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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."
Pants on fire.
But we're on Google's side so we'll let it go.
If he didn't mean they should negotiate a Java license with Sun, why did he say:
How you could possibly interpret that statement as meaning anything other than "we need to negotiate a license" is beyond me. I may not like Oracle's aggressiveness in pursuing the issue, but I can't read this email as being anything other than an acknowledgement that Google needs a license.
Now don't get me wrong. Google could have later used the GPL version of Java safely, but they didn't have that option back then. Plus there's the question of whether you're allowed to use pieces of a GPL piece of software, such as the Dalvik compiler and core runtime with a Dalvik-compiled copy of the Java code for it's libraries and packages.
I would contend that they're well within the GPL, provided that the Dalvik code was also released under the GPL. However, if the Dalvik core isn't under GPL, then they've got the issue of mixing GPL and non-GPL code to muddy the waters, and maybe that's the angle Oracle is playing.
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
Reading the email linked by the FP, I would call his claim fairly plausible - I wouldn't take him to have meant "gee, we've infringed the hell out of it, we need to get legal ASAP", but rather "Can you please just buy the best option for us so we can move on and stop the games?"
Honestly, something like that exact discussion comes up on a monthly basis where I work, and some shyster could probably find examples of me saying substantially the same thing in my emails. And I don't give two shakes of a rat's ass about whether or not my employer wants to stay legal on the licensing side - If they don't mind me using a copy of Windows registered to Razor1911, no skin off my back (and hell, good ammo for me if things get ugly).
Of course you have never written a message like that, he used proper grammar in his emails. 8)
When you cant win, ad hominem.
p29 of the exhibit
If I am working for the human resource department of Google, I will fire that Mr. Lindholm long ago
Where the hell have you been working that HR get to choose who to fire? That's really not how it works.
Under that last point, they would definitely need a license from Sun, as "Java" was a registered trademark from Sun. MS and Sun had already been through that battle. If you want to call it Java, you needed permission from Sun. That's very different from claiming you need a license to make a Java compatible language. No smoking gun here.
make imaginary.friends COUNT=100 VISIBLE=false
From the article:
"This week Larry Page could not recall who Lindholm was"
Hey Larry, let me google that for you:
http://lmgtfy.com/?q=tim+lindholm
No matter what he meant, it shouldn't matter. Oracle is trying to use the e-mail to prove "Google knew ahead of time they were in the wrong!" when in fact this e-mail was written AFTER Oracle bought Sun and was murmuring about lawsuits. It's also an unsent draft of an e-mail written by a Google employee who wasn't working on Android! Wow!
I guess if I want to screw over my company in the future, I know how to do it now... Incriminating e-mail drafts!
Maxim: People cannot follow directions.
Increases in truth directly with the length of time spent explaining them
That "copied" code is a joke.
If you have the function prototype per the java doc and you test the limit cases to see what exceptions are thrown, how else can you implement that array range check in a non-trivial way?
That's just lawyer bullshit.
My first thought, too, but it's a private method, not implementing any API.
What's funny is that they're highlighting this trivial function while inadvertently showing that Android uses TimSort, whereas the Java standard library which, according to the docs, uses a tuned quicksort, adapted from Jon L. Bentley and M. Douglas McIlroy's "Engineering a Sort Function".
You know, go down to the DMV and get a driver's license so android could drive one of those google cars. In the country Java (note the capitalization), not for the JAVA SDK.
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
I read it as: Whatever kind of license we need to run Android, we should get one. As somebody who was not, himself, actually involved in any kind of licensing negotiations, laws, etc., he didn't have the least flipping clue WHAT that might entail.
Imagine my boss seeing emacs for the first time and saying "Holy $hit! this emacs is awesome! SirWired, go buy whatever we need to run it." That isn't any kind of admission that running emacs requires paying somebody; just a statement that he wants it.
Google's position is that no license from Sun was in fact needed, and that Eric Lindstrom was not the person that had anything to do with that determination
So you wouldn't call one of the authors of the original Java Virtual Machine spec a person who you would hire? Look at the top of this document:
http://docs.oracle.com/javase/specs/jvms/se7/html/index.html
NOTHING is free. Everything takes time and money to create. Now, for various reasons, people give software away...but this is a massive corporation producing software worth billions of dollars, and a key part of it depends on software that was developed at a cost of millions of dollars.
So a reasonable few million bucks to Oracle for their trouble seems fair.
I don't think I understand the subtle difference in what I said and what you said... So let me try to be clear by pretending to know what I'm talking about for a second: Oracle is trying to use the e-mail to show evidence of WILLFUL INFRINGEMENT.
And it could be evidence of that, except: 1) it was written after Oracle started threatening, 2) it was written AFTER Sun's CEO publicly congratulated Google on releasing Android and promised Sun would support the Android platform 3) it was written by someone in Google not working on Android 4) it was saved as a draft but not sent.
Are you trying to say Oracle is less evil than Google? Are you at all familiar with Oracle?
Honestly even if Google is in the wrong here (which I strongly disagree with), I think it's vitally important Oracle lose this case, as the legal theory they are trying to push (that public APIs are subject to copyright and licensing) is absolute INSANITY and would be the death knell to a large percentage of the software industry.
Though it would make developing on proprietary systems significantly more painful than Free/Open systems like Linux, so that would make some people around here very happy...
Maxim: People cannot follow directions.
Increases in truth directly with the length of time spent explaining them
If there is any lesson to be learnt from this trial it gonna be this - Hire the right person [...snip...] I mean, what qualification that Mr. Lindholm has on legal stuffs ?
Google did not hire Mr. Lindholm to work as a lawyer. Would you also expect your janitors to know how to code? Your delivery drivers to reconcile AP? Your controller to weld deck plates?
How can an ex-Sun employee, currently employed by Google, write an email saying things like "Google need a license for Java" ?
Because non-lawyers can still put two and two together to come up with four. Because the average employee frequently needs to make recommendations within their own domain of knowledge that have implications outside that domain. Because IT people in particular don't generally give a shit about what HR thinks, and HR would already fire us in a heartbeat if the company could live without us.
Or more accurately - Because someone asked.
Actually I would say it should be looked upon as a more fundamental question which is this: Should email be treated as a letter, or as a text message?
The problem with treating emails like a letter is simply people don't think about emails like they do about a letter, probably because it is so trivial to send. With a letter one has to take the time and consolidate their thoughts, write them down, fold it up, put in the envelope etc, whereas with emails they are treated with no more thought most of the time than a LOLCat.
I just have to wonder how many times companies will be bitchslapped by emails like this before they either simply don't allow emails or have them disposed of quickly. because unless you can somehow get your employees to treat emails with the gravitas of a formal letter they will just keep biting you right in the ass.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
Google did not hire Mr. Lindholm to work as a lawyer. Would you also expect your janitors to know how to code? Your delivery drivers to reconcile AP? Your controller to weld deck plates?
No. But you would expect employees (well, maybe except for janitors) to understand the implications in the current legal climate, and refrain from putting things so bluntly as "we're clearly violating these patents and must get a license", even in internal email - unless they are explicitly asked to express their legal opinion. At least, that sort of thing has been part of on-boarding training in pretty much every place I've worked in the last eight years.
I'm all the time sending an email to my boss telling him that we need a license for such-and-such piece of software. It's just expected of most programmers in any sane company to recommend to their boss software tools or libraries that could make things easier or better.
That is not a legal issue, it's a procurement request.
It would be a legal issue if you were already using the software in question (though in that case it would be unethical to not raise it, though it's still a good idea to do it with legal first). Something more closely resembling the situation at hand is if you had been using some software with a very complicated licensing scheme, and you came to believe that the license your company has does not actually allow you to use it in some of the ways you do - but said license violation is not intentional. For those kinds of things, you bring up with the lawyers, and you explicitly invoke the attorney-client privilege if possible (your training should cover this, as well).
the only thing that I can come up with is just like MSFT tried to do in the 90s they tried to take advantage of all the experience that developers have with Java without bothering to actually get the rights to do so
It's nothing like that, please do not insult our intellgence. Microsoft's purpose was to pollute the Java brand by popularizing its incompatible version, calling it Java, whereas it was possible and even the default that Java programs developed with Microsoft's version would not operate correctly with Sun's version. As you know.
When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
Those are the 1.6 docs. Java 1.7 also uses TimSort. Of course, since this was released in 2011, it's entirely possible that this means Oracle has been copying Android code...
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Because Java might not be the best tool for the job? I know some Java developers find this a shocking idea, but it's really true: sometimes another language and environment is a better solution.
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No. But you would expect employees (well, maybe except for janitors) to understand the implications in the current legal climate, and refrain from putting things so bluntly as "we're clearly violating these patents and must get a license", even in internal email - unless they are explicitly asked to express their legal opinion. At least, that sort of thing has been part of on-boarding training in pretty much every place I've worked in the last eight years.
Except that's not what he says. Patents are not, at any point, mentioned in the memo. The memo expresses a desire to use the Java trademark in marketing Android. It is well-known that Sun required licensing of the Java Technology Compatibility Kit and a successful pass of its tests before it would allow you to use the Java trademark in this way, so the license stated as required (a license for the TCK software, not a patent license) would most definitely have been required IF google had proceeded with the plan as it was described in that memo. They did not proceed with this plan, however, instead deciding to distance themselves from Java, make their virtual machine incompatible with the Java virtual machine (although providing tools supporting automated translation between the two formats), and not use the Java trademark in any of their marketing material. So it is unclear what relevance a (correct) statement about the licensing terms on the Java trademark has on a court case about a system that does not use that trademark. This so-called "smoking gun" is just misdirection on Oracle's part.
Unlike Microsoft, Google doesn't claim that their platform is compatible with the JVM. Just as C can be compiled for x86 or ARM, Java can now be compiled for JVM and Dalvik and nobody claims they are bytecode-compatible.
(+1, Disagree)
Actually, the license discussed in the email is for TCK, which is a tool for testing and certifying that Java implementations correctly implement the Java standard.
The code in question (TimSort) was donated to OpenJDK7 by the Google engineer.... ;)
Makes their focus on this even sillier.....
Read the context. Licensing Java would have given them advantages... they would have been able to use the Java virtual machine's native instruction format (meaning applications didn't need to go through a translation phase to run), they would have been able to include J2ME support (thus run preexisting applications and games) and would have been able to use the Java trademark in their advertising (familiar to mobile phone buyers, so would have boosted early sales). Java licensing was desirable, and they evaluated alternatives to Java in order to scare Sun into thinking they actually would switch.
Your being an idiot aside, this was an unsent DRAFT email.
It is not just a draft. Oracle ARE using the drafts as evidence, but the final email also included the licensing language. The reason Oracle had to use the drafts was because the original email was at one point argued to be privileged information. It was found not to be and the final email is considered evidence.
And now I can understand why Oracle's shorts are in a knot.
A key point of Java technology is the cross-platform nature of the JVM. Without the JVM, you lose the portability that was a primary goal, and which Sun fought Microsoft to protect. Microsoft, despite having licensed Java, was beaten down in court for their "variant" on Java.
Regardless of the legalities of the case, I now have to take Oracle's side on the issue. Google is breaking the Java "contract" with developers: portability. Java is not just the syntax and libraries; it's the whole ecosystem, including the concept of portable jars. So regardless of the finer points of law that have been brought up, I hope Oracle wins.
If Microsoft can be bitch-slapped, so can Google.
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
You'll probably get furious then if you'd see this or this. Those bastards are even worse than Google - they compile our pretty and portable .jars to completely non-crossplatform machine code! How dare they.
Java programming language != Java platform. There's no "contract" that any jar will run on any platform using Java programming language - go try running Java EE application on a Java-enabled phone or Bluray's BD-J applet on your PC.
And yes, MS was bitchslapped because they claimed to implement standard, compatible Java SE implementation while introducing incompatiblities. Google claims to implement NOT any of Snoracle's Java platforms, but a new runtime using Java programming language.
You can now proceed to remove your foot from your mouth.