Slashdot Mirror
Oracle and Google To Finally Enter Courtroom
Fluffeh writes "After around 900 motions and filings, not to mention a timeline of two years, Google and Oracle are finally putting their case before a jury which will be selected on Monday. While Oracle originally sued for billions, the possible damages have come down to a more reasonable $30-something million (the details vary depending on if you ask Google or Oracle). However, the sides are still far apart. Oracle's proposal was a minimum, not a maximum, and Oracle has asked for a tripling of damages because of the 'willful and deliberate nature of Google's infringement.' For ongoing royalties from future sales, Google has proposed payment of just over one-half of one percent of revenue if patent infringement is proven, but Oracle wants more. Beyond financial damages, Oracle has asked for a permanent order preventing Google from continuing to infringe the patents and copyrights. The case is planned to start on Monday afternoon, after jury selection or Tuesday at the latest."
I still have no god damn idea why Oracle is doing this other than amazing short sightedness.
Android is one of the few things left stopping coders fleeing to dot net , its literally a lifeline keeping java alive, and Oracle in their stupidity want to sever that.
*WHY* would they engage on a path so god damn harmful to the health of one of their most important intellectual properties. Its frigging bizare.
I mean ok, sure get a pound of flesh for licencing costs, whatever, billionaires suing billionaires is not my interest. But their "rememdy" seems to effectively involve killing davlik, which would be catastrophic to java coders who have had a huge new source of work from android.
Excuse the Unicode crap in my posts. That's an apostrophe, and slashdot is busted.
... the trend now is the lawyers, who invented nothing but hot air, gonna be the ones who rake in the $$$
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
Actually no...Android is here to stay and won't move away from Java and Oracle knows that very well. So they're trying to have their cake (Java made more popular by way of Android dev) and eat it too (grab lots of monies from Google for using Java in that manner).
Seriously dude. Oracles remedy seems to involve killing davlik. That means no java on the android. Its a scorched earth aproach to IP litigation, and you better hope oracle fails on that.
Excuse the Unicode crap in my posts. That's an apostrophe, and slashdot is busted.
will be well enough educated in technology to make a reasonable decision based on evidence. The last time I had jury duty on a first degree murder case, the person selected from my pool brought a herd of ants into the jury room with his lunch bag (plastic bag from store checkout) and kept going on about how special he was because he and his wife had the only set of twins in the world with identical fingerprints. I am a biologist and was strucken from further review by the defense because I answered the question "Do you believe that DNA technology is accurate?" with "Yes sir, I believe it is accurate." It must be great to be a lawyer.
Koalas. They're telepathic. Plus, they control the weather. -Margaret
You have to be kidding. Java is so firmly entrenched in the enterprise application space that Android is a blip on the radar. It could go away tomorrow and people who write real applications - booking engines, investment monitoring, vehicle tracking, stock management, supply line tracking - will never even blink.
In spite of the sunk cost of Davlik, I think at this point it would be better for Google to simply deprecate Java and tell developers that new development will happen in some other language (like Dart, python, whatever). They could continue to support the Java API indefinitely, but give new apps all the new features and optimisation. Android has had a lot of stick for being a slow, unpolished platform, and this is an opportunity to ditch some of that reputation, at the same time as ditching an unwilling partner (Oracle) who obviously doesn't appreciate what Google have done for Java with Android. The alternative doesn't bear thinking about - constant antagonism with the management of the language standard they are using. If Oracle loses this case they will not take it lying down - expect other moves against Google in the future, hell, even if they win I expect they'd come back for more at some later date. Oracle is obviously in a death spiral and determined to take the rest of the world with it - Apple has also ditched them recently, it seems because of friction with Oracle and new licensing terms, so it's not as if this is going to get better.
Java has caused Google serious issues with performance on a mobile platform anyway - they'd be better off with a language and platform that they control entirely. Unfortunately changing the platform like this would be a huge wrench and would have to be managed very carefully over a period of years, but it can be done.
Yup.
Java is huge in the kind of stuff that doesn't make the news very often.
More importantly, a lot of these systems are so large that "switching to .NET" isn't really a practical option.
Even if all Java development ceased tommorow.. I suspect Java would still be around for a long, long time. Java could become the next COBOL!
They're probably playing hardball...ask for too much in order to receive a lot. Like you said, killing Dalvik would only hurt them, it wouldn't make any sense to actually enforce that even if they get the authority to do so.
Unfortunately, that's business....
Seriously dude. Oracles remedy seems to involve killing davlik. That means no java on the android. Its a scorched earth aproach to IP litigation, and you better hope oracle fails on that.
Yes, I noticed the scorched earth approach. However, there may be a ray of hope against that approach. Because Java is a standard [if only de facto], Oracle may be compelled to offer a license under FRAND [fair, reasonable, and non-discriminatory] terms. Google's offer of 1/2 of 1% is in the FRAND ballpark for a mass market item.
In the Apple/Moto fight in Germany, Moto got an injunction against Apple for infringing some Moto patents. They got the injunction because Apple had not negotiated in good faith [stalling for five years]. However, latest ruling appears that Apple might reverse this on the FRAND argument.
Like a good neighbor, fsck is there
Clearly, Google having to pay Oracle millions of dollars is no big deal - chump change to them.
But Oracle has asked for a permanent order preventing Google from continuing to infringe the patents and copyrights. Clearly Oracle is willing to go to the wall to get its way. It would certainly appear that the future of Java is of little import to Oracle compared to winning this battle and getting as much compensation from Google as they can.
If Oracle wins, what they demand will only be limited by the importance of the patents and copyright in question. Leaving the copyright issue aside for now (since it is less clear), how important are the patents? Can Google work around them?
It is my understanding that the principle concern is this patent:
Method and system for performing static initialization.
http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO2&Sect2=HITOFF&p=1&u=/netahtml/PTO/search-bool.html&r=18&f=G&l=50&co1=AND&d=PTXT&s1=6061520&OS=6061520&RS=6061520
How significantly would Davlik be affected if they had to work around this patent?
To be fair, I'm not sure this sort of endless litigation is necessarily caused by patents, it's more a result of the legal system we have, and the perverse incentives for lawyers to keep themselves in work. Jarndyce v Jarndyce is a good place to start for an example of this which doesn't involve patents.
Go would actually be an excellent option. Its a really clever language that solves a whole ton of C related pain-points, and compiles surprisingly snapilly.
I mean google might be concerned that not many people know it, but Apple took the exact same punt with objective C, but ultimately objective C's strengths as a rapid development platform won over a lot of coders who might otherwise be spooked away from it.
Excuse the Unicode crap in my posts. That's an apostrophe, and slashdot is busted.
I'm just trying to imagine what both companies could have done, if the money for this had been spent on R&D projects. Probably both companies and their ecosystems would have been better off. Conflict between two titans rattles the earth, and shakes and frightens smaller beings.
Two years of hard core litigation? Which small companies can afford that? Even if a small company is clearly in the right, a giant can litigate them out of existence, before the truth comes to light.
'tis uneasy waters, in which we tread today, my fellows.
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
Maybe you've overlooked something
The broken patent system has made a lot of lawyers very very rich
And rich lawyers will see that the broken patent system stays broken
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
Java constantly is listed among the top three most popular programming languages. It's not because of Android.
Android chose Java because Java was popular, not the other way around. You must be unaware of the other uses of Java in this world.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Two rich lawfirms leave richer...
Android is ... literally a lifeline keeping java alive
As an enterprise infrastructure technologist, I can tell you that Java is very much alive. With or without Android, it is not going anywhere anytime soon.
> have no god damn idea why Oracle is doing this
Because Google can't axe Java now, they in their infinite wisdom allowed it to proliferate. If only they have kept C and let developers to add Java, Python, Go, Haskell runtimes (all derived and compiled from C) they would have a great and truly free&open platform, the whole Java thing would get offloaded to third parties, something that smart companies do. Now Java is mandated, and of course you can't compile Go from Java nor Python from Java etc. as it all requires C to be the default underlaying SDK, which for some uniquely flawed executive reasoning is not. So Java is now the huge drag anchor of Android development, not only creating nightmares to developers, but also this patent/copyright Oracle stink.
I'm just trying to imagine what both companies could have done, if the money for this had been spent on R&D projects
Good question maybe.....
Google oceanSpray! a new product that twists the web, attracts millions of users, but never leaves beta and is closed after a few years to the protests of the small but devoted community that stuck around.
or
Oracle Cloudsense Exalogic. A new database that analyzes the cloud, provides a solid support package, but uses an obscure syntax that mostly annoys the programmers who need to work with it, and costs $3million a seat.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Android is here to stay and won't move away from Java and Oracle knows that very well
Yeah, it's not like Google has made their own language or uses popular, high level language internally that could replace java.
Since there's already C++ support for those needing the support, python could easily replace new development. Freeze the java API, only release the goodies in the new python API, and watch as java rides off into the sunset wrt new development.
Infact, I think the only reason they bought sun was for the IP to bludgeon google over the head with. I'm not quite clear why though.
Walter Isaacson's bio of Steve Jobs sheds some light on it. Jobs and Larry Ellison were BFFs. Together, they had a long history of conspiring to advance each others' agendas.
Ellison, for instance, was prepared to launch a "hostile" takeover of Apple if they didn't bring Jobs back on board. Even after Jobs's death, rolling boulders downhill at Google just for the lulz would be precisely Ellison's style. He has nothing to lose and potentially a lot to gain.
In the Apple/Moto fight in Germany, Moto got an injunction against Apple for infringing some Moto patents. They got the injunction because Apple had not negotiated in good faith [stalling for five years]. However, latest ruling appears that Apple might reverse this on the FRAND argument.
They can argue FRAND in that case because Moto has actually signed a bunch of disclaimers when they submit their patents to the standard org. I very much doubt you can argue FRAND on a random technology by claiming that it is a "de facto standard".
Does google even have any direct revenue for android?
Jason
Not going to happen. Android platform is BIG. And it works quite OK, actually.
Python is not going to cut it. It's interpreted (i.e. 'too slow') and has miserable multithreading. Dalvik VM is by now JIT-compiled with decent multi-threading. Besides, Python is a dynamic language and they are a pain for complex apps.
Go isn't going to cut it either because it's a purely compiled language.
True as ever! I wonder how many more messy high-profile cases Java will cause before it dies... or if Oracle's schmoozing against Google might end up decimating their platform in industry, thereby preventing such cases.
Bio questions? Ask me to start a Q&A journal. Computer analogies available for most topics!
Android chose Java because Java was popular, not the other way around. You must be unaware of the other uses of Java in this world.
Exactly. Java's got a huge number of server-side programs written for it, and it mostly gets on and supports those pretty well. Its somewhat chunky startup costs aren't a big problem in that situation (you don't need to start processes very often and you can usefully throw hardware at it) and its both fast and safe; fast because this is the case that JITting does best with, and safe because there's no loading of strange native code or user-supplied classes. The only real competitor in this space is .Net (yes, I know its not a language but a group of them targeting a single runtime, but then again what I say about Java really applies to a suite of languages too) and that only really has traction on Windows; Mono isn't very trusted yet, and most of the organizations with these sorts of code bases are very conservative (the only reason that Java and C# have had real traction into this space is because a lot of effort was made by Sun and Microsoft to enable relatively low-skilled programmers to work on connecting nasty legacy databases with relatively modern front-ends; that finally displaced a lot of companies away from COBOL and MUMPS).
The amazing thing is that people still write new desktop apps in Java...
"Little does he know, but there is no 'I' in 'Idiot'!"
Yup.
Java is huge in the kind of stuff that doesn't make the news very often.
More importantly, a lot of these systems are so large that "switching to .NET" isn't really a practical option.
Even if all Java development ceased tommorow.. I suspect Java would still be around for a long, long time. Java could become the next COBOL!
Java is also huge in the kind of stuff that does make the news. It's either the #1 or #2 most used programming language for applications, depending on what you try to measure.
The reason why switching to .NET isn't practical doesn't have anything to do with size. There is nothing preventing anyone from developing a Java-to-CLR compiler (google says http://www.janetdev.org/ but I haven't tried it), and writing any new parts of your application in some other CLR language. I think the biggest hurdle would be switching the IT infrastructure to windows and then being committed to sticking with that choice for ever.
By the way, if you think all COBOL development has ceased, you are wrong.
Unfortunately, that's business....
I've been in the business field for decades, and I will tell you that 99.9% of business people on this earth do not include extortion as a part of normal business practice.
What Oracle is doing is extortion, pure and simple, and unfortunately, Google isn't their only target.
Hundreds of million Android users will also be affected
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
Say what now? The Oracle/Google lawsuit is about copyright infringement of the Java library APIs, as thoroughly documented at Groklaw. I don't know which lawsuit you're thinking of.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
Do you think Google didn't know exactly what they were doing when the developed Dalvik? The company is awash with ex-Sun execs.
There are already companies licensing Java on mobile who are at a distinct competitive disadvantage because they have to pay a licensing fee to Oracle for the use of Java, whereas Google (and its partner manufacturers) do not license Java on Android. If Oracle wins my guess is Android will die slowly because whatever the PR may be, Android is successful because the cell carriers make more money from the devices than any other.
Sun knew exactly what is was doing when it opened up the non-mobile Java SDK but failed to do the same with Java ME.
Oracle is in an all or nothing move to either generate revenue from Java on mobile or kill it off. Whatever the damages they're claiming, the real cost will be in the massive license fees they negotiate if they win.
RIM's Playbook device is the first example of what is happening. The device has no Java unless you use Android apps. Despite the fact RIM's entire app catalog on App World for its earlier OS was Java based. Whatever their public statements on the subject, the truth is this is about licensing and competition (otherwise why didn't RIM release the Java VM already available on the new OS they bought).
No the patent side of the lawsuit is pretty much gutted. The patents Oracle was suiing over were mostly tossed by the patent office. That is why the $$ went from billions to millions.
He has nothing to lose and potentially a lot to gain.
Nothing to lose... you mean other than having most of Oracle's Java patents invalidated and spending an obscene amount of legal fees against the prospect of not recovering anything?
Oracle sucks, that's all there is to it.
Copyright violations over APIs? And Java is supposed to be F/OSS?
In my opinion, this is essentially illegal dumping
While the default is Google search, I know of at least two instances of carriers/handset makers changing it out. Samsung had a Verizon Android version of the Galaxy S with Bing search and Motorola had some Droid models with Yahoo search.
Windows resellers were forbidden from doing this.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
Oracle does a lot of stupid things, they're your typically corporation who would shoot themselves in the foot if it had an immediate benefit. Everyone in the company is driven hard by what I've heard is a tyrannical executive team, from my vantage point they have a case of PRS (performance review syndrome).
Not knowing otherwise, I'd say they bought Sun just to destroy it. First they kill OpenOffice, then Solaris, then ZFS, and now their working on Java. Very short sighted, but in my opinion not has bad as IBM's failure to see the value in Sun and more importantly the implications of a merger with one of our largest competitors.
If they don't use them to sue people, what would be the point of having them.
The nuclear weapons analogy is very appropriate: You're not supposed to have to use them. If you actually end up litigating a patent, something has gone terribly wrong.
The problem is this: If you have a valid patent and you want to use it for exclusion like patents are intended (like pharmaceutical companies do), you don't end up in court, because your competitors know you have a valid patent and don't bother infringing it, or stop when you tell them to.
But that isn't what happens in the tech industry. Instead, everyone has a huge pile of overly broad and obvious patents which everyone else is infringing (and only because none of them should ever have been issued), and the cost of litigating that many patents is almost always prohibitive. The consequence is that no one can use them for exclusion, because as soon as you file a lawsuit you get one back and it's mutually assured destruction. At the same time, you still have to have a huge patent arsenal in order to deter all the other companies from going to you for a shake down using a huge pile of questionable patents that would almost always cost more to litigate and invalidate than license. In this case the problem was that Oracle was vastly overvaluing the patents -- they were claiming $6B in damages at the start of all this. Now it looks like if they win it's going to end up being more like something less than $50M. Which is almost certainly less than the amount Oracle is having to spend in legal fees.
The sole purpose of buying sun seems to be to attack google with their IP... for what purpose I don't know.
I don't know if that's really it. I think part of it is that there are a very large number of old, conservative, high-spending Oracle customers who use Sun hardware, and if Sun dies then those customers are going to be looking for a new vendor, and in the process they could end up being sold an Oracle competitor's database. So Oracle staged a Sun bailout. They just happened to end up with Java in the process.
The thing is, Java means something different to Oracle than it ever did to Sun. The original point of Java was to stop people from writing apps in Visual Basic or against the Win32 API which then wouldn't run on Solaris and SPARC -- Java was "write once, run anywhere" so you could write your app for whatever you have now and then Sun could come in at some point and pitch some hardware to you and it would still run your software.
Oracle is instead looking at it as a licensing opportunity. Lots of people are using Java, Oracle wants money. The problem is that their patents are crap and claiming copyright on an API is ridiculous. It's like claiming a copyright on the bolt pattern in a piece of industrial equipment so that no competitors can make replacement parts. It's purely functional, and copyright only covers expression, not function. Functionality is the domain of patents.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Oracle Java isn't open source.
Straight from wikipedia:
On November 13, 2006, Sun released much of Java as free and open source software, (FOSS), under the terms of the GNU General Public License (GPL). On May 8, 2007, Sun finished the process, making all of Java's core code available under free software/open-source distribution terms, aside from a small portion of code to which Sun did not hold the copyright.
True as ever! I wonder how many more messy high-profile cases Java will cause before it dies... or if Oracle's schmoozing against Google might end up decimating their platform in industry, thereby preventing such cases.
With Java's popularity in mobile apps and server-side enterprise software, I doubt it will be "killed" anytime soon. Unless Microsoft decides to support dot net across multiple platforms, it will never be a viable replacement.
Microsoft and RIM are both dying breeds with little marketshare and zero mindshare.
Who cares if Microsoft is using a Java clone (C# is much, much more like Java than C, don't let the branding fool you)?
Mod me down, my New Earth Global Warmingist friends!
Somewhere at Google is a Java fanboy, they do far to much mission critical stuff in it (while still developing their stuff) for it to be anything but a fanboy reasoning. They even generate their javascript by writing java instead. No people, javascript is NOT a bad language, it is just a different one that requires a different mindset. Writing a program to be able to generate code for one language in another SCRIPTING language... that is just insanity.
And as has been pointed out, turning Linux into a java only platform is just insane as well. One of the major strengths of Linux is it wide coding support, why on earth would you limit it to just Java a language owned by a rather dubious company before and after (Sun's handling was just as insane) over the countless truly free alternatives? By all means let developers develop in it if they want to but keep your options open.
No, a fanboy exec has declared Java to be the way and business logic be damned.
Meanwhile Apple has forced developers to learn their own language and has the more healthy market. Go figure. Where is the java advantage?
Compile time type checking helps with large applications to reduce the amount of errors. Javascript is an interpreted language with dynamic types and it takes more work to write the application libraries as the application grows. It's not really insane to use a compiler to write javascript if it helps in error reduction.
Does google even have any direct revenue for android?
Jason
Not in pure form directly. It is completely free.
They encourage developers to download the source SDK (all 8.1 GB of it). I have it on my machine and take updates all the time. This doesn't include the Android kernel, but this is also freely available for download. In fact, the Android mods to Linux have [just recently] been added back to the mainline kernel tree.
All of the "front facing" [to app developers] APIs are common. If you're a small shop app developer, you're good to go.
But, handset manufacturers may need some custom mods to the kernel to provide optimal performance on their platforms or support a unique device they have. They can [and some do] make the mods themselves. They can maintain their own source deltas [which is easy enough to do because everything is maintained by git].
If, however, you want professional developer support [beyond filing a bug tracking report], Google will [probably] provide that--for a fee (or some other revenue sharing arrangement). Since most telcos and handset/tablet manufacturers are risk averse, they will usually have such an arrangement.
Like a good neighbor, fsck is there
They can argue FRAND in that case because Moto has actually signed a bunch of disclaimers when they submit their patents to the standard org. I very much doubt you can argue FRAND on a random technology by claiming that it is a "de facto standard".
Fair enough. That doesn't mean Google won't try [and may be successful]. This may be strengthened slightly by Sun's previous two separate attempts to submit Java as a standard to JTC1 and ECMA.
Oracle is playing a dangerous game [for themselves] on several fronts.
The reason that Java became popular was the "write-once-run-anywhere" [WORA] and that Oracle [nee Sun] would provide access for any platform. If Oracle wins, this collapses and many independent developers would see the need to reconsider their strategy in light of the fact that Oracle [on a whim] could deny access to a platform that is the developer's primary market.
The implications go far beyond Google. If Oracle wins, this would imperil not just Google, but telcos, handset makers, and tens of thousands of software developers. Legalities aside, the court will be aware of the potential widespread economic chaos that might ensue and temper its judgement accordingly. The court might refuse the injunction and compel Oracle to offer a license [Google might have to pay the $30M damages + license fees but it would be free to pursue Dalvik/Android]
Further, if Oracle prevails, the federal government might view Oracle as a "sole source supplier". In other words, no government contract would be able to use Java in it. For example, because Apple is considered to be a sole source supplier, the FDA will not approve any medical system that uses Apple/Mac technology. That's why you always see PC's (or Sun's) at your local doctor's office. Or, if Java has found its way into certain gov't systems, the federal gov't may seize/nullify the patents under national security grounds.
Also, I believe Google has filed with the USPTO for a reexamination on the patents, arguing they are obvious or there is prior art, etc. Personally, I'm not currently up on what patents are being asserted. But, as a computer engineer, I'm hard pressed to see what could patentable in the JVM as machine architecture simulators/emulators have been around since the 1960's.
In the 1980's, when [AT&T] Unix was the only variant around, they were controlling it and didn't want a formal standard. That's how POSIX came about. Using [court tested] "clean room" techniques, they were able to come up with a standard that gave rise to other implementations (e.g. minux and linux). That's why linux is called POSIX-compliant and not Unix-compliant. This could happen for Java (HP had a clean room Java implementation for embedded systems in the 90's).
In the late 1990's when Microsoft was creating a Windows specific variant of Java [mainly to eviscerate Java], Sun took them to court and got a preliminary injunction. The appeal [which MS won] was that the punishment did not fit the crime. In other words, a breach of contract should not be punished by means of an injunction. No doubt this ruling will be cited in the current case.
Google didn't clean room the Dalvik JVM for the same purpose as MS. The Sun/Java JVM assumes, more or less, a fairly powerful machine (e.g. a PC/Mac/mainframe, etc.). It is too slow/bloated for "low power" (e.g. CPU speed, memory, disk space) handset/tablet. Likewise for the Java Runtime Environment (JRE). It's meant to be a one-size-fits-all kitchen sink approach. Way too big to fit on a small nimble device, yet it would need additional handset specific classes and the generic classes that have no use in a handset would need to be trimmed.
Weaning off Java might be as herculean a task as the U.S. converting to the metric system. At worst, Google might have to call it something other than "Java". But, end users kn
Like a good neighbor, fsck is there