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Judge Orders Oracle and Google To Talk, Again
Reader Fluffeh snips from and links to Ars Technica with the latest chapter in the ongoing Google vs. Oracle fight involving patents, Java, and Android, writing that executives at both companies were "'ordered to hold one last round of settlement talks no later than April 9th, with the trial over Google's alleged use of Java technology in Android set to begin April 16,' though '[t]he last-ditch effort to avoid a trial seems unlikely to succeed. ... Oracle initially accused Google of violating seven patents, but has since dropped most of them. This is due to the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office ruling the patents described technology that was not patentable. Two patents assigned to the Oracle-owned Sun Microsystems remain: #6,061,520 which covers "an improvement over conventional systems for initializing static arrays by reducing the amount of code executed by the virtual machine to statically initialize an array," and #RE38,104 which covers a type of compiler and interpreter."
This is due to the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office ruling the patents described technology that was not patentable.
Then why did they have the patents in the first place? This just shows how big of a load of bullshit software patents are. Do they at least get their money back for the patents that are supposedly not patentable? I'd be pissed if I paid $25,000 and then the assholes tell me my patent is invalid.
Not really. Skimming the patent, it seems that it is describing a preprocessing stage where you try running all static constructors, record their results, and generate a simplified version. This would be equally applicable to C++ - if all that the constructor does in a global is touch memory then you can just record the memory layout and stick that in the executable. It's quite neat, but I'm not entirely sure it counts as non-obvious, because it's really just an application of constant propagation, which all compilers have done for decades.
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It seems that IT news is dominated by A litigating against B (lawyers get rich.) C takes on D in a bunch of jurisdictions and has products pulled from shelves (lawyers get rich and consumer choice suffers a hiccup.) Much of the litigation is driven by US tech firms. As a European, I realise our legal systems are less than perfect, but I'd like to understand more about the motivation (beyond $$ alone,) for such active lawyering. Maybe it's all about $$...but isn't everyone getting bored with this?