Oracle, Google Move To Streamline Java Suit

itwbennett writes "Google and Oracle each submitted proposals on Friday to reduce the number of claims in their Java patent infringement lawsuit, which could help bring the case to a speedier conclusion. Earlier this month, lawyers for the two companies gave Judge William Alsup of the US District Court in San Francisco a crash course in Java to prepare him for a claim construction conference."

Comments

The only possible winners are

[Malnar]

...the lawyers.

crash course in Java - a Google perspective

[Hazel Bergeron]

-- Sun --

Imagine a box of Smalltalk.

Imagine someone dropping that box in a festering pit of C. (Not all pits of C are festering. This one is.)

Redefine "API" as "buzzword implementation".

Extend according to what the competition's doing, rather than as may be technically appropriate.

-- Google --

Recall how Microsoft made Java incompatible and how nerds all hated it.

Recall that you are Google and all nerds love you.

Do the same thing.

Watch your market grow to Apple levels of hysteria.

Observe Hank Scorpio taking over Java.

Take out the flame retardant lawyers, and, in a scenario looking increasingly Monty Python, use them to teach judges Java. ...

Judge Can't Cram classes.*; for Court

[necro351]

Computer Science and software engineering are rife with themes. Many so-called inventions and 'new' ideas are applying these tried and true themes to a new permutation of some old problem. For instance, folding two loops together to reap stale items in a hash-table while simultaneously doing a query by iterating across a bucket list (a previous but recent slashdot patent posting). You can tell someone (a Judge) what JIT is, that it effectively combines caching of already-compiled code with partial compilation, but he can't appreciate that software engineering and computer science are pervaded by the concepts of caching, and right-sizing work. He can't possibly appreciate how obvious some of these 'inventions' are, and rank them fairly on a scale of truly inventive (LZW in my opinion) to 'someone-skilled-in-the-art-could-do-that' (twiddling bits in FAT to support short file-names). I think this is in general the primary source of frustration for engineers and scientists: that judges and patent clerks who really have no good sense of taste or knowlege on the matter make such important decisions. Redhat pointed out once that in the _vast_ majority of patent suits, the person being sued is never accused of actually _reading_ the patent, but infringing accidentally. People don't read software patents, so their claimed benefit of being able to publish great ideas by protecting them for the inventor is just bunk: society eats the bar while the inventor is anomolously protected for really no reason. They are basically landmines that only rich or organized people can buy, and most of the community knows it. Giving judges crash courses in Java is a promising start, but its also a depressing reminder of how far we have to go.