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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."
Either way, I'm starting to get as many lulz from this as from SCO vs IBM. That these lawyers don't bust out laughing while they're spouting this shit is a wonderment to me.
... but they do hold a majority share. :-P
A sign that they're recognizing that the system has a problem, which, let's be honest - is a great step forward in and of itself. With more pressure from judges like Alsup, maybe we can start to see a move away from the purely-adversarial legal process; where both sides demand the moon because not doing so will just weaken their position to no gain...and because with less time wasted in trial, the lawyers earn less in legal fees. But, hey, even if he just stops at fixing the symptom, at least he's bloody fixing the symptom. Good for the judge.
if system would be working, this suit wouldn't exist, but it is a nice example of judge having sense of humor and humiliation.
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Some sanity in the courts would go a long way towards imposing some sanity in the world at large.
Don't know, to me it seems like an example of corporate gambling.
:-)
- Sun betting that google would pay $100M to prevent future lawsuits (after all, Google has been playing with fire all along)
- Google betting that they would pay nothing after all, so they preferred to bet "lawyer fees" vs "$100M" vs "lawyer fees + billions"
- Oracle betting whatever they bought Sun for - for a chance to win billions.
Also, lots of small investors with stock in google and/or oracle, just spending the day at the casino
Not betting: Lawyers, they're shopping for widescreen monitors so they don't have to horizontal-scroll when home banking.
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.
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.
Maybe it's time to fork Java, and then go to court....
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.
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... 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.
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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.
Not all of them
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.
It sounds like the judge is explaining to the lawyers how they should do their job.
He asks for a Sun executive not on Oracle's payroll who would testify in Oracle's favour, then Oracle suggests someone who is on their payroll, and the judge has to explain to the lawyer that someone not on their payroll would be a lot more convincing to the jury. Honestly, can't Oracle's lawyers think of that on their own?
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.
No. And some of those invalidations are also in appeal.
Of course they can, but then they might actually have to do some "work"... Also, maybe they just can't find anybody?
Prepare a few millions to pay the lawyers. AFAIK Google knew they're using technology owned by Sun, decided to play and will and it worked fine for a few years. But they're probably end like a dupe in a casino, loosing 10x they've gained.
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.
And those appeals will be appealed, etc.
Can you imagine a world without lawyers? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0u9JAt6gFqM
(after all, Google has been playing with fire all along)
How so? They specifically created a technology base from the ground up which is superior to to Java ME and is NOT a derivative work. Your argument implies either you're being spoon fed misinformation from Oracle, or that all technology development is, "playing with fire." Can you clarify what you meant because I seriously doubt you meant the later and its not clear at all how the former can be the least bit true.
"From the ground up" is debatable, and part of the reason this lawsuit exists.
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..
Yes, but they do make a great database. Their support fees are outrageous, support policies suck, and everything else they do is of questionable value. Did I mention they make a great database?
make imaginary.friends COUNT=100 VISIBLE=false
There is a well established concept of treble (triple) damages in cases of willful violation. While that's not a limit, it's a good guideline. Therefore, if they were willing to license it for $100M, then damages of $300M + court costs is not unreasonable. Above that, you better have a really, really strong case. So far, I've not heard anything from Oracle that indicates there was any actual infringement, only an allegation of infringement. So given that, my opinion (and we know how much that's worth) is that Oracle is way out of line on their damages claim.
make imaginary.friends COUNT=100 VISIBLE=false
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.
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>He asks for a Sun executive not on Oracle's payroll
But does that standard also apply to Google?
By rights, Google should have to produce ex-Googlers who will testify that they are correct, right?
I'm not a lawyer, but I play one on the Internet. Blog
You're off by an order of magnitude: Sun offered Google a license for $100M; Google declined and did a clean-room implementation, Dalvik, which differed from the Sun JVM; *SUN* never complained about patents (in fact Gosling commented after leaving that the Oracle lawyers were all but foaming at the mouth when said patents were discussed during acquisition talks), then *ORACLE* (aka One Raving A*hole Called Larry Ellison) promptly filed suit wanting danegeld from Google for every Android handset/tablet/whatever that went out.
The copyright issues have been dropped, since Google did a clean-room rework, and many of the patents are being reexamined, IIRC some are already being called for obviousness and/or prior art. Oracle is now complaining about staying the case while the re-examination continues because they'd rather get the money now, er, their IP is that valuable. Right.
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While this point is reasonable, keep in mind that Google would not only be fined the stated amount, but also injuncted from continuing use of the infringing product. That's would sting, wouldn't you say?
Depends on how you define "ground".
Which is really hard to define in IT. Everything that has been done is based on something, even if it's just the binary system. They just have debate whether any "ground" is pwned by Oracle.
what's so great about it? As part of my job I have to set up and config and tune Oracle, been doing that for 20 years. But instead of a Oracle RAC cluster, for instance, could just run solid alternative database (e.g. postgresql) on a large SMP system (getting pretty cheap with all these cores AMD and Intel are slapping on a chip) with any one of several replication mechanisms (some of which don't impact host performance one bit)
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.
Apparently you missed the point, that everything they do except their database is questionable at best.
However, what makes their database great it it's reliability and scalability. For example, it's support for bitmap indexes made it the only viable option for some OLTP systems I've worked on. We tried other databases, but couldn't get the performance and uptime necessary unless we threw so much money into hardware and support people that those systems became significantly more costly than Oracle.
make imaginary.friends COUNT=100 VISIBLE=false
Scalability? I can run other dbms on huge n-way systems. Scaling with RAC, well in the case of read-only with the entire database fitting into memory, sure. Other situations maybe not so much........RAC is more for redundancy than for performance at my clients that have it.
The point is that I didn't have to run a huge array of n-way systems, or a super expensive server to deliver the performance as would have been necessary with other systems. That dramatically lowered the cost of Oracle vs anyone else. And had I outgrown the system I was on, there was a whole lot of room to grow, faster servers, grids, etc. None of the other databases could deliver the performance I needed without spending a ton of money on arrays of faster hardware and the software to allow them to run on such an array. Oracle is faster and more scalable than any of it's competitors, with the possible exception of Teradata.
make imaginary.friends COUNT=100 VISIBLE=false
or that all technology development is, "playing with fire."
With sufficiently many patents around, it is, since patents don't have the requirement that your work must be derived (rather than your own idea that happens to be similar enough) in order for patent to apply.
No, it doesn't require a Sun JDK. It requires a compiler that is capable of translating a source written in Java (the language) into a .class file containing JVM bytecode. You can use any of the several dozen available compilers for that purpose, or write your own.
By the way, you could write a program that translates Java bytecode to .NET bytecode (indeed, such already exist - e.g. IKVM). Is the existence of such a program sufficient to say that ".NET is Java"?
You can also have a program that takes Java code and translates it to C++. Is C++ Java?
Visual J++ was the development environment (a part of Visual Studio) - that was not the issue. The issue was that the virtual machine was called "Microsoft JVM", and loaded .class and .jar files - with several non-standard extensions like delegates, which the license agreement that allowed the use of the trademark "JVM" and "Java" did not allow.
Dalvik does not call itself "JVM" or "Java".
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"?
Microsoft's only fault in the case had come out to be that they had altered the behaviour of java.* packages and org.sun.* packages. Which Google hasn't. Microsoft should have included their "extensions" in org.microsoft.* packages.
Those days Sun chose mostly not to sue on java patents on simply implementing another JVM as long as it was standard compliant and hence not vulnerable to Extend Embrace Extinguish attack.
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