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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."
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).
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.
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?
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.
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.