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Schmidt Testifies Android Did Not Use Sun's IP
CWmike writes "Google built a 'clean room' version of Java and did not use Sun's intellectual property, Google's executive chairman, Eric Schmidt, testified in court Tuesday. Schmidt said its use of Java in Android was 'legally correct.' On this day seven of the trial, Schmidt gave the jury a brief history of Java, describing its release as 'an almost religious moment.' He told the jury that Google had once hoped to partner with Sun to develop Android using Java, but that negotiations broke off because Google wanted Android to be open source, and Sun was unwilling to give up that much control over Java. Instead, Schmidt said, Google created the 'clean room' version of Java that didn't use Sun's protected code. Its engineers invented 'a completely different approach' to the way Java worked internally, Schmidt testified."
Where do you get the shit that you smoke?
Mod me down, my New Earth Global Warmingist friends!
We really need better names in this industry. I read the headline and immediately imagined a robot falling over and convulsing while saying "IP conflict.. conffflict... unaaaable to.. reboot," while a self-satisfied and positively glowing Sun glanced over the top of his laptop and started giggling quietly to himself. But it could just be the caffeine withdrawl too.
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
Guess why Google doesn't use it or create their own? Because that would be much more work to do.
1) What's wrong with saving yourself work?
2) Isn't that the whole point of OSS?
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
If Oracle is so worried about the "Fragmentation of Java", why would they want to force Google to write a completely different API?
If what he says is true, there should be lots of evidence including a big stack of affidavits signed by the reverse-engineers swearing that they have never seen the original code. If he can't pull these out of his pocket, along with the Attorney who oversaw the project, I'd be.. erm... skeptical.
Isn't this basically what Linus Torvalds did with Linux? If it can be done with an OS couldn't you do it with a compiler or an interpreter? I'm not a programmer, so the likeliness of this story being true is beyond my ability to judge.
-- QED
Seriously though - I love the irony in someone saying
"Name any market Google has created [...] It's all polished implementations of other peoples well proven ideas."
in response to a comment about Google "stealing" from Apple
Schmidt has dirty paws. I would not be surprised if this behavior is why Sergey Brin had to oust him. Name any market Google has created? Search? Mail? Maps? Online Docs? It's all polished implementations of other peoples well proven ideas. Their finest and purest idea was their first one: search ranking by citation.
AdWords. I'm unaware of any prior system that did automatic auctions for specific search terms. As far as Google's success, AdWords was equally as important as search, since it's the financial basis for the entire company. If you read some of the early history of Google their original sales methods were human centric, slow and no better than anyone else. AdWords started the flood of cash.
"Seven Deadly Sins? I thought it was a to-do list!"
That's impossible. Where in heaven would Jobs have found a lawyer?
Google wanted the [i]actual virtual machine[/i] to be open source. Java the [i]language[/i] was open sourced. This trial resides around whether or not that open source license extended to the api's of the language.
We're talking about an intermediate representation. Both Google and Oracle's virtual machines take their respective bytecode formats and convert them to a register-based machine language prior to execution. The only difference is that Google does this by translating from a different register-based language while Oracle translates from a stack-based language. This isn't about calling conventions, but compiler technology.
He should have excused himself from the board the moment Google started working on Android.
That would have been silly because Google started working on Android when Apple was a company that made portable music players and pretty much nothing else. But even so, he did in fact recuse himself from all discussions involving the iPhone and resigned not long after its release. Since Google purchasing Android was very publicly known there is no excuse for the rest of the board for not removing him if they thought it was a problem. There was absolutely nothing secret about it, so if it was a problem as you seem to believe then that is a testament to incredible stupidity of the Apple board room and not much else.
In 2006, only javac, the java compiler, was open source. Android doesn't even use this compiler, so this was irrelevant to them. It took until 2007 for a GPL release of the class library, and Android was basically finished by this point in time. The first android phone launched only weeks after Java's GPL release. The decision to pursue an open source Java implementation was taken in 2005, shortly after Google acquired Android, and long before Sun began open-sourcing anything.
You are mixing things.
OpenJDK is the GPLv2 licensed reference implementation for Java SE. This is important because it includes crap like Swing and AWT that have no place on a modern mobile phone or tablet, amongst countless of other fat that's not needing. The virtual machine itself is way to heavy, doing optimizations that can be afforded on a desktop, but that are too expensive on a mobile phone.
But Java ME (mobile edition) is an entirely different matter. It does not have an open-source implementation, so you have to license it from Sun/Oracle. And if you do that, you cannot modify it to suit your needs, unless Sun/Oracle agrees, which is very unlikely because historically they've been quite religios about their TCK.
So the thing left to do, if you want to use "open-source Java" is to fork OpenJDK. But the problem here is that the patents grant in GPLv2 is implicit and this means for derivate works it does not hold in Europe (for example) as the "implicit patents grant" is an artifact strictly related to the US patents office only.
Apache begged Sun for years to license them the TCK for Apache Harmony (the most complete third-party open-source implementation), but the license of the TCK says that distribution of the implementation for mobile devices is subject to licensing, a clause which is incompatible with Harmony's APL license, therefore Sun disagreed ... but at least people assumed that a clean-room implementation is fine, even if it does not pass the TCK, as long as you don't use the Java trademark. And now Oracle wants to prove otherwise.
So no, for mobile devices Java is closed, unless you go with a clean-room implementation, which Google did.
Dalvik is a virtual machine optimized for mobile phones. The latest version is pretty good too. Android has its flaws, but it's overall pretty good and this is in part because Google went the extra mile with their own VM implementation, which wouldn't have been possible otherwise.
Oh come on, just saying a name is harmless. It's like Candlejack - I say "Candlejack" all the time, and nothing bad ever ha
..One point if the GPLv2 does not cover US Patents in Europe but it does cover US Patents in the US ... what is the problem?
US Software patents are covered in the US - but implicitly granted
US Software patents are meaningless in Europe
Europe does not have Software Patents ...
So this is about Copyright and not Patents ...and nothing was copied?
Puteulanus fenestra mortis
No, he's just wrong.
In fact, despite the fact that kernel and userland programs in Android require it to be open source, Google is making it as hard as possible for it to be any use for others.
This is wrong - only the kernel is GPL. They have no obligation to release the rest of the source, which is either Apache2 or BSD licensed. In fact, they didn't for a version (Honeycomb?).
Bionic, Dalvik, they could've kept all of that closed and they didn't.
You need to be registered partner and pay hefty sums just to officially use Android.
This is a red herring and slightly wrong. You can call your device "Android" if you pass the compatibility test, which is free (as in beer and speech). If this is enough to call Android not open, then Firefox isn't either (see Iceweasel).
You have to get a license to get access to Google Play, which isn't software but a service provided by Google and not really part of Android.
In fact, they have basically used the work of countless amount of volunteer programmers without giving much back.
That's called open source. We all use much more than we contribute back; in fact, that's the whole point!
But the fact is that the Android software is open, and Linux 3.3 included contributions from Android's kernel.
Guess why Google doesn't use it or create their own? Because that would be much more work to do.
They have created a language (Go), they pay for the development of Python (check who employs Guido van Rossum) and they have developed a full compiler and VM (Dalvik).
The reason they chose Java has nothing to do with it being more work, but with the fact that developers already know the language.
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FTFY
Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun