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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.
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.
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!
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?
> 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.
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.
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 !
Suppose a man locks a room full of strangers together for a full year. He waves a gun around and announces that he will be accepting any exclusive privilege to be allowed to speak and write a given word, where the privilege is given in a first come first serve basis. Any that violate this exclusivity will be shot in the head. Some of the strangers might be working closely with this man, or some may be just trying to get on his good side with gifts, but at the end of the day, he has the gun.
It would require extraordinary unity and trust to do anything other than try to grab up as many words as you can. Everyone would be eyeing each other like a mexican stand off, until one person went first to seek privilege from the man with the gun. At that moment, each person would have to rush to this man with the gun to get as much of the language as he can, else be doomed to silence.
This metaphor has to interesting points about companies involved in this patent system and other forms of IP laws. First, focus should be on the gunman; not the victims who play his game. To correct this problem, he must be addressed. Second, even decent people must play this game. They have no other choice if they wish to offer a product we want. Just one single bad guy requires everyone scramble to 'defend' themselves by means of the arbitrary rules of the game. If you do not, you will fade away. That would leave only the ones who eagerly participate, gladly using the rules and often bending them by becoming a favored sycophant and supplicant of the gunman.
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?