Oracle Sues Google Over Android
http://www.mercurynews.com/top-stories/ci_15762198
It's unknown if this will have an immediate positive effect on iPhone sales, but who knows?
Quote:
In a clash of two Silicon Valley titans, Oracle said Thursday that it has filed a federal copyright lawsuit alleging that Google's popular Android operating system was built on Oracle's Java software without permission.
Android, which was first released in late 2008, is used by several computer manufacturers as the operating system that runs smartphones and other computing devices. Oracle's lawsuit, filed in the U.S. District Court for Northern California, accuses Google of infringing on patents and copyrights that Oracle acquired when it bought Sun Microsystems earlier this year.
In a clash of two Silicon Valley titans, Oracle said Thursday that it has filed a federal copyright lawsuit alleging that Google's popular Android operating system was built on Oracle's Java software without permission.
Android, which was first released in late 2008, is used by several computer manufacturers as the operating system that runs smartphones and other computing devices. Oracle's lawsuit, filed in the U.S. District Court for Northern California, accuses Google of infringing on patents and copyrights that Oracle acquired when it bought Sun Microsystems earlier this year.
It's unknown if this will have an immediate positive effect on iPhone sales, but who knows?
Comments
Oracle can go fuck itself for all I care.
Didn't Sun release Java under the GPL2 license? Also, the runtime engine in Android isn't a pure Java runtime. It is a variant called dex.
Oracle can go fuck itself for all I care.
No. They released it under the SUN COMMUNITY SOURCE LICENSE
ATTACHMENT D COMMERCIAL USE LICENSE
[Contact Sun Microsystems For Commercial Use Terms and Conditions]
You can bet that part says if you make money off it, me make money off it too. Only fair.
Perhaps Larry Ellison's recent defense of Steve Jobs (when he spoke of Mark Hurd's departure at HP) goes deeper than it first seems. Could be a nascent Oracle+Apple deal and they both see the value in cutting Google/Android off at the knees.
Or he just doesn't like Squirrel-Boy, and sees an opportunity to cause Squirrel-Boy difficulty while indirectly helping his buddy Steve.
Or he just doesn't like Squirrel-Boy, and sees an opportunity to cause Squirrel-Boy difficulty while indirectly helping his buddy Steve.
Actually, he looks more like Mister Peabody... or Sherman ...
No. They released it under the SUN COMMUNITY SOURCE LICENSE
You can bet that part says if you make money off it, me make money off it too. Only fair.
The Ars Technica article makes it clear. Link
But here's the rub: Java is patented in such a way that only a complete implementation is licensed royalty-free, not a superset or a subset.
No. They released it under the SUN COMMUNITY SOURCE LICENSE
You can bet that part says if you make money off it, me make money off it too. Only fair.
You're wrong. Java has been open sourced under GPL2, with exemptions such as the sun. packages and the browser plugin.
But here's the rub: Java is patented in such a way that only a complete implementation is licensed royalty-free, not a superset or a subset.
A VERSION of Java was GPL2 licensed. Current releases are under the Sun Community Source License. Lot's of people thought Sun put everything into GPL, but they actually put very little into GPL licensed code relative to the whole of the Java universe.
Java Mobile Edition was NEVER GPL'ed, it has only ever been under SCSL. This happens to be part of Googles major trouble here as the patent problems are clearly in Oracle's favor because GPL2 never touched that part of the Java spec. To me it looks like there was either some very sloppy lawyering on the Android side of things or Google just decided to press forward despite potential licensing show-stoppers.
If you use and make money on other peoples open source code commercially, you go deep on the lawyering, or else. The licenses are pretty specific and don't automagically grant the rest of the world everything related to the released code for free too.
Also, Sun did GPL2 JME. They just didn't add the classpath exemption that they added for the desktop/server edition of Java. This means that any code written with JME must be GPL'd as well. Anybody developing against JME will obviously pay Oracle rather than GPL their code.
Get your facts straight!
A VERSION of Java was GPL2 licensed. Current releases are under the Sun Community Source License. Lot's of people thought Sun put everything into GPL, but they actually put very little into GPL licensed code relative to the whole of the Java universe.
Java Mobile Edition was NEVER GPL'ed, it has only ever been under SCSL. This happens to be part of Googles major trouble here as the patent problems are clearly in Oracle's favor because GPL2 never touched that part of the Java spec. To me it looks like there was either some very sloppy lawyering on the Android side of things or Google just decided to press forward despite potential licensing show-stoppers.
If you use and make money on other peoples open source code commercially, you go deep on the lawyering, or else. The licenses are pretty specific and don't automagically grant the rest of the world everything related to the released code for free too.
(1) Whether copyright protection extends to a software interface.
(2) Whether, as the jury found, the petitioner’s use of a software interface in the context of creating a new computer program constitutes fair use.
What a long and twisting road so far.