either explicitly or inherently, in a single prior art reference; or
(ii) a claim is obvious under 35 USC 103 if a combination of prior art references teach or suggest each and every limitation as set forth in the claim.
The reason it takes longer than 10 minutes is you have to through every word of each claim and find it in the prior art.
So, looking at your first one:
-- cut 6,125,447 / 1997 -- 1. A method for providing security, the method comprising the steps of: establishing one or more protection domains, wherein a protection domain is associated with zero or more permissions; establishing an association between said one or more protection domains and one or more classes of one or more objects; and determining whether an action requested by a particular object is permitted based on said association between said one or more protection domains and said one or more classes. -- end cut -- -> This is C++ private / protected -- cut evidence 1983 -- C++ (pronounced see plus plus) is a statically typed, free-form, multi-paradigm, compiled, general-purpose programming language. It is regarded as a "middle-level" language, as it comprises a combination of both high-level and low-level language features.[2] It was developed by Bjarne Stroustrup starting in 1979 at Bell Labs as an enhancement to the C programming language and originally named C with Classes. It was renamed C++ in 1983.[3] -- end cut --
I don't see "protection domains" in your quote, nor do I see each protection domain associated with "zero or more permissions". I also don't see any associations between those protection domains and classes. I also don't see any determinations based on the associations.
If your answer is "but that's how C++ works," that's fine, but you have to actually show each and every element in the claim in the reference... Not just mention that the reference exists. That's why it takes more than 10 minutes.
tl;dr summary since I got pretty long-winded: The problem is that Java was never open in the first place. Users of FOSS need to learn to decide for themselves when technologies aren't really open, and avoid using them.
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:
* Did Oracle try to resolve this amicably with Google (by way of a license deal) or is Oracle pursuing purely destructive objectives?
Does this really matter? It would have been good for PR, but is anyone really under the illusion that Oracle wants to play nice with anyone? Personally I'd rather companies make it clear when they intend to swing around the "government-sanctioned monopolist hammer" instead of pretending that they're really quite reasonable, but that you do owe them quite a bit of money for using that technology they insisted was really open. Regarding PR, this kind of activity does put companies in my, "prone to dangerous legal demands" category, but frankly, Sun and Oracle were already both in that category.
* Will Google solve this patent problem in a way that the entire Android ecosystem (including the makers of Android-based phones and the authors of Android apps) will be reassured, or will Google only take care of its own risk?
Valid and important question, but as a non-Android and non-Java developer, I'm not interested in the answer.
* Is Java less of an open standard now than C#? I don't really buy the argument that Oracle may only be suing because of deviations from the standards definition. This kind of patent attack is evil no matter whether Google adhere to certain specififcations or not.
I wouldn't say Java is "less" open than C#. I do and always have put them in the same boat, which is "IP minefield, never develop in these environments." Also, this action changed NOTHING. Java has ALWAYS been an IP minefield just as much as C#, it's just that Sun managed to fool quite a few more people about it than Microsoft could. The only good patents are patents that are effectively neutered by PERMISSIVE patent grants. Sun's patent grant has always been a joke.
* Isn't this now the ultimate proof that the Open Invention Network doesn't really protect the Linux ecosystem from patent attacks? This is case of one OIN licensee (Oracle) suing another (Google).
Another interesting question, OIN's license only grants acces to patents specifically related to the Linux System as defined by OIN. After a quick look through the listing, the Java SDK itself doesn't seem to be there. There are several components that rely on Java (ant, an eclipse java compiler, a gcc Java runtime), but if those packages don't exercise the patents in question, then Oracle is acting exactly as the OIN is designed to allow them to act.
I don't see this as a failing of OIN. The way I see it, the fact that the Java SDK isn't considered a part of the "Linux System" by OIN means that Oracle doesn't consider Java to be open, which means to me that I don't want to use or rely on Java. It's nice for PR to say things like, "OIN protects licensees from patent threats related to Linux", but if you're going to be doing business based on that assurance, you should definitely be checking the definitions and making sure that what you think is covered is actually covered.
After putting in a bit more thought before posting, I have to say that while my previous comments are valid, your point is also valid. The "Linux Ecosystem", a more broadly defined set of software than the quite narrowly-defined "Linux System" according to OIN, is not at all fully covered