Google Developer Testifies That Java Memo Was Misinterpreted

benfrog writes with a piece that appeared in yesterday's Wall Street Journal about the in-progress legal battle between Oracle and Google over Java: "Ex-Sun and current Google employee Tim Lindholm testified that it was "not what he meant" when asked about the smoking gun email (included here (PDF)) that essentially said that Google needed to get a license for Java because all the alternatives 'suck[ed].' He went on in 'brief but tense testimony' to claim that his day-to-day involvement with Android was limited."

Comments

Re:Oh come on

[dgatwood]

If he didn't mean they should negotiate a Java license with Sun, why did he say:

It seems likely that he meant that they should negotiate with Sun for a license. However, the most likely meaning of such a statement (when spoken or written by an engineer) is that it would be easier to get a quality product out the door in a timely manner if they licensed Java from Sun than if they wrote their own implementation, and thus, from an engineering perspective, they needed to do so. The powers that be chose to rewrite it instead of buying a license, therefore no license was needed from either a legal or a technical perspective. It is therefore downright silly to interpret such a statement from an engineer as implying that a license was legally necessary.