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Google: Sun Offered To License Java For $100M
alphadogg writes "Sun Microsystems offered to license its Java technology to Google for $100 million, a Google attorney said Thursday, attempting to show that Oracle is out of touch as it seeks billions from Google for patent infringement. Oracle and Google were in court for a hearing in Oracle's lawsuit accusing Google of patent infringement in its Android OS. Judge William Alsup was in a feisty mood, warning Oracle that 'this court is not a wholly-owned subsidiary of Oracle Corporation' and telling Google that Andy Rubin, who runs its Android business, will be 'on the hot-seat' at trial. He also criticized both parties for taking unreasonable positions regarding the amount of damages owed for the alleged infringement."
Is this an example of the system actually working, or just constantly stating the obvious?
... but they do hold a majority share. :-P
I'll buy that for a dollar.
Didn't the patents get invalidated?
Google is in the wrong here but because Oracle is getting greedy, Google will get off with a slap on the wrist. Good for them!
The dangers of knowledge trigger emotional distress in human beings.
My god, avoiding Java fragmentation was a cult religion at Sun (witness the Microsoft Java suit). Keeping Java under one umbrella was pretty much ALL Sun cared about for the last ten years of its life.
Isn't he Pee Wee Herman?
wow....100million and they turned it down? what assholes....they buy crappy startups for 100 times that. Maybe Oracle should indeed teach them a lesson.
As much as I hate Google as a company, I wish ownership of Java went to them instead of Oracle when Sun died.
Oracle has a culture of making everything needlessly complicated. Sun did too and that always hurt Java, but Oracle is far worse.
As a long time Java developer I feel like a Parisian in Nazi held France.
I do think $100 million is a bit much for licensing Java, however Google has to admit that the Java technology is worth a considerable amount of money since they worked hard to copy it.
If they both knew what was good for them, they would enter into some cross licensing agreement where Google can focus on something else besides trying to defend their blatant copy of JVM, and Oracle would have access to Google's refinements that made Java run better on underpowered hardware (register based v. stack based JVM). Also I think it would be nice not to have to do simple byte substitution to run a Java program on Dalvik (Google really you're not fooling anybody).
If they quickly settled :
I think combining their efforts would bring true innovation to the market, but this patent war is doing the exact opposite. Google and Oracle both need to step back and see that they both are shooting themselves in the foot. If people needed a concrete example of how patents can stifle innovation they only need to look at this case.
These comments are my own and do not necessarily reflect the views or opinions of my employer or colleagues...
... have always talked about on here.
Software patents are tired, pointless and ultimately just fucking dumb.
Watching the patent wars that are continuing to errupt in the mobile telecoms market is clear evidence of this. Everyone is suing everyone else for breaching ideas, rather than implementations.
I may have gotten this completely wrong, due to all the Chinese Whispers that comes with this kind of thing, but if it's true, how on earth can Apple patent the idea of recognising a phone number in a piece of text. Jesus Christ, you can do that with a fucking regular expression..!
(surely the above is not what they're suing HTC over, right???)
Software patents need to go, as this is all starting to become fucking ridiculous.
Instead of innovation to draw customers and and generate revenue, Microsoft, Apple and even now HTC are reaching into their portfolios and waving crappy bits of paper in each others faces.
"Customers? We don't need customers!" they screech. "We're just going to make our money off you, instead!"
Stupid, stupid, stupid.
THE HONOUR OF THE KNIGHTS - CC Licensed Sci-Fi Novel
i think only Google can extract the real use of Java : Techravi , Sun microsystems only used the 10 % potential of Java...
Oracle, it's one hundred BILLION dollars!
Geeze!
And I bet Larry's tank of sharks with laser beams are really angry Sea Bass.
As an European (from Finland), this is mainly a spectacle of American justice system. Here are some random thoughts based on this news.
In here I constantly hear that "American justice system is corrupted, owned by politicians and big money... Blah blah blah." Now we have an example to observe. It seems to me that the judge is this case is not willing to cave in for anything. The junge is strict, has huge balls, and it appears that the best thing he can do for his career, is to make just decision.
I also bet that he is going to deliver his decision in plain language that is readable even to lay persons. This, and the fact that the case is public, will guarantee that if anything will go wrong, you will hear about it. This is quite a good guarantee that there won't be any funny business.
Nothing is perfect and there is a possibility that the decision is rotten. If this is the case, as I mentioned, the hell break loose. Unfortunately, the public ripping of judgements has one unintended consequence: Europeans will hear about it and somehow conclude that because the system is criticized, it must be worse than their own system that receives no such critique. If any, the opposite is true.
Disclaimer: I'm not taking sides here, just posting a general info.
If I release some software under GPL-- completely free (beer and speech) -- and someone takes that source code, strips all copyright info, and creates a closed source version of my software, I can receive financial damage compensation. It doesn't matter that my code is available free of charge.
Forget all the laws, the rules, the years of training... they only help you clerk. The single most effective tool in a lawyer's warchest is being able to deadpan better than Al Pacino.
The dangers of knowledge trigger emotional distress in human beings.
Wow. Steve Jobs let you out so early today!
You forgot how Nokia bitch-slapped your dungeon master? and Kodak as well?
It's unlikely that even half of the patents are legitimate. Microsoft doesn't get the money because they won a lawsuit, but because these lawsuits are impossible to figure out, and none of the smaller Android players wanted to get involved in that.
I don't think Oracle will win this one, or that they are in the right. But as far as a $ goes are they really far out?
If you'd sell it on a licensed deal for 100M, then if you accuse someone of stealing & selling your IP - wouldn't it be damages of Billions? I mean, you can't say the damages are just what the proposed purchase price was - otherwise it is incentive to always steal.
Steal a $20,000 car, get caught 50% of the time, punishment = $20,000 fine (and you keep the car). = always steal it.
What are you, an idiot? Android is derived from GPL software. The GPL exists because the originators wanted to be able to create derivative works. Further, the fight is not over Java. The argument is over whether or not a tablet is a "mobile device" (primarily a cellphone, meaning you pay licencing fees) or a PC (meaning the free JRE is a go.) Technology has advanced beyond the definitions of the original licence and we are once again hamstrung by a lack of forward thinking. Oracle should be relieved Google didn't throw their weight behind Iced Tea. The rest of us should be pissed that they didn't.
I'm not a fan of Oracle, but I hope Google and Oracle eventually reach a cross-licensing deal. My concern is that Oracle appears to be buying open-source companies and turning around and suing everyone using it (K-splice being next.) Or Google just buys Oracle to solve it and get some patent leverage. Google should have bought Sun when it had the chance.
Methinks they would get the inferior Java ME if they paid for it.
Not the best deal, is it?
The fact that HTC decided to pay Apple some fee does not prove they've violated their IP. It merely means they've found out this was a cheaper and safer way to go. Maybe they'd loose, paying 10x more, maybe they'd win but paying a lot of money to the lawyers ...
Most of the Apple patents are complete gibberish, a perfect proof that software patents are just a stick used to bash competitors.
Software patents have done nothing but hurt everyone who uses software by hurting the software developers especially the little guys who can't afford to license the Intellectual Property of every element of a program such as icons, multiple icons, tabs, scrollbars, progressbars, screen taps, text on pictures, text on video all of which are now patented along with everything else imaginable. Allowing software patents was a huge mistake in the first place and every end user is just now beginning to pay the price. Software development is slowing down because nobody wants the liability involved in making anything. What a damn mess! It should be put back to how it was when things actually worked, software should be protected by copyright not patents.
So what if they offered a Java license for $100mil in the past, they didn't take that offer. It's just like in regular business, you get a low price offered, but you you don't take it at that time, later it propably will cost you a hell of a lot more, just like this case.. moronic lawyers..
Android is derived from GPL software.
Only the kernel that Android runs on top of is GPL. The rest of Android is under a less restrictive ASL 2.0 license.
I don't always use unix-like operating systems; but when I do, I prefer FreeBSD.
Uh, well, morally?
I'd go the other way. Even if Google didn't have a legal obligation to pay Sun, I'd say that morally it would have been the right thing to do.
I mean come on, we're not talking about a 2-man garage startup being crushed by Sun Microsystems.
The overage sketch is Sun creates Java, nurtures the Java ecosystem, including the millions of developers who are automatically Android developers now, and Google comes along and doesn't feel like sending any money Sun's way.
So they do some acrobatics and pretend there's no Java in Android.
Google's responsible for twisting the knife into Sun: Before Android, Java MIDP was considered somewhat necessary for a phone (to run mobile Java apps). Android cemented the death of mobile Java apps, which was unfortunate, because a lot of those things worked on a huge number of platforms. Anyway, that resulted in revenue loss for Sun.
Oracle is definitely justified in asking for money. But not billions. Best scenario: Google pays at least $100 mil, maybe double that for a worldwide license, including for Android licensees.
I'm not a lawyer, but I play one on the Internet. Blog
Sun offered Google a Java License for $100M. Google then declined that offer and opted instead to use Java without paying Sun. At the time, Google must have thought either:
a) "We're not violating Sun's patents"
or
b) "We'll get away with violating Sun's patents"
Now, I'm never one to side with Oracle, but lately I haven't seen Google denying the charges, just the damages. I'm not a code monkey, and not familiar with the intimate details of Java and what Oracle claims they infringed upon, but it seems almost like Google has decided that they're guilty of violating Sun/Oracle's IP, and now they're trying to minimize the loss to their bottom line?
Also, whose brilliant idea was it to tell the court "Yeah, Sun told us years ago that we should pay them $100M to use Java. We didn't feel like doing that." It seems a bit like willful infringement.
Dalvik is so not Java that it REQUIRES a Sun JDK to work.
Sorry dude, but anybody stupid enough to believe that something that USES the Java bitcode output by a Sun Java JDK is not Java is a complete moron.
I never thought I would see a company worse than Microsoft, but Oracle is - hands down, the worst company out there when it comes to trying to sue it's way to more profits. The best things Google could do is release it's own language then we can all punt on Java and condemn it to the slag-heap and get a REAL multi-platform open-source solution that people can code to freely.
I recommend all of my customers who want to move to Oracle or expand their Oracle foot-print to move to HDFS primarily to kill the beast at the source - cut off the life-blood of revenue and it will die...
Yeah, you not understanding something is definitely how we should determine legitimacy. Assuming that yardstick fails, we'll just go with how many people on Slashdot scream about how obvious everything is in retrospect.
You've just recapped Microsoft's arguments for their version of Java, Visual J++.
Translating a language to another language is just that, translation.
Dalvik is not a language, but a java bytecode USER. It the Java bytecode is not generated by a Sun Java compliant (read the requirements) compiler there is nothing to run under Dalvik.
That's right, Dalvik is not a language. It's a VM. I can, for example, write a Java (or C#, or some other language) compiler that targets Dalvik directly. The idea to use the existing Java compiler to handle the high-level semantics for you, and then do the (much simpler) bytecode translation is a nifty trick, but that's all there is to it.
By the way, one of my examples was translating Java bytecode to .NET IL. You didn't comment on that, though it's closer to the subject at hand. So: does the existence of IKVM means that ".NET is Java"?