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Ellison Doesn't Know If Java Is Free
New submitter Emacs.Cmode sends this excerpt from CNet:
"Among the highlights emanating from U.S. District Court in San Francisco courtroom 8 today was Oracle CEO Larry Ellison's response to a question regarding the status of the Java programming language, which his company acquired when it bought Sun Microsystems in 2010. Asked by Google's lead attorney, Robert Van Nest, if the Java language is free, Ellison was slow to respond. Judge William Alsup pushed Ellison to answer with a yes or no. As ZDNet reporter Rachel King observed in the courtroom, Ellison resisted and huffed, 'I don't know.'"
Groklaw has a good write-up about what happened during day one of the trial and a briefer summary of what happened on day two.
They pay them billions of dollars to look pretty and play golf. Ellison's the prettiest. And he smells like pie. If they really wanted to know anything about Java, they should have asked an Oracle employee who makes a immeasurably miniscule fraction of Ellison's salary.
Actually, Ellison's annual salary is 1$, no joke. He is paid in stock to avoid income taxes.
Well, in context:
This is apparently significant because in his deposition, he answered those questions with "That's correct"....
"I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
Sigh...
Feist Publications, Inc., v. Rural Telephone Service Co., 499 U.S. 340 (1991),[1] commonly called Feist v. Rural, is an important United States Supreme Court case establishing that information alone without a minimum of original creativity cannot be protected by copyright. In the case appealed, Feist had copied information from Rural's telephone listings to include in its own, after Rural had refused to license the information. Rural sued for copyright infringement. The Court ruled that information contained in Rural's phone directory was not copyrightable and that therefore no infringement existed.
1991. SCOTUS.
This is a rather famous case and anyone with even a passing familiarity with copyright should have read about this at least once.
Sorry to burst *your* bubble.
--
BMO
From what I gather this is Oracle's beef:
If you want to call your runtime virtual machine that you wrote 'Java' you must pass the TCK and purchase a Java commercial license. Ellison is pissed because Google didn't do that. Google wrote their own runtime virtual machine and they didn't call it Java so they wouldn't need the license to use the trademark 'Java'. Google can thumb their noses at Oracle because there are no restrictions on using the Java programming language and compilers, there are only restrictions on the runtime envirnoment.
At this point, what can Oracle do to extract money from Google? Well it appears they are trying to put restrictions on realistic uses of the Java programming language by claiming that you can't use the Java APIs without Oracle's permission because they are copyrighted. Now, historically the courts have ruled that APIs are not copyrightable so Oracle is tapdancing around with the arrangement and grouping of APIs being special. It also looks like Oracle is going to try to go after Google for the comments in the header files as infringing on Oracle's copywritten Java specifications.
Oracle has a really weak hand and they know it, but they also have good lawyers. It'll be interesting to see of they can confuse the Java Language, APIs and specifications in the minds of the jurors and convince them that Google did something wrong.
I was on a Jury for 6 weeks in a murder trial a few years ago. I was actually pleasantly suprised to find the Judge basically bitch slapped the prosecution or defense any time they tried to make a witness give a yes/no answer when the witness clearly believed it could not be legitimately answered as such and then would proceed to allow the witness to answer how they deemed appropriate.