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Oracle Seeks $9.3 Billion For Google's Use Of Java In Android (computerworld.com)
angry tapir quotes a report from Computerworld: Oracle is seeking as much as $9.3 billion in damages in a long-running copyright lawsuit against Google over its use of Java in Android, court filings show. Oracle sued Google six years ago, claiming the search giant needs a license to use parts of the Java platform in Google's market-leading mobile OS.
The two companies first went to trial in 2012, but the jury was split on whether or not Google's use of Java was protected by "fair use." Now they're headed back to the courtroom for a new trial scheduled to begin May 9, where Oracle's Larry Ellison and Google's Eric Schmidt will be present. Currently, the sum Oracle is asking for is about 10 times as much as when the two companies went to trial in 2012.
According to the public documents at the time of the purchase they purchased SUN primarily for the hardware division, they apparently valued the software assets very little.
Second trial always favors the defendant. They knows the plaintiffs strategy and what influenced the jury.
Weird... wasn't Java GPL'd at one point (2006-2007)? Oracle does not have a leg to stand on here even if Google were to take the whole stack and redistribute it. They would merely be required to make the source available - which they have done and it has led to derivatives/forks.
But, as Android is built on a Java _clone_ (Apache Harmony, soon OpenJDK) on top of Linux. Oracle's claim is even weaker.
The Christian Right is Neither (Christian nor right). See: Matthew 23, Matthew 25, Ezekiel 16:48-50
Perhaps. But, the point still remains that my name stands on patents that seem to cover things like addition, complex numbers and even the general idea of algorithms. My name is literally on a patent that could be used to sue someone that had the audacity to add two numbers. That's how fucked up our system is.
Agreed, but the problem is that there is no alternative statically-typed ("compile-y") language out there that seems ready in terms of being road-tested and not too different from other common production languages.
C# is too MS-tied with a similar legal-greed risk, and C++ is too low-level to replace Java and C#.
Object Pascal? Ada? too complex. Eiffel? too much like Pascal such that you might as well go Pascal.
Python, Ruby, Php, etc. are dynamic languages. They have their place, but for certain classes of applications you need a static/strict typed language.
Object-Fortran? :-) I dunno
Table-ized A.I.
The problem isn't that Google did that...
The problem is Google originally did that with Sun's blessing... who was then bought out by Oracle... now Oracle is suing for something the original patent owner gave permission for.
It is. Even if you're in the right and think you can win you have to think very seriously before doing something like that. Where I work the (not Oracle) database vendor we had used for years started suing its customers - they sued us for millions after recalculating our license fees and arriving at a ridiculous number. So we wrote them out of all our applications and refused to buy anything from them. I'm not sure who won the lawsuit, but in just a handful of years they were out of business.