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Oracle Thinks Google Owes $6.1 Billion In Damages
An anonymous reader writes "When Oracle acquired Sun in 2009, the company got its hands on a lot of desirable technology. While OpenOffice may have fallen by the wayside, Oracle isn't about to let the Java programming language and its associated patents remain untouched if they can generate some additional revenue. In fact, the company is currently in the middle of a legal battle with Google over those patents that could potentially net Oracle billions and leave Android crippled. In August last year Oracle sued Google for infringing Java patents and copyright by developing Android. Oracle argues that Android uses technology derived from Java and therefore infringes multiple patents. It wants compensation, but with most court documents and details not publicly available, it's hard to know specifics. However, new documents made available late last week revealed just how much Oracle thinks is an acceptable damages payment for Google to make. According to an expert Oracle hired, Google could be looking at a bill between $1.4 billion and $6.1 billion for its alleged infringements."
Hey maybe Oracle should be paying some of us damages for inflicting Java on the world. ;)
1. Buy Oracle
2. Sack those who are responsible for the suit.
3. Open Java to the Public Domain
4. Sell Oracle.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Isn't this a standard tactic, ask for some obscenely high figure and then settle for much much less?
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Groklaw commentary
C++ is looking pretty good right about now.
I am very small, utmostly microscopic.
All my troubles seemed so far away....
So basically Oracle thinks that Google is expecting to spend about 6.2 Billion dollars to pay it's lawyers and is hoping they see it would just be cheaper for them to license the technology from Oracle.
Please oh please let Google fight this and win. Not because I love Google, but because I hate Oracle.
If what I just said sounded like a troll, it was probably just a failed attempt at humor.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Fuck Ellison. I hope he gets run over by a fucking bus.
You are probably a talented programmer, and I completely agree that C or C++ is the holy grail for low level optimization (if you are too noob for Assembly or Hex). I am personally fond of C++ and do not really "get" Java, although I do use it.
This may be obvious, but for many software it's a trade-off between development time, bugginess, manageability and speed, C++ is not always optimal.
If I was in charge of a software company, I'd think very, very hard about using something other than Java for any future projects. This lawsuit will quite possibly bite Oracle in the ass over the long term.
I guess Larry Ellison is needing some extra money to start building his next yacht.
It may be time for a Groklaw comeback...
'The Economy' is a giant Ponzi scheme whose most pitiable suckers are the youngest among us and the yet-unborn.
Ellison and B/P/S form two sides of the same coin, being corporations which have grown quickly and absurdly massive on the business of data gathering and mining. In the former case the link with government work was well-known; in the latter case it's met with cries of HURR CONSPIRACY THEORIST because we trust the government these days not to abuse any large repository of data and try really hard to ignore evidence.
But the individual people concerned are egomaniacal dicks, and that acts against their favour, which in turn acts in our favour.
I doubt Google would infringe on someone else's patents. That would be evil, and that's not how Google rolls.
"We live in a global world" - Harvey Pitt, former Securities and Exchange Commission Chairman
And I hear that Google has a lot of Python running in-house already. But if fewer CPU cycle per function performed is the goal for low power mobile devices, why not just plain old C?
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
Oh, please. C++ has always looked like a train wreck.
May God have mercy on the soul of those who think that the painful process of learning to deal with it's numerous retarded idiosyncrasies in any way relates to skill or talent in programming.
I hope LulzSec makes some funny stuff to Oracle's servers soon.
I dunno what Oracle's people are smoking, popping, or injecting, but I want some!
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
Basing Android development on Java was a mistake. It is GNU/Linux, after all, and people should have used what they pleased to develop under Xfce, Meego, Gnome, KDE, or some other relatively well established GUI. Writing apps with C++/Qt would have been easier than Java, with faster executables and smaller memory footprint.
Looks like they want to make all their money back with this lawsuit. 'tis how they roll, I guess.
I see people saying Google should buy Oracle. Not gonna happen, of course. However, Google could buy the Java IP off them if they wanted. Surely, the valuation of Java's IP would be much smaller than the entire valuation of Sun (hw divisions and all), so it may actually come cheaper than fighting this out to the end.
On the other hand, that is probably what Oracle wants to happen. Tbh, I want to see Google fight this and rip Oracle apart in court, because Oracle are fucking asshats no matter how I look at this.
http://golang.org/
Linux is fine, Java is the problem. And they're working on a better language already.
Every language has retarded idiosyncrasies, the skill and talent in programming is to learn a language and know how to properly use that tool to solve a particular problem. Well written C++ can be very elegant and not look at all like a train wreck. Poorly written code in any language is still poorly written code and will look like a train wreck.
Wasn't Java(tm) being forced upon programmers as a universal cross-platform programming language? Sun wanted Java everywhere. However, whenever I tried it as a cross platform solution, all I could get were errors of the type "Sorry, this program was compiled with java runtime of 1.4.5.4.3.4.1.3.2.33.4.5.p, and you are using 1.4.5.4.3.4.1.3.2.33.4.5.q" .
So, Google drank the tea, and now is being punished for it.
Who would win this election: Andrew Weiner vs Andrew Weiner's weiner.
Java made money for Sun (now Oracle) on mobile phones, it was licensed for use there, Google did something clever (or maybe not so much) and released a phone/framework that used a previously accepted implementation of Java (heavyweight versus the 'efficient' phone version) and skirted the licensing issue altogether.
Now Oracle feels that Google owes them licensing for 'phone' java.
So what is Android, a phone with java? or a tiny linux system with a phone card?
I believe this is one reason Apple wants to distance themselves from java, its going to become a headache.
Developers developers developers.
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Child...
- Dan.
~ People that think they are better than anyone else for any reason are the cause of all the strife in the world.
Where is the glue language that makes a single distributable work on all platforms?
As far as Java goes, they should have come up with their own implementation/compiler whatever that does not draw from anything but the syntax of the language. The syntax is open right? And bytecode is not a new idea so they could have rolled their own clean-room bytecode without straining anything.
Groklaw also identified this as FUD, also known as "trying the case in the newspapers".
--dave
davecb@spamcop.net
You don't need to set oracle to evil, it already has that value. You just need: assert oracle==evil
SIGSEGV caught, terminating
wait... not that kind of sig.
What I consider funny is that the whole premise of how .net was sold to dev shops.
No memory management to have to deal with, right? Not so, at least for VB.net. Declare a form? Have to call dispose on it.
The third party grid control set we use, we have to call dispose on many things created for those grids.
Why "dispose" is ok and "delete" is not seems to have come down to "you bought the tool, suck it up".
Yeah, I get that dispose is there to clean up other allocated resources, but the memory is not freed either in those cases.
And RAII handles all cases without having to have dispose like kludges tacked on.
emt 377 emt 4
I don't know who I want to lose more.
C gets far too little love
You're kidding, right? C is one of the most used languages, the second according to TIOBE (which is flawed, yes).
you pretty much have to implement everything in C (..) if you want to make it highly scalable.
That's so wrong I don't even know how to begin to tell you. Scalability has nothing to do with being fast per se, but with scaling linearly.
Dilbert RSS feed
... spend 6 billion to make Larry Ellison's head bigger
or ... spend 10 million to remove Larry Ellison's head
From a pure business standpoint the decision is obvious.
.sigs are for post^Hers.
Yeah seriously, I don't know why people even bother to learn languages that are 11 times as slow on fairly routine tasks.
Because I'm way more expensive than adding a second rackmount server. Because the few hundred thousand lines of Python in production in my company are either event-driven (waiting for web requests), IO bound (waiting on remote websites to answer), or scheduled (nightly batch processes). Because our "busy" server currently has a 15 minute load average of 0.13 and 99.2% free CPU. Tell me again why I'd want to write CPU-efficient code over programmer-efficient applications?
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
That would explain why all my searches for Oracle on Google today keep redirecting me to goatse.cx.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
First of all, cash isn't the only method for corporate acquisitions. The other one is that they buyer can trade their own equity for the purchase; "I'll give you n shares of my stock for each m shares of yours." This can be combined with cash, but cash is part of the buyer's market cap too, so to estimate one company's capacity to buy another, you look at the market cap, not at the cash reserves. GOOG are 155.99B, so they'd still have to give away more than half of their company to get half of Oracle.
Second, when a company is interested in buying a second one, they usually have to pay premium to convince the target's owners to sells. Buying Oracle would cost more than Oracle's market cap—or more precisely, a serious intent to buy Oracle would drive up Oracle's price.
Are you adequate?
The company that has done the most damage to Java is Oracle. Will they sue themself next? It seems that Oracle is trying hard to destroy all assets they acquired from the Sun.
Actually, Fortran gets far too little love. If anyone would bother to look at the more recent standards (say 95 and on) they would see that it does a heck of a lot (and very well too.) Unfortunately, people have been taught/told that it is either a) dead or b) evil.
Kudos to you sir. You followed up on a fanboy debate over computer languages with a Grammar Nazi post.
Except for ending slavery, the Nazis, communism, & securing American independence, war has never solved anything.
What are the #3 4 5 languages? Aka count counting Java, not C++.
Let's say Google squashes this and everyone boycotts Oracle and Java. Anyone have thoughts on what the dark horse language is?
I keep hearing Python mentioned. Aside from the "whiter syntax" apparently it might let me write non-OO programs more like BASIC but more modern.
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
Failed companies are pathetic trolls trying to steal money from companies who rightfully and successfully use what is available. Oracle, you're irrelevant now. Leave Java to the community, accept that OOo has been taken over, and let everything else you are hoarding go as well, and find some other thing to do.
When companies make such desperate acts to gain money and fame, they deserve neither.
This is a sig. Deal with it.
No memory management to have to deal with, right? Not so, at least for VB.net. Declare a form? Have to call dispose on it.
The third party grid control set we use, we have to call dispose on many things created for those grids.
It's basically the same problem java has. Tracing GC is tolerable for memory management but is no use for managing other resources that likely need to be freed up sooner.
And RAII handles all cases without having to have dispose like kludges tacked on.
Afaict RAII is nice for the simple stuff but it does have problems of it's own. Primerally how multiple references to the same resource and reference cycles are handled. Get this wrong and you can end up with stuff not being disposed of because a reference cycle keeps reference counts nonzero even after all external references are gone.
note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register
how can the damages be more then the entire value of sun?
If there was even a 1% tax on proposed settlement size, the amount of bluster in these figures would collapse by an order of magnitude.
Imagine if it cost $63m to file a claim in the court system for $6.3b in damages.
We all know Ellison is going to ask for $2b/inch whenever he can get away with it, if there's no price for grasping.
Know anything about Larry Ellison? He thinks he's a Samurai. You have underestimated his determination to bring Google to their knees.
Eating sushi does not make you a Samurai.
Building in Woodside, CA, a multi-million dollar estate, modeled on feudal Japanese architecture (i.e. no nails) and hand built by builders brought over from Japan to do the job, just might.
He's also been photographed wearing a kimono.
Probably has a suit of armor and blades in his office.
He was known at one time to be working out some form of management based upon Bushido - no word on any underlings committing seppuku.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
I've coded in Python before, and it has quite a few issues. It's a decent language and it runs in a lot of places - but Ruby runs in all those same places and has a significantly larger array of really nice language features. Really popularity of a language isn't going to define how "good" it is, and more specifically how much better it will be for your application.
Until Go gets some kind of generics for libraries to provide generified algorithms and data structures, it's not worth the bother.
Java isn't that bad of a language. But : .NET framework. Personal preference though.
- The libraries are not the best I've seen. I much prefer the layout of Qt or the
- Documentation after this much time should have been a great deal better. Java documentation is so-so and the library documentation is abominable.
- The Java VM should have been completely revamped when it became obvious a hardware implementation was pretty close to impossible. It is relatively easy to accelerate Java by translating most instructions to another processor architecture, however, it's more of a compile step than an execution step. The Java VM really should be implementable in hardware.
- The intermediate code format should store data as little-endian instead of big-endian. This is 2011. x86, x64, ARM dominate the processor world. Most other processor cores (such as TI DSP and MIPS) have the option of running in little endian mode. PowerPC and what's left of Sparc are the only big processors left which are big endian only. There are others like hitachi H8 and such, but I'm not even sure there are java virtual machines for them. Let's be realistic, file storage of large arrays of data should be little endian these days. And yet, Java still uses big endian. Time for that to change.
But I do agree with you... as a language, it's probably a better C++ than C++. I have personally been working on something that's half way in-between myself. Basically, C++ without code separation and without the need for forward declaration. It isn't a compiler per-say so much as a code separator. It converts #imports into #includes and converts classes into code + classes. Compile times have dropped considerably by forcing recompile of entire code bases at once.
This. The whole Android kinda-sorta Java virtual machine kludge was just a hack to avoid paying Sun any money.
If they had come to a reasonable agreement with Sun paying them a couple hundred million for a catchall license, Sun could've still been in business. Of course, Sun had no business sense, either.
I'm not a lawyer, but I play one on the Internet. Blog
Yep... .NET and QT learned the most important lesson which was versioning. Nothing can't be fixed by deprecation of older technologies, even technologies like real CPUs get these benefits. It might have taken forever, but my latest Intel Core i7 doesn't even run 16-bit code unless emulated. Java was close to being the first of its kind... SmallTalk being a notable but much ignored predecessor (mostly because it was REALLY annoying to program with) and having set things in stone the way they did was a huge mistake in my opinion. I personally ported AWT to 5 different platforms back in the old days, even wrote a mostly Java implementation based on a frame buffer and an input event manager. I ported SWT to two platforms before Eclipse was even released within IBM for internal evaluation. And looking back on it, looking at AWT, SWT, Swing, I'm still amazed that Java is still used for making UI apps.
:) I personally find that I can often write code in C# or Java that can perform equally well or better than in C or C++. Especially when handling large integers and large amounts of dynamic memory allocation.
Let's forget the third party library system and focus on something more important. Naming.
Java, Mocha, Kaffe, Beans, Latte etc...
Don't get me wrong... I love coffee... drink over a liter of it by lunch time each day. But I have to Google to figure out what any of this crap is. If they'd have used three letter acronyms, I'd have had an easier time knowing what they were talking about. This utter lack of professionalism has always left me feeling like Java is the language of people who would rather be playing with tinker toys than writing code. What would have been wrong with something like "Object Modularity and Component System" as opposed to something stupid like beans.
Jazelle was always interesting because it took an acceleration approach as opposed to an implementation approach. In a way it said "Well, making a Java only processor is obviously a waste of time, but we can implement a means of running as many instructions as possible from directly within the CPU." I know there are hardware implementations of Java which accelerate probably as much as 90% of the system. And obviously, emulating 100% of the system would require an operating system to be implemented in byte code for it to be useful. It could be done I supposed, but it would be painful and ugly. As matter of fact, I remember some of the earlier attempts like JavaOS to do so. And I stand by the painful and ugly and add awkward to the mixture. PCI drivers were impressively ugly because of the weird method of memory mapping involved.
A more generic VM would have been much nicer I think. Start with a Motorola 68000 instruction set or even an ARM instruction set. Then compile the language natively to that core. Stack, register or Harvard disaster based, makes no difference. The point would be that the processor would be generic enough that the language and technology would be more important than the VM. These days when most CPU architectures include protections such as Intel's "Do not execute" flags and such, a more generic CPU with a specialized MMU for garbage collection would have been better. But, there's no point to it anymore.
The real value to Java is in the language itself. I don't know if I'd try to differentiate the relationship between Java to C or C++, but it's far enough from either and close enough to both that it would be hard to decide. It's a C/C++ like language as much as C# is. I personally program about 95% of my code in C++ since, with the exception of header/source mess which I no longer notice and by using Qt, I find it to be a great solution for everything from scripting to kernel development. Hell, it even has regular expressions
VMs are really a thing of the past these days anyway. They're more closely related to being a second stage compiler. Of course, in a language like Java where some code really shouldn't be compiled unless that execution path is de
Who the hell will want to invest in a technology owned no longer by its creative creator who made it grow(Sun), but now by a patent troll(Oracle) who is only looking to sue the Java users?
:(
RIP Java, my first true OOP love
Even if they wrote a new OS or language, patent trolls would still come after them with claims of infringement.
Some patents so broad and vague that the trolls could claim that you infringe them just by getting out of bed in the morning. They do not depend on coding details. With such patents, they will go after anyone with money.
I thought dalvik converted java to something else, but its another tool that does that.