Google and Oracle face off - again - over Android, with billions on the line
Two of Silicon Valley's most accomplished heavyweights stepped back into the legal squared circle this week, as the search giant defends its use of Oracle's Java APIs in Android for the second time.
Alphabet chairman Eric Schmidt took the witness stand on Tuesday and proved tough for Oracle's legal team to pin down, according to Computerworld. Schmidt -- a longtime Silicon Valley insider and former Sun Microsystems chief -- said that he had never heard of a company being forced to seek a license for API usage despite "forty years of experience."
Under additional questioning from Oracle attorney Peter Bicks, Schmidt went on to deny that Google requires developers or other interested third parties to obtain such licenses for use of its own APIs.
"I'm not aware of one that we treat as proprietary in the way you're asking your question," he told Bicks, nodding toward Google's assertion that Oracle's demands are unusual and unreasonable.
Just over 10,000 lines of code -- out of potentially millions of lines in Android -- are at issue in the trial, but Bicks sought to reframe that for the jury. "It took 10,000 lines of code to power this Apollo lunar module," Bicks said, holding up a photo of the famous spacecraft.
If Oracle emerges victorious, it could mean a windfall for Larry Ellison's firm. The company is seeking $8.8 billion in damages from what it believes is Google's $21 billion profit from Android to date.
Alphabet chairman Eric Schmidt took the witness stand on Tuesday and proved tough for Oracle's legal team to pin down, according to Computerworld. Schmidt -- a longtime Silicon Valley insider and former Sun Microsystems chief -- said that he had never heard of a company being forced to seek a license for API usage despite "forty years of experience."
Under additional questioning from Oracle attorney Peter Bicks, Schmidt went on to deny that Google requires developers or other interested third parties to obtain such licenses for use of its own APIs.
"I'm not aware of one that we treat as proprietary in the way you're asking your question," he told Bicks, nodding toward Google's assertion that Oracle's demands are unusual and unreasonable.
Just over 10,000 lines of code -- out of potentially millions of lines in Android -- are at issue in the trial, but Bicks sought to reframe that for the jury. "It took 10,000 lines of code to power this Apollo lunar module," Bicks said, holding up a photo of the famous spacecraft.
If Oracle emerges victorious, it could mean a windfall for Larry Ellison's firm. The company is seeking $8.8 billion in damages from what it believes is Google's $21 billion profit from Android to date.
Comments
Interesting story though.
By by the way, I think Oracle has a good case regarding Google's dismissal of its copyright on Java.
Except that in this case he's been correct on most issues, even predicting the Appeals Court outcome. Meanwhile, PJ at Groklaw (who, as it turned out, was wrong on most issues in this case) has run away like a coward and shut Groklaw down over the lamest of excuses - that the government is snooping on your e-mails. Funny how the rest of the world has continued on without issue over so-called NSA spying but Groklaw was, for some inexplicable reason, unable to continue to function.
"The Amazon Maps API offers interface parity with version 2 of the Google Maps API. Most classes and method calls in your Google Maps app work the same on Amazon devices."
https://developer.amazon.com/public/apis/experience/maps/docs-v2/migrating-an-app-from-google-maps-v2
As you said this pre-dates google, This goes back to Andy Rubin, he is the one who stole this as well as other things to make Android. Google has no choice now but to define this case and hope to win. Why, Larry made it clear he will not license the API which would shut down Android, but this is also why Google has been rewriting Android so to not have this issue going forward.
I doubt Oracle would refuse licensing to Google. I think Oracle would ask that Google bring "Android Java" back into line and compatible with "regular Java" so there's no longer two different, and incompatible versions.
Speaking of incompatible, one argument Google makes is that APIs can't be copyrighted as this would prevent interoperability. However, Android isn't compatible with Java, so I'm not even sure why they are using this tactic.
No, the first judgement came down over a year before Groklaw was shut down. And I never stated she ran away from Oracle/Google specifically, but it was definitely a factor.
Most industry people thought Oracle would win on copyright. It was considered a slam dunk, such that nobody thought it was even necessary to put their support behind Oracle. When Aslup made his ridiculous decision they all woke up and went "WTF just happened". After the trial and when Oracle filed their appeal is when all the big industry players started submitting their amicus briefs in support or Oracle. They basically all "woke up" after the first trial result.
Around the time this was going on and support for Oracle was pouring in is when the NSA spying broke and PJ shut down Groklaw.
I assumed the closure over the Lavabit flap was a pretext for something else.
for close to a century the implications of API copyright are rather large.) Since the U.S. adopted the Berne Convention
copyright inheres everywhere tangible media exist, but I'd be surprised that fair use for copyrighted code should be restricted to things like de minimus usage and even parody. That juries are shown pictures of Apollo laughably shows the level of discourse required to initially decide these things.
Industry players like Microsoft, who is implementing the iOS system frameworks (https://github.com/Microsoft/WinObjC) and engaging in the very practice that they argued against? One of Oracle's own products (https://www.oracle.com/linux/) was created that way, as a drop-in replacement for proprietary Unix. Reimplementing interfaces is a standard practice as old as the software industry. Oracle is the one suddenly trying to change the rules.
Oracle is right to seek payment for their IP, but this action prevents them from making any money off Android going forward, as Google has already switched the offending APIs to a combination of their own code plus OpenJDK. I think that the talk of Google switching to another language like Apple's Swift or their own Golang is overblown: you have millions of apps written in Java that will still need a JVM to run on, and there is no "good" way around that. I think that the main issue is that Oracle bought Sun thinking that they were getting a goldmine, and they are more than a bit peeved that it didn't provide them anywhere near the windfall that they hoped.