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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!
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!
My guess is that Oracle doesn't plan on winning the copyright issues at all. As has been pointed out in previous articles, if they win they will have, as a consequence, turned Java into a derivative work of the pre-existing languages it borrowed from. They will be sued for -- and lose -- much more than they could possibly hope to win here now. If they win on copyright, they lose big time.
Although they probably hope they can win on the patent issues, considering their damages have come down so much (from they probably thought were uninflated numbers) some of the execs and lawyers probably see that even if they win, they're not going to get what they want. Essentially, what started off as a hopeful money grab is now them most likely just going through the motions in order to save face. Though perhaps they are delusional enough to think otherwise.
As others have pointed out, if they actually do stop Davlik entirely, then their "win" is to have less people interested in Java. From what I hear about Java for the past couple of years, though, they seem to be willfully killing it off through mismanagement anyway. So perhaps they really don't give a shit about it at all. What kind of revenues they get due to Java?
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."
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.
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.
As others have pointed out, if they actually do stop Davlik entirely, then their "win" is to have less people interested in Java. From what I hear about Java for the past couple of years, though, they seem to be willfully killing it off through mismanagement anyway. So perhaps they really don't give a shit about it at all. What kind of revenues they get due to Java?
They're not killing it, they're turning it into COBOL 2.0 - a realm of humongous "enterprise" solutions chock full of incomprehensible code that requires very expensive consultants to maintain, much less update. In other words, the kind of turf on which Oracle knows how to play very well.
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 !
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?
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.
you havn't been coding enterprise applications either., Some code is more complex than other, way more complex. Massively, stupidly, craply, suckfestly more complex.
Not because it is somehow special, but because there was money to be made in dragging the thing out as long as possible and making it as complicated as possible with the cheapest and most useless developers and the most expensive consultants you could imagine.
And most of these shitty shit shit applications are written in Java for people who have budgets bigger than their overstuffed bonus payouts.
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.
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