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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."
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.
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.
[citation needed]
If you think imaginary property and real property are the same, when does your house become public domain?
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.
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.
... 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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'cept that's nothing like what happened.
In fact, all Google did was reimplement an already clean-room reimplementation of Java. The case is about software patents, which Oracle claims Google infringed by doing so, not copyrights. The only mention of copyrights was Oracle trying to say "Google made an interface that was compatible with Java" because Google took a public header file (which are non-copyrightable through reason of insufficient expression - because they are *fact*-based files, nothing else) and used it to create a compatible API.
The lawsuit is basically trying to say "no-one, anywhere, can make anything even vaguely similar to Java because we hold the patent on it", not "Google stole our Java code".
But, please, do carry on trolling.
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 am a bit in the dark as to the intricacies of Java and Dalvik, so forgive me if this is a daft question...
When you say Google "create[d] a compatible API", is this similar to what WINE did for the WIN32 API? A re-implementation, through new code, that emulates* the functionality of the precursor?
* I know -- WINE is not an emulator, I use the word in a more metaphoric sense.
MC
No. And some of those invalidations are also in appeal.
There is no such thing as a copy of Suns JVM etc.
The only thing that is "similar" is the fact that the "language" used to program on Android "looks like" Java and is ofc from a programmers point of view the same as Java.
However as soon as you start doing serious development, you realize there is no "Android Java Platform" there is only a language!
In other words: there is no claim or wish or hint that a "Java Program" would run on Android. The programs need to be considered "Android Programs". The opposite is true as well, an Android Program is not advertized to be compatible to any Java Platform in any way.
Java is just a modern Pascal in this case or a newer C ...
If you bring the point about register based VMs versus stack based ones, then python and parrot infringe also Oracles patents?
That is very very true and also very very sad :-/
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they did. it's called "dalvik". the problem is, oracle thinks dalvik infringes on patents used by java's hotspot(tm) runtime.
What ? Me, worry ?
But Google used the code anyway and that's where they are in the wrong.
Uh, no, you might be confusing patents with copyright. They don't distribute Oracle's licensed code in Android itself and as far as I know, the copyright claim in the lawsuit has already been dropped.
It's pretty obvious they knew about these patents but ignored them so that puts them in the wrong.
The question is not whether they knew about them, but whether:
1) They are valid at all - (Oracle was ordered to drop 98% of them from the lawsuit)
2) They are infringing - that's up to the court to decide.
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Of course they can, but then they might actually have to do some "work"... Also, maybe they just can't find anybody?
"Google wanted to partner to save money, but Sun wanted $100mil and I'm pretty sure Google didn't want to invest that much so they decided not to. But Google used the code anyway and that's where they are in the wrong."
That or they figured out a way to work around the patents and avoid being guilty of infringement.
"People have known about Google being in the wrong for about a year. "
Oh, it's written in a blog on the internet. It must be true then. Perhaps we could update Wikipedia to reference the blog just to confirm it to be the case.
"It's pretty obvious they knew about these patents but ignored them so that puts them in the wrong."
Ignored them, or found them to be almost certainly invalid, or simply worked around them? You seem to be rather blindly dismissing some perfectly credible alternative possibilities here.
More realistically the chance are Google examined the patents, felt they were probably not valid and invalidated by prior art or similar, but to avoid having to deal with the hassle of a costly court case, figured it'd approach Sun about licensing. When Sun gave the $100mill figure they quite possibly figured that the risk of the cost of court was probably worth it, Sun probably didn't take it any further knowing that they themselves saw little point in stumping up the cash for a case they'd probably lose. Oracle however obviously thought differently, but, as some of Oracle's patents have already been dismissed as not valid, then perhaps there's some truth to this theory.
You seem to have made a very strong assertion, based on very little fact, whilst ignoring perfectly valid alternative possible events.
You're ignoring some crucial points:
1) That google chose a clean-room over SUN tech after the dealmaking failed. That is a perfectly valid defense for a copyright claim - and nothing in the evidence so far suggests that anything other than a copyright claim was ever discussed. Patent claims wouldn't be addressed by a clean-room implementation but so far there is no evidence whatsoever of willfull patent infringement.
2) The factor of willful and selective enforcement: several other organisations have built java compatible VM's and compilers (Kaffeine and gcj for example) - and never has sun or oracle sued them -despite stating their aim at java-compatibility.
3) That java itself was GPL'd prior to the oracle acquisition and teh terms of that license provides blanket patent coverage over java itself, it's only the java test-suite (used for measuring compatibility) which is licensed differently (thus remaining patentable) and this is why code such as Apache Foundation's Harmony are safe - they don't do those tests. Oracle has yet to show any proof that google ever used the test-suite.
4) Public statements by SUN employees that the java patents in question are frivolous (made stronger by the fact that they are the very employees who applied for them) and were only filed to get sun defensive patent protection, and that they even competed to see who could get the stupidest, silliest patent granted.
This case is still very much up in the air in terms of real guilt. Whether you agree with software patents or not - the simple reality is that Oracle has a lot of unanswered questions here and it's by no means clear-cut whether google did in fact infringe any patents at all - let alone what the true damage assesment should be if they did.
I find one thing from this far more disturbing: google claims that real damages should be based on android value only, and since android is zero-cost that damages must be zero-cost as well.
The judge declared that zero-cost is not applicable as their other income (ad-revenue) must be considered as tied in with this. This is very concerning because it would make the likely liability of open-source projects that are sued by patent trolls far higher, if the revenue from the supposedly infringing product is to be expanded to include revenue from any other software, service or product which in some way gets bundled or shared on that product then many open-source companies face a far higher risk in patents than they previously did.
Imagine if a company sued wordpress for patent infringement and then claimed that every ad shown on their commercial wordpress.com free blog hosting site is revenue that should count toward the calculation of patent damages ?
Unicode killed the ASCII-art *
You completely missed his point. His comments are not so much about software patents, but about how people perceive the various justice systems in the world, and the consequences of those perceptions. The whole post could be boiled down to Europeans continually hearing that the US system is such a mess (whether or not it always is) and assume that their own system is better, when in some cases it can be just as bad or worse than the US system. To better illustrate, after the Pirate Bay trials and the whole debacle involving Assange, many people on Slashdot who had blindly assumed that the Swedish legal system was immune to the problems for which the US system is criticized were forced to reassess their beliefs.
(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.
"I think that's perfectly sensible (or rather, as sensible as patents ever are). You shouldn't be able to get free reign to infringe on anyone's patents just by making the particular infringing part of your software open source."
But that's not what happened.
The patent holder gpled; the patent holder was aware of the patents when they did it.
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Corrupt generally would mean that you can bribe the judge, or jury, to rule in your favor. That is not happening here (as far as we know). If there was any corruption, it was from congress, who made the laws that way to being with, not with the court.
The court merely follows, and makes judgements, based on the rules. That is what it means to have rule of law, and it's really a good thing.
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