Google Developer Testifies That Java Memo Was Misinterpreted 201
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."
Liar liar (Score:4, Funny)
Pants on fire.
But we're on Google's side so we'll let it go.
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It seems like it's been taken out of context to me.
This guy (who is a developer, not a lawyer) says "We've looked at the alternatives, and don't like them. Therefore we need to go with Java, so let the legal bods know so they can't start negotiating". That doesn't imply he's informing them, as a knowledgeable legal source, that they'll need to go and get a license. It's clear from the context that this developer doesn't care much about the legal side, and is just talking about technical desirability.
And tha
Re:Most vital lesson learnt: Hire the right person (Score:5, Funny)
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Of course taken literally, Google needed to get 'a', one, single, not plural, just one licence, for the whole of Google and all of it's customers. So smoking gun all right, clearly a euphemism, no claim that google needed to get hundreds millions of licences to distribute it to all of it's customers.
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Its an email, people think and put it to words. You even made the statement. He is not a lawer.
Don't be so scared of lawyers, they will be fertilizer too one day
So what if your kid comes to work and says in a recording
What do we do
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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.
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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
Re:Most vital lesson learnt: Hire the right person (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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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.
Re:Most vital lesson learnt: Hire the right person (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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You fail. The email is dated 2005. Way BEFORE Android was released, in fact, before it was even close to finalized.
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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 - b
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The discussion we're talking about was about procurement, too, albeit on a larger scale -- the android dev team were deciding they needed to procure Java, because the alternatives they considered (primarily objective C) "sucked" in their opinion. So they were suggesting buying a license for Sun's Java TCK, a prerequisite for producing an officially sanctioned version of Java at the time.
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Didn't they already purchase Android by that time, and were basically debating how to release it?
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Comment removed (Score:4, Insightful)
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The guy uses the word "Memorialize" rather than "document" in its verb form. I would fire him just for that :o)
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Fire him? I'd fire at him.
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It's the sort of email I would write, what's wrong with it? Maybe it's not accurate but you can't call him a liar for that, he was mistaken on the subtleties of licensing morass. But as someone who is not a lawyer, who is not speaking for the company, is not high up in the management chain, and who is only sending internal email about what he thinks should be done, it should not matter. Are we no longer allowed to send email to coworkers without having legal check it out first?
I know people today tend to
Re:Lawyers (Score:2)
Nah, this all went to hell in the lawyer zone.
Many quality employees send recommendations to management all the time. It's up to Legal to *REPLY* and say "nice suggestion, we don't need to".
In Verbal Culture companies you get hosed because you are *missing* documentation because no one tells the right people stuff.
Then when $%#$ hits Fans you get questions like "he declined our contract and we never made a new one? WTF?"
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Oracle are arguing that they needed a license.
The point of the e-mail is to show that Google were aware they needed a license and so the infringement was willful which increases the penalties. If he was wrong then it doesn't really matter what he said since willful won't matter.
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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.
Re:Liar liar (Score:5, Insightful)
Because Oracle is on the other side.
Oh come on (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Oh come on (Score:5, Insightful)
"We need to buy shiny toy X" doesn't always, or (IMO) even usually, mean "we've already chewed the fingers off it, guess we need to pay for it now".
This e-mail was years after Google started Android (Score:5, Insightful)
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!
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Oracle is trying to use the e-mail to prove
There are literally shittons of emails talking about Google needing a license, trying to get a license, not doing clean-room because they were confident they would get a license, etc. To show it wasn't clean-room Oracle doesn't even have to show anything was copied, Google up and said it. 'Should we do this clean-room?' 'No, it'll be fine'.
Google now needs to prove to a jury not just that they didn't actually need a license, but also that all their top execs and engineers were wrong. If say in a police i
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Are you talking about places like Russia & Zimbabwe, or did you just get your JD from DeVry?
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If say in a police interrogation you admit to doing the crime a jury will still convict you even if there is absolute proof that you didn't do it.
Of course they won't, assuming your defence is half competent. The law isn't about who said what, it is about the facts of the case. If Google don't need a license then even if they thought they did it doesn't matter, the simple fact is that one is not required and they owe Oracle nothing.
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If say in a police interrogation you admit to doing the crime a jury will still convict you even if there is absolute proof that you didn't do it. Human nature says if you admitted to it then you did it
The actual evidence, on the other hand, indicates that it is remarkably easy for the police to get people to confess to things they didn't do. Much of what we think of as "common sense" or "human nature" is complete BS.
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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.
Re:This e-mail was years after Google started Andr (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
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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 no
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You'll probably get furious then if you'd see this [gnu.org] or this [excelsior-usa.com]. 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,
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Google claims to implement NOT any of Snoracle's Java platforms
How dare you misspell Whoracle's name.
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Google is breaking the Java "contract" with developers: portability.
I'd be much more (read: nonzero) sympathetic to that position if Google didn't explicitly state that their binaries run on Dalvik [android.com], and not the JVM:
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And now I can understand why Oracle's shorts are in a knot.
Sure you can, just like the rest of us. Larry's shorts are in a knot because he wants to do a particularly evil thing by fencing in what is supposed to belong the the commons, that is to say, the languages we use. And the rest of us (except for you perhaps) know it is a bad idea, don't want him to, and are taking steps to prevent it. As everybody knows, that is why Larry's shorts are in a knot.
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But there were no way Google could ever be compatible with java on the phone. Because they would either have to be compaitble with the entire java jdk 1.6 stack including awt/swing and would end up with something which would be really really slow, ugly, huge and not something you would ever want on a phone.
Or they could be compatible with Java Me, but then Android would really really suck, because Java Me is a really bad platform to base an entire system on It is missing far to many things and Java Me are
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Sticking stubbornly to Java as the native platform for Android was stupid, but then Google does lots of stupid things. However, if it defeats Troll Oracle's attempts to extend intellectual property rights in directions that harm society, then it may all turn out well. But it is just insanely stupid for Google not to have already moved the core Android libraries away from Java, so that the java interface just becomes a wrapper. It's because Googler's aren't really as smart as they like to tell each other the
Re:This e-mail was years after Google started Andr (Score:5, Informative)
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...
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Haven't seen those e-mails... Got a link?
Re:Oh come on (Score:5, Interesting)
It seems likely that he meant that they should negotiate with Sun for a license. However, the most likely meaning of such a statement (when spoken or written by an engineer) is that it would be easier to get a quality product out the door in a timely manner if they licensed Java from Sun than if they wrote their own implementation, and thus, from an engineering perspective, they needed to do so. The powers that be chose to rewrite it instead of buying a license, therefore no license was needed from either a legal or a technical perspective. It is therefore downright silly to interpret such a statement from an engineer as implying that a license was legally necessary.
He ain't a lawyer (Score:5, Informative)
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
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Do that and you lose support from Samsung and HTC, who differentiate their products by using heavily customised runtimes that they do not release source code for.
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It's like when your wife says, "We need to get new curtains in the living room." You say, "what's wrong with the ones we have?" She says, "They suck."
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And then you say, "Perhaps if you did, I'd be happy to buy you some new curtains!".
Re:Oh come on (Score:5, Informative)
Looking at the various email threads, it reads to me like Google decided a Java-compatible platform was their best option, and licensing one from Sun (they already had one, called Java) was the easiest path to getting the job done. Another email in the exhibit mentions the possibility of clean-rooming their own Java-compatible platform, but basically saying it would be a giant PITA and not cost-effective vs. just licensing Sun's existing one. I don't see the Java license discussions as construing "proof of knowledge of infringement" (etc.), or belief that it was the only legal path forward, only that at least one guy believed it was the easiest path forward.
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Dalvik is released under the Apache licence, as it's partly based upon Apache Harmony - a free Java implementation. Note, Harmony wasn't an 'official' java implementation at the time, as it couldn't use the TCK testing kit (that showed compliance with the java spec) under licence terms that didn't conflict with the apache licence - specifically, field of use restrictions. Sun stonewalled, as they wanted to have their own GPL-licenced java implementation up and running for linux before working with the Apac
Re:Oh come on (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Read the context prior to that. At the point that email was sent, Google's plan was to use the name Java in their marketing. Java was Sun's trademark, so of course they would have needed to licence it.
They decided not to, however, instead hiding the connections between Android and Java in developer-oriented documentation, and being careful never to claim that Android implements Java in any way (it implements a system that is compatible with programs for the Java programming language, or some other such nonsense, that is always careful not to suggest any Sun/Oracle endorsement of the system).
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Really, RTFS and look at the linked email, dated 2005.
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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.
Because of the statement "under the terms we need." As far as I know Java licensing is complicated. If you are writing some small stuff you intend to open source, you are probably not going to need any license. When asked about it, Larry Ellison didn't know which reflects that it's not a simple thing. Maybe he should have phrased it better to say "Let's use Java. See if we need licensing for our purposes."
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How you could possibly interpret that statement as meaning anything other than "we need to negotiate a license" is beyond me
I had that situation at work actually. Probably not the same situation as Google, but the same situation as you point out.
We needed a new Apache server install, more or less dedicated to a web-app and set of server extensions that I didn't want to put on any existing Apache install.
While discussing this with a co-worker (who is primarily a windows admin only), he suggested we simply purchase another Windows 2003 server to install as a VM, and put Apache on that.
Instead, I went ahead and installed Debian Li
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Using Apache-licensed software from a GPLv3 code base is perfectly legal:
http://www.apache.org/licenses/GPL-compatibility.html [apache.org]
However, I would contend that a runtime is far more than a library, and it would seem that you can't include GPLv3 code into an Apache codebase, so the question is whether Google kept the license boundaries between the Java-sourced GPLv3 code and the Dalvik compiler/runtime. i.e. They were not allowed to incorporate pieces of the GPLv3 code into Dalvik itself. Recompiling the
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AFAIK, there is no GPLv3 code in Android. The only GPL code is Linux, which is GPLv2.
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Not true. The Dalvik compiler was used to compile the GPL-released Java library/package source. Google did not rewrite all of Java, just a non-JVM runtime/virtual-machine (and even that came from an Apache project.) Either Google has a proprietary license to do so (which they don't), or they had to rely on the GPLv2 licensed Java source that Sun released before Oracle bought them.
Unfortunately I couldn't find any articles speaking to GPLv2 compatibility, only v3.
I thought part of the argument was ar
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Not true. The Dalvik compiler was used to compile the GPL-released Java library/package source.
The Java library source in Android is based on Apache Harmony, and is Apache-licensed, not GPL. Here [java2s.com]'s an example file from it, with complete copyright notices.
Fairly plausible (Score:5, Insightful)
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).
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From here [oracle.com]:
Jul 26, 2005: “Must take license from Sun”
Oct 11, 2005: “We’ll pay Sun for the license and the TCK”
“We are making Java central to our solution”
Feb 10, 2006: “helping negotiate with my old team at Sun for a critical
license”
Mar 24, 2006: “Java.lang api’s are copyrighted”
Nice foresight (Score:5, Informative)
p29 of the exhibit
Pretty clear to me (Score:3)
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.
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The trial is about patent infringement, not trademarks..
Re:Pretty clear to me (Score:5, Informative)
It's about both patent and copyright. They're down to only one patent though. The actual copyright is minimal, so Oracle's trying to make the silly argument that they have a copyright on the API. Not only is such a thing impossible, but they can't produce a "work" that's infringed nor an exemplar of a reproduction.
I'm going to agree with the grandparent. One employee urging the company buy something to solve a certain problem is not proof the company stole it. If the company decides to achieve its goals in a different way strategically because the object of their desire is not for sale (which is the case here) this also doesn't mean that they stole it.
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That claim by Oracle means they can sue each and every developer using Java. Major alarm bells should be going off here, Java is now a poisoned language, whilst Google should be able to fight off the battle how many other companies would be destroyed by the cash fight in court. Time to give Java the boot and go elsewhere Ruby for example.
Re:Pretty clear to me (Score:4)
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All their IP would belong to somebody else.
You mean all their IP are belong to us?
Move all lawsuit! For great justice!
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What's the remaining patent?
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First, the point is that this email isn't a "smoking gun". Not by a long stretch.
The patent claims have narrowed significantly [arstechnica.com], with only 2 of the original 7 patents remaining, and one of those is on shaky ground. Most of the remaining claims are about copyright, not patent. So while there are still patents involved, it's largely about copyright at this point.
See Groklaw [groklaw.net] if you need to familiarize yourself with other facts of the case.
Let me google that for you (Score:3)
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 [lmgtfy.com]
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You think a great man like Larry Page dirties his fingers with a computer keyboard?
Re:Let me google that for you (Score:5, Funny)
You think a great man like Larry Page dirties his fingers with a computer keyboard?
He has Siri look it up for him.
He meant a *driver's* license (Score:4, Funny)
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.
Erm (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
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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.
Is the English Language free?
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On the one hand, a, hmm, say, 5 million award to Oracle would seem fair, given the fact that Oracle is such a "nice company" with such a "nice CEO".
On the other hand, a huge award that gives Android trouble might finally make some people try out better and completely open alternatives like the MeeGo Harmattan OS that Nokia abandoned and pick that up...
Yes, I am daydreaming again.
best quote ever (Score:2)
the case falls into a murky area where simple, clear sensible law should exist. When that happens, the lawyers are the biggest winners.
Remember that if you are one of those people who feel it is 100% certain that Google will win (or lose).
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Where he said he didn't mean a Sun license. Just a license.
Yeah, I don't understand why Oracle's attorneys ask such stupid questions. I mean obviously there are multiple Java implementations other than Sun's which they could have licensed if they didn't want to go the route of creating an alternative internally.
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There are no legally licensed mobile implementations of Java, never have been(at least according to Oracle).
You can implement Java however you like, wherever you like, but the license therefor requires that your implementation pass the TCK. The TCK is not open source, and is licensed for use only on desktops and servers, explicitly. This is stupid, but it's part of Sun's legacy of trying to actually make enough money to not get bought by Oracle, a plan they failed at.
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You're making the mistake of trying to use external facts to determine what somebody meant. None of that actually matters unless it went into Lindholm's thought process when making the statement.
And it remains the case that the most obvious interpretation of the statement is probably the correct one: "I'm not a lawyer, but we can probably just throw money at someone and make it go away, right?"
Which, of course, is useless as evidence of anything. Discussions regarding the option of paying off a troll are by
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Was it? I don't see the word "patent" in the email.
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Except that the license is for the patents which is what Sun held.
So if the patents are invalid or do not apply to Google's implementation, then no license is needed?
Re:Skipped the best part. (Score:4, Informative)
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.
Re:Obvious implementation (Score:5, Informative)
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 [oracle.com], uses a tuned quicksort, adapted from Jon L. Bentley and M. Douglas McIlroy's "Engineering a Sort Function".
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The code in question (TimSort) was donated to OpenJDK7 by the Google engineer.... ;)
Makes their focus on this even sillier.....
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Due to the way reflection works in Java, private methods are in fact publically accessible. Doing so is not advisable, but you can do something like this:
Method m = Whatever.class.getDeclaredMethod(name, types);
m.setAccessible(true);
m.invoke(object, parameters);
If you have a security manager in place it will probably throw a fit when you try to do this, but a lot of java code runs without security managers, including (I believe) android applications. So private-method compatibility is desirable, and can b
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Actually, that would be true of most of Java's peers too - In C++, you'd be able to do this if you could somehow get the address of the private function (by looking at the binary's layout or whatever), and in C#, I think reflection allows you to do the same...
It's like hanging a curtain and saying "this is private", but someone can come along and rip it off and it's no longer private...
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Actually, that would be true of most of Java's peers too - In C++, you'd be able to do this if you could somehow get the address of the private function (by looking at the binary's layout or whatever), and in C#, I think reflection allows you to do the same...
It's like hanging a curtain and saying "this is private", but someone can come along and rip it off and it's no longer private...
Right, the only truly private method is one running on a system you physically control access to. And make sure you didn't play any Sony CDs on it...
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So private-method compatibility is desirable, and can be produced with a clean-room process.
I'd like to believe no one would go to that much trouble to call a private method like this one, but from what I've seen at work lately, some coders really are deliberately perverse.
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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 e
the real reason for not going with sun.. (Score:2)
look, they went their own way simply to avoid the JSR-shittape-perpetual forever negotiations for adding methods no vendor then goes on implementing properly. everyone knew that going with such "official" java deal was going to be too much of a hellhole to bother with, certainly their engineers knew this, after all if it was a good route then java me would have evolved faster into what android essentially is, because that shitprocess is how SUN paid their "engineers"(sit-on-their-ass-negotiators) assigned t
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If it isn't going to happen, please let Android die so it can be replaced by something cleaner.
If Android dies at this point, it gets replaced by iOS (walled garden) or Windows Mobile (MSIL, which isn't exactly a lot better than Java). I don't consider either of those a good outcome.
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