Judge In Oracle-Google Case Given Crash Course in Java

itwbennett writes "Lawyers for Oracle and Google gave Judge William Alsup of the U.S. District Court in San Francisco an overview of Java and why it was invented, and an explanation of terms such as bytecode, compiler, class library and machine-readable code. The tutorial was to prepare him for a claim construction conference in two weeks, where he'll have to sort out disputes between the two sides about how language in Oracle's Java patents should be interpreted. At one point an attorney for Google, Scott Weingaertner, described how a typical computer is made up of applications, an OS and the hardware underneath. 'I understand that much,' Alsup said, asking him to move on. But he had to ask several questions to grasp some aspects of Java, including the concept of Java class libraries. 'Coming into today's hearing, I couldn't understand what was meant by a class,' he admitted."

Comments

Why not ?

[zero.kalvin]

I won't go to a Baseball match and be the whatever is the equivalent of a referee is! Judges need to be informed about the subject they are going to judge(?) on.

Re:Why not ?

[Mouldy]

You would need to be some sort of mechanical or engineering background information, however, to determine if party B's mechanical system is different enough from party A's mechanical system to rule on some sort of patent issue between the 2 parties. To one person, an engine is an engine. They don't care if it's petrol, diesel or rocket fuel. It's the loud bit that makes vehicles move.

Someone determining whether or not the latest engine by VW (for example) is too similar to an engine previously made by Alfa Romeo is going to need to know more than "an engine is the loud bit that makes vehicles move" - somebody is going to have to explain the details behind the mechanics. Based on this information, they might decide that the engine as a whole isn't a rip-off, but maybe the odd way the valves are set up is suspiciously similar. It would be unfair to make a judgement without the extra technical knowledge.

Re:Why not ?

[WrongSizeGlass]

I won't go to a Baseball match and be the whatever is the equivalent of a referee is! Judges need to be informed about the subject they are going to judge(?) on.

Exactly. Shouldn't most of us - those of us who want to see some sort of software patent reform, limitations, or even outright abolishment - be lauding the public display of a judge who wants and needs to learn about technology in order to address the software patent debacle? Just because he's already experienced in patent law doesn't mean he knows enough about the subject matter before his court.

Educating someone about the subject they are deciding, administering, governing, or even adjudicating over can't be a bad thing.

Re:Why not ?

[DarkOx]

Judges are not supposed to be specialists they should be generalists, because they need to understand the effects of the decisions they make in a broad societal context. What they need to be is REALLY SMART. We as a society need to do what we can to put some of the best and brightest on the bench.

This judge is a great example of how to do it right! He is not technical expert he is a legal expert and he smart enough to:

A) Know what he does not know
B) Recognize that he needs to be educated about what he does not know to make a good ruling
C) Learn and understand new possibly foreign concepts quickly enough to keep the legal system at least sort of efficient.

I applaud this fully!

Humility is great...

[bjourne]

But when you have no clue about what software development is, then how on earth would you be able to judge trials about it fairly? Are the lawmakers that arrogant that they think they can understand the basics of software development in about one sitting, when an engineer have to study the subject for several years? Why not turn the tables around. Let's take a prominent developer with a nice career. Have this judge and some of his fellows give him a a one day crasch course on business law, what to do when a lawyer says "objection" and so on. I'll bet my ass we would get much more reasonable and logical judgements that way.

Re:Humility is great...

[hey!]

Oh, c'mon. The issues to be decided here aren't any more abstruse than in any other kind of engineering case. Nor are the *vast* majority software developers any more competent to make technical judgments than the judge would be after a few days prep time. Sure, developers more apt to have some idea of what a virtual machine is beforehand, but that idea is to vague to be of much use. How many could explain the difference between a stack machine and a register machine? Or give any kind of explanation of how a compiler optimizer does what it is supposed to? Not many. If you narrowed the pool of "judges" down to people who understood the technology involved to make *technical* judgments in this case, the pool would be tiny and probably consist of people who had a stake in the outcome of the case.

Fortunately, that's not what we need the judge to do. He doesn't have to make decisions about the applications of technology; he has to make decisions about the application of *law*. And it's way better this way. You get the software experts up to make their arguments, and see if they can convince somebody who doesn't have a pre-formed opinion. If one side doesn't have a leg to stand on, it'll show. If both sides have arguments that would sound reasonable to another expert, you want the judge to apply the law without ruling on which side of the dubious question is right. An expert in virtual machine technology couldn't do that impartially. If we followed *your* suggestion, we'd have courts making engineering decisions. What the court should do is rely upon engineering consensus where it exists, and not interfere with the development of that consensus where it doesn't yet.

The drawback of this system is that it depends on having a judge who is good at grasping the essentials of what is at stake. But software developers are ordinary mortals, and a little humility would do us a lot of good. True, not everyone can *do* what we do, but unlike particle physicists or poets we make our living doing things that don't take uncommon intellectual talent to grasp.

Of course, judges *do* often get things horribly wrong, but not more often than software developers get things horribly wrong. It's just the nature of the law that its failures have a wider impact. When you fail as a software developer, somebody who decided to rely upon you is disappointed. When you fail as a judge, people who had no involvement or choice at all are swept into that failure. I think where we've seen horribly misguided legal rulings on technical matters, its because the judge latched onto the kind of specious analogy that politicians often deal with when they talk technology. Even when a politician's intentions are good and the results of using the analogy positive ("information superhighway"), that's not a precise enough understanding to make legal rulings. This guy is doing the right thing and going to school, not exaggerating his prior understanding.

While many here pretend to be lawyers....

[gatkinso]

...he doesn't pretend to be a developer.

Awesome Judge!

Re:I'm glad, honestly.

[malkavian]

How is a software engineer, in a few weeks, going to learn enough about a particular field to go and be able to obtain a spec document from a client? Answer, they don't, they just learn enough to be able to communicate with the experts, and translate their knowledge into relevance for the task at hand.

Really, the Judge in question seems to be entirely on the ball. He doesn't need to know how to apply the relevant parts in a program of his own; he just needs to understand generally what the basic principle is. You know, the kind of thing that got explained in a couple of hours of a lecture at the beginning of a degree. A bit above layman, but nowhere near enough to be a full on practitioner. When you know enough of what the base principles are, you get the ability to make sensible questions on the deeper detail.
All the judge needs to know is how this language detail translates into the field of law,

Re:I'm glad, honestly.

[WrongSizeGlass]

How is the judge going to learn enough about Java, in a way that is unbiased by the lawyers for each side, in a few weeks, to make a sensible decision? Doesn't he need to know a fair bit about how Java code is used, who uses it, what for, etc?

He needs to understand the concepts of Java, not all the implementation details and not how to code/debug/code/scream/debug/sigh/debug/relief java. And he doesn't need to be able to read Java or its syntax.

A quick overview of Java features that are not unique to Java will also help eliminate a lot of the clutter. He needs to understand using or extending classes (ie, the Java class libraries) but not have to worry about all the possibilities of public/private properties & methods, inheritance, polymorphism or other common OOP mechanisms.

Re:Oracle made a big mistake

[GooberToo]

why this isn't the exact same as the MS Java mess which everyone was cheering when Sun shut it down?

I'm sure you're get many an answer but here's the short answer.

Microsoft purposely failed to maintain currency as well as created incompatibilities. This had the effect of giving people a very bad taste in their mouth with Java since they were providing the defacto implementation on Windows; since it was bundled. This had the effect of damaging the Java brand; which was entirely Microsoft's intention, so as to push their own technology. It was part of their classic embrace and extend strategy and was extremely anti-competitive.

Google, on the other hand, is using the official java compiler and tools. Oracle's Java compiler then creates JVM bytecode. Google translates that JVM bytecode into Dalvik bytecode and packages it up into an application (apk). As such, its technically correct to say, Android programs are created using the Java language syntax and a subset of the Java framework. Their framework comes from freely available sources and is compiled using official, freely available, Java technology.

The differences are profound.

Basically it boils down to Oracle being pissed Google did an end-run around Oracle's Java ME implementation and licensing requirements by creating their own Java ME VM-like environment (Dalvik VM). Oracle simply doesn't have a case. At least not that I've seen so far.