The entire complaint Oracle lobbed at Google has been available online for a while now, and after reading it through with my total lack of any knowledge of the inner workings of the American legal system, a few things did stand out to me as peculiar. We’ll have to wait for a more detailed analysis by someone qualified to do so. Also, a few other notes about this case I’ve picked up online.
First and foremost, many compare this case to the Sun v. Microsoft thing regarding the Microsoft Java Virtual Machine, but this comparison is off. In that particular case, Sun sued Microsoft because of an alleged breach of licensing terms. Microsoft and Sun made an agreement that Redmond could implement its own Java virtual machine while still calling it Java.
Microsoft’s implementation, however, had to follow the most recent Java specifications, and this is where it went wrong, according to Sun. Microsoft was allowed to use Java technologies, patents, and fiddle with them – but the agreement between the two companies stated that the implementation had to be complete. The case was eventually settled out of court.
The current case is entirely different. Google never entered into any agreement with Sun or Oracle, and just basically took bits and pieces of Java technology (in a clean room fashion) to create its Dalvik virtual machine. I’m not too deep into this whole Java thing to understand everything, but from what I can read Dalvik is rather different from any Java compatible VM, and of course, it being a clean room implementation means there’s no Sun/Oracle-owned code in there – at least, that’s what you’d think.
Oracle believes differently. Not only do they state that Android infringes on a number of patents, it also violates Oracle’s copyrights and trademarks. “Without consent, authorization, approval, or license, Google knowingly, willingly, and unlawfully copied, prepared, published, and distributed Oracle America’s copyrighted work, portions thereof, or derivative works and continues to do so,” Oracle alleges, “Google’s Android infringes Oracle America’s copyrights in Java and Google is not licensed to do so.”
There’s some interesting stuff in the complaint. For instance, while Oracle is clearly going after just Google right now, the complaint mentions Android device makers and even users over and over again. It could very well be that this is standard practice, but as a mere layman, it sure sounds like a few warning shots across HTC’s and Samsung’s bows.
Furthermore, Oracle doesn’t just want Gogole to stop distributing Android – they’re asking for the destruction of every copy of Android. Oracle wants “an order that all copies made or used in violation of Oracle America’s copyrights, and all means by which such copies may be reproduced, be impounded and destroyed or otherwise reasonably disposed of.”
A final interesting note is that Oracle believes Android is competing with Java as an “operating system software platform for cellular telephones and other mobile devices”. I guess Oracle doesn’t like it that Java-proper is no longer the one choice of mobile developers. They see the writing on the wall; where Oracle collects royalties for every BlackBerry and Symbian phone sold, they don’t get a penny for mobile devices running iOS or Android, and with these two destined to become the two dominant players in the mobile market, that kind of sucks for Oracle.
Yet another high-profile lawsuit in technology land. No one but lawyers will profit from this. How many more cases will it take before the powers that be in the US realise how incredibly stupid their patent system really is?
In the meantime, Jobs and Ballmer are laughing over a couple of beers. This Oracle trick plays right into their hands – uncertainty about Android is good for iOS, uncertainty about Java is good for .NET/Silverlight. Thanks, Larry.
There was once a company named SCO…
SCO had no healthy primary business anymore when they started that never-ending story. Oracle does.
Also note how quickly after Sun acquisition this happened. Might this (rights to Java, and especially right to sue over it) be one of the reasons Oracle acquired Sun in the first place?
They didn’t need Sun to buy sun to write Java code themselves.
This looks like they’re suing over Davlik, not Java itself. They want one Java platform, similar to when Sun sued Microsoft for a vastly modified Java.
Personally, I’m hoping this just gets resolved with Google getting a larger role within JCP, and any genuine improvements are moved back to JVM proper.
Java is in a lot of phones, and this has been one of the major reasons pick java as their language of choice. Google doesn’t even make much money from Android directly, they’re just the lead developers of the project.
But Davlik isn’t marketed Java, while M$’s JVM was. That’s a bit difference. Improvements to Davlik VM won’t likely mean anything to the larger JVM or J2ME communities.
Yes. Thats the reason why there suing for patents. Problem is technology created by SUN is getting used by Google. Google is making money. If someone says Andriod is free and Google is not making money out of it, think again. They made it to make sure they get Ad revenue from it. Will the open source their Ad technology? If they ever do it, will they allow someone to change it and get money out of it and they not getting much from it?
SUN, an amazing company who invested lot of money in R&D wouldnt exist if Oracle didnt buy it. SUN would go bankrupt in a few years. before it got bought, it was trading for exact value of money it has in cash. I would even say companies like Google killed one of the best research company, SUN.
Things like this will happen as long as patents…
-Are owned and can be used by a company and not only by their inventors
-Can be vague
-Can last a very long time before reaching public domain
I don’t know if you can really just say “no one but lawyers will profit from this.” Either way the lawsuit goes, there will be a precedent set that can either benefit Oracle or Google down the road. Yeah, the lawyers will earn a lot of money, and may get paid more than they should, but really . . . no one but lawyers will benefit no matter what? There’s some deserved cynicism over US legal system, but the companies don’t make lawsuits to pay lawyers out of charity.
Eventually, I can see something decided like Google using “Java” to describe something that’s not really Java, and changing some code to make it all ok like how BSD got rid of a few files to separate itself from AT&T copyrights. But that’s a naive, uninformed guess.
Edited 2010-08-13 14:25 UTC
I don’t get why every company that sues someone for patents has to act all proud and make the other company sound like scum.
Seriously? Do they really even believe what they are saying? Don’t they realize that they are the scum who ought to be sued for making false claims?
And asking for all copies of Android to be destroyed? They must have gone completely and utterly insane to suggest something like that…
Edited 2010-08-13 14:28 UTC
Neither is the case. It’s just that you can’t complain when the judges take your claims, drop some of them (because they’re ridiculous) and then base the verdict on what’s left over.
So you better start with as many claims as legally possible to maximize the result.
Throwing shit at the wall, and hoping that something sticks and all that…
Of course not. It’s just legalese for saying how shocked, SHOCKED they are about Google’s deeds.
One interesting aspect of this lawsuit is that Dalvik is indeed a bit of a “hostile” implementation of Java, done to circumvent licensing feeds from Sun. I rememeber chuckling about this clever legal hack Google were doing back when Android was made public. They were essentially saying “screw you Sun” by going their own way. Some bad blood must be left among the Sun employees.
Realistically I don’t think they expect every Android copy to be destroyed. They are probably hoping to make Google pay royalties for each copy sold.
Duh… Corporate lawsuits are just about money. Open source advocates seem to think think their software is synonymous with Freedom but I don’t mind paying for the goods and services I use. In fact those whose primary goal in life is to spend as little as possible are similar to those whose goals are the accumulation of as much wealth as possible. Sadly many Americans worship the dollar — a form of idolatry.
Again. Free software isn’t about zero price, it’s about liberty. From the horse’s mouth: http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/selling.html
I agree that many Americans^H^H^H^H^H humans worship the dollar^H^H^H^H local currency, and it’s a form of idolatry, and it’s sad. But compare the lifestyle of Bill Gates to that of rms, and it’s just weird for you to effectively claim that the latter is all about “the accumulation of as much wealth as possible”.
Then why not say what they think is realistic? All that they are doing with such crazy suggestions is making everyone hate them.
They don’t care if you hate them, as long as you pay them.
Companies can rarely be bothered to plan past the next quarterly numbers.
Oracle will still have more money than god with or without people liking them for the foreseeable future, but it would be naive to believe that they didn’t make themselves onto the shit list of some useful people.
Oracle enjoys a ridiculous profit margin because they are lacking competition at their level.
If I had the technical talent available to me to complete with them I’d say its an opportunity to enter a market that isn’t already saturated.
> “If I had the technical talent available to me to complete with them I’d say its an opportunity to enter a market that isn’t already saturated.”
I’d say it IS rather saturated, with patents. Actually, saturated is probably even an understatement in this regard… Packed and overflowing would be a better description.
Basically, these days, the chances of a good new idea to become successful without infringing on patents/copyrights is extremely slim. The only reason there still are some ideas that slip through is that they don’t generate enough $$$ to attract the IP holders’ attention. Yet. Once they do, it’s a lawsuit and/or a buyout. The founders get to keep a small amount from the deal, and the world looses another potentially interesting innovation to the hands of the mega-IP corporations, and back to square 1.1
Competing with Oracle is not possible.
They are other databases, made by companies with very deep pockets but none can compete with Oracle. Oracle is to the database what Microsoft is to the desktop OS/office software. They just have too much momentum and nothing can stop them.
If Oracle would stick to DB, it would be fine, but now they want to enter into all possible software markets and thats where the problem is.
You’re new around here, aren’t you? 😉
“Apple II Forever.” “Nobody ever got fired for buying IBM.” “Nobody can challenge DEC’s Vax.” “Windows will never replace Unix on the engineering desktop.” “Nothing can stop the momentum of Windows Mobile.” “Nothing can prevent the iPhone from dominating the smartphone market.”
Heard it all before.
Although Windows is declining only slowly in desktop share right now (about 1.5% per year), that could easily change over the next decade. Their customer’s expectations are changing due to more web apps, touch screens, HDTVs, embedded processing, and tablet and mobile computing. At some point, you have to wonder if they will look at a Windows desktop machine and ask, “Why do I need that again?” And if you don’t need Windows apps, you don’t need Windows on a desktop computer – any OS will do.
That’s just one scenario, of course – many others have been discussed in forums where folks obsessed with market share statistics lurk (ahem). And in a sense, it doesn’t matter, because desktops are declining in importance as those other categories grow.
But to claim that “nothing can stop them” on the desktop (Microsoft) – or in databases (Oracle) – is to miss the lessons of computing history, IMHO.
other then ibm and microsoft, and sco, i can’t think of another company that has been more hated then oracle.
Edited 2010-08-13 18:35 UTC
Possibly BP as of late…
Apple?
Who hates Oracle? It’s irrelevant to most people, and “gets the job done” for those that need to deal with it.
Those who’ve had to renegotiate pricing for an Oracle license? Just saying…
Apple is actually the most admired company on the planet.
http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/mostadmired/2010/index.html
Among the clueless, possibly.
I just *love* the eighth item of that list =p
Apple. But it’s a bit complicated, because it has also been extremely loved. There’s no cold-blooded way of talking about Apple.
I think it might be more a threat for Google than anything else really. They are probably going to settle out of court for some such type of agreement.
What all this tells to me is that opensource can’t trust companies. Their patent promises are worthless, they always put some condition to convince you that you won’t be sued. It would be much simpler to give away the patents to everybody for free without conditions but they never do that. So I’m not going to support Mono just because it’s a “bit” safer. I want a 100% free development environment, not controlled by any company (like python). Why can’t we, the opensource community, invent our own languages and standards and forget the patented “standards” that companies try to impose on us?
Just how sure are you that python doesn’t infringe any patents?
I’m not saying that it does, I’m just saying that we can’t know that it doesn’t. For all intents and purposes, we can’t know that for pretty much anything.
It would probably take a small army of patent lawyers several years just to get picture of most of the patents that python MIGHT infringe. Same is true for just about any software project.
I could argue that it’s more safe to use a language with patent exemptions that’s been vetted by paranoid lawyers than it is to use a language like Python or Scala or Lua that are completely community driven with developers who have absolutely know idea what timebomb language features to stay away from.
Also, Microsoft’s patent exemptions are ironically more liberal than Sun/Oracle’s – this lawsuit could not have happened if Google had implemented C# on top of a custom, non-CLI compatible runtime. Copying and pasting from my other comment-
C# and the CLI are specified in separate standards, so, for example, Mono is allowed to compile C# to native Object-C/nibs and create an iPhone application without fear of falling outside of coverage by the community promise.
Google, who translates JBC to Dalvik bytecode, is getting sued because Java’s patent exemption requires that you implement both the JVM and Java together and to spec, or else neither are covered.
Edited 2010-08-13 15:36 UTC
Android and its non-standard Java gets the stench of IP infringement, more companies use WP7, more developers use .net.
open source does do that, so do companies. java is a platform built by a massive company specifically for other massive companies, and has been plagued by the politics inherant in that almost from day one.
Back to basics, back to C/C++
So, basically, Oracle wants Google to shut down remotely my HTC Legend ? No way, I paid for it
LOL. These guys are nut, do they really believe that Google people are SO intensely stupid to put themselves in the middle of a patient war ? I don’t think so. But in these days the tech companies are suing each other for whatever they like. Personally I’m tired of reading that sort of news …
Best foto-comment to this issue:
http://img195.imageshack.us/img195/4305/javalarry.jpg
pass it around plz
Love the eye brows.
…and I’ll say it again. I despise Oracle.
They take good things and screw them up.
spot on.
They did it with WebLogic (huge price hikes). Now more expensive than Websphere App Server ND.
MySQL (need I say anymore?) – Already forked.
Open Solaris – Forking here we come.
and now this.
Scum of the earth.
And their core DB costs far more than DB2 to run on the same H/W.
Take a gander at their prices for an 8-way/8 core Sparc server. Then don’t ever talk about Apple charging a premium price again.
This is coming from someone who was once upon a time an Oracle DBA! (7.3.4 on Tru64/VMS)
This was predicted a long time ago. This article is still worth reading and explains the situation:
http://www.betaversion.org/~stefano/linotype/news/110/
Wow. 15 November 2007 according to archive.org. “Sun is under fire for IP issues related to ZFS and they claimed that it’s an “attack on free softwareâ€. I’m curious to see how they’re going to spin their own IP attack on Android (because I bet there’s going to be one).”
Spot on, Mr. Mazzocchi.
Oracle is attacking ‘Free Software’. Sun is dead.
No need to spin anything.
It’s no surprise. The Sun takeover is taking its tole on Oracle, which only came about because Ellison had an ego trip about going up against IBM.
Since Java never made any real money for Sun then trying to grab a slice of the mobile market without having actually entered it seems a decent thing to do. Rather desperate, but it’s worth a shot.
Few months ago Google engineers critised the over-complexity of C++ and Java. This is why they are developed(ing) the Go programming language.
I think this lawsuit is playing into the hands of Google.
In the future the Go programming language might become the default programming language for android and Chrome operating system application developers. And lawsuits like this just might justify and fast track this.
If I remember correctly the whole Gmail application is written in Java. I had the impression that Google and Sun had a nice working relationship. Look like this is not the case with non FOSS Oracle.
What they REALLY need to do is get fully on board with LLVM and the Java byte code front end for it. Then make it an integral part of Android and their SDK’s. No need for the JVM ever again.
No need to waste trying to make LLVM support Java. GCC already supports that through gcj. It can compile Java source code to Java bytecode, or to native executable code. And it can even compile Java bytecode to native code.
They might need to modify it to enable compilation of Dalvik bytecode to native code. But they can go Java source to binary without any modification.
Well, GW, we’ve finally gone nucular.
It was a Gartner analyst that made that claim based on the VM being incompatible with a standard Java application. Of course that doesn’t mean that Dalvik did not copy components from the Java VM.
Remember that Android was developed when Sun was pushing itself as an open source loving company. Google was probably not worried about a lawsuit and didn’t bother creating a VM entirely from scratch. The lawsuit is pretty overreaching in its demands which likely means there are violations.
Considering that Dalvik is register-based and the normal JVM is stack-based, and the binary format used for the classes is substantially different in Dalvik than the normal JVM, I’m going to guess there is very little code you could actually just grab and use.
Google has been very careful to say that you use a java-like language to write android apps. I doubt they were careless with the code when they were so careful in the PR/Documentation
Android is open sourced…. How do you make an accusation of theft without pointing to files / line numebrs?
Seriously… show me line numbers. I’m not talking about patent infringing…. Oracle used the word “copy”.
I believe the attorney in charge of this is the same as the one SCO used against IBM or Novell. Boies. His definition of “copy” is something like “functions pretty much the same way”.
You’re correct on the Sun versus MS case… MS had agreed to implement Java to the spec… but instead on the one hand they did not comply to the spec and on the other hand extended it in a non-spec way. In a nutshell .. programs written to run on MS-Java were not (always) going to run on standard java (as required by the spec)
LPOD… just wants your money.
Let me curse the ponytail who led our once great company to the slaughterhouse…
(LPOD : Larry, Prince of Darkness)
Apple must be loving this.
As Meego is a non-Java platform that uses Qt and some Gtk, Nokia will receive a boost from this confusion.
Let’s do some wild speculation on what Oracle might earn from a backroom out of court settlement.
Let’s speculate on five years into the future..after the legal dealings has ended.
Let’s say Oracle negotiate a .50c fee on every Android handset sold. Paid by either Google or the handset maker.
Currently 200 000 Android handsets is sold daily after just two years of it’s initial release.
In 2009 total cellphone sales was about 1 000 000 000 ie. one Billion. Smartphones has become cheaper and cheaper so let’s guess in 5 year’s time 50% of all phones will be “smartphones” and global cellphone sales has increased to 1.5 Billion.
That will be 50% x 50% x 1.5Billion x $0.5=$125 Million Dollar royalty revenue to Oracle yearly.
That is not counting the possibility of revenue that Oracle might earn on every Android app sold.
I’m a bit confused about what Google is doing wrong according to Oracle.
Is it because they compile to Java bytecode and then (after coverting he Java bytecode to their own VM bytecode) don’t use the standard Java VM? If so, couldn’t this be solved just by compiling the source to their VMs bytecode?
Or, would the use of the Java language itself, and some of the same names as Java’s libraries also constitute some form of patent issue?
Honestly, I cannot see this affecting Google much. All they have to do, worst case, is modify the source code language so its sufficiently non-Java-like and then write a compiler to compile this source directly to their own VM. It would be shitty for the developer community, but if necessary not a major problem (considering that Android already has sufficient critical mass in market share to make developers take notice regardless of its development process).
this will end with google buying oracle 😉
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Oracle allows any individual to download and use the copy of THEIR Java Development Kit. I am very much grateful for that. One can also download developers version of their database server, JDeveloper and other products.
I don’t see why would Oracle allow everyone to make money from their own property. I write software myself and I always retain tight control over distribution of my work.
Considering open source Java, I think it never worked properly. I had problems with some applets written by other people. Also, some of my customers had problems with my applications, running them on IcedTea on Redora. I refused to look into that until they installed official JRE from Oracle. But, when they did that, the problems ceased to exist. IcedTea is, probably, linked against some local libraries, any of which might cause problems. As far as I am concerned open source JRE/JDK should have never existed at all, because it is only causing me problems.