By 
Oracle is stoking the lawsuit flames, amending their current suit against Google to now suggest that Android takes large portions of the Java code verbatim for use in the operating system. The suit now goes on to say that developer APIs are “derivative” of Oracles’ own.
Oracle’s claim is that Android re-uses many components of the class-based programming language, from class names and libraries to definitions and parameters. The custom Dalvik engine which has allowed for many of the speed enhancments in Android 2.2 is based on Java and is at the heart of the suit.
Google had previously accused Oracle of “dishonest behavior,” but the company hasn’t responded the recent changes to the case.
[via Electronista]
wow, just more companies trying to get rich off of other companies success.
is there anybody who isn’t suing google? oh yeah, forget on last post… first! yay!
Wow, you can patent class names and method signatures these days? Oracle are a sad bunch who wish they could innovate like Google but are reduced to trying to sue other companies.
How can you steal something that is open source?
If I code in Java, am I stealing too?
In as much as Oracle are a sad bunch of patent trolls, you have got to admit that Google should’ve snatched Java from floundering Sun Micro couple years back. A completely overlooked business decision.
Agreed on the missed opportunity by google. Especially considering that google is aqcuiring companies at a very fast pace, they’re up to like 40 just this year. Probably would’ve been cheaper for them than dealing with this ridiculous lawsuit by oracle.
PATENT PENDING!!
public static void main(String args[])
{
System.out.println(“Hello World!”);
}
Agreed. The world would be a much happier place right now if either Google or IBM had picked up Sun instead of Oracle.
It’s not like Oracle are some small, do-nothing company who have just been sitting on patents. They have a higher revenue than even Google.
Oracle does have a lot of revenue and they are not just an Sco. But they are not being honest in their dealings. They are purposefully inflating their ‘damages’ in hopes that they can get a large settlement or a nice percentage of android sales.
So are they going to go after MS too given that a lot of C# class names and method signatures are the same? This is absolutely ridiculous.
I used to like Oracle… until they partnered w/ Microsoft. Now all of their products wants to install the freaking bing sh!t on my computer… A while back when I saw this I was like… oh why did Oracle partner w/ Microsoft? Then I hear about the lawsuit.
Makes you think… Maybe Oracle is the one just suing Google… but who is behind them… Microsoft? Anybody else see this?
if google eventually profits from JAVA’s open source (directly or indirectly), they will lose this lawsuit. They will be required to buy software licenses for each mobile device developed on Android OS.
Which means Android won’t be free anymore… that is very sad.
They should have bought “Sun” like others said, but they probably didn’t see it coming.
You mean like the Bing ads that are now showing up on Phandroid. Conspiracy theorists unite.
Do not forget, it was Google who went around the world stealing peoples wireless data with their cars filming the street view panoramas. They were vacuuming all the unencrypted data, and got caught by the Germans.
Now everyone is suing them over privacy rights.
And Facebook sharing everyone’s contacts with marketeers and other people. Does Harvard teach stealing as a core business course?
Oracle is many steps higher on the ethics pedestal than these companies.
“Oracle is many steps higher on the ethics pedestal than these companies.”
I can only hope that you work for Oracle and they are paying you well. Google’s Streetview fiasco has nothing to do with Oracle making dubious claims about Java and Google’s use of it. Not to mention a quick browse of wikipedia and not much digging at all will show Oracle has had it’s share of dirty dealings, not to mention they are still being sued by the DoJ over shoddy products they supplied. Not really defending Google, but please do not try and make it as if Oracle is some paragon of ethical behaviour, because they are not.
@Jim Horton: Google was not stealing, they were recording data that was flowing around unencrypted. And as far as I have read so far, there is no law against this in germany. And being honest, I do not even belive that Google did this on purpose, it just happends, while they were trying to find out the name of the routers for better posistioning.
Also street view is not violating any law here in germany (even if some say so). In fact taking photos from buildings, streets, everything, is a given right here.
And what is Oracle suing google now for: Stealing class names, or even full classes, that are in the OpenJDK which is under GPL??!! Yeah, great. If that works, we have a lot of fun in software development the next years. Because you will have to find very nice names for your classes then. Because I guess that almost all class names which make some kind of sense are already used by some >GPL!!< class.
Btw: I never heard that Google was selling any data to somebody, like you said about facebook.
And for the records: Oracle has invented little to nothing. They are just a good marketing. Their database was not to bad (but honestly not very good, when I first used it with the 7th vesion.)
Beside the database, what did they develop? I can not remember anything. Even the so called ebusiness suite is just a mixture of companies they aquired a cople of years ago.
@ 13.
Google should have seen this coming because they had already had been negotaiting with Sun Microsystems pre-Oracle-buyout because Sun believed Google was violating the Java license terms. I’m not too happy about the Oracle vs. Google lawsuit, and I can only hope Android will survive it.
I have been developing in Java for last 11 years and it will always be close to my heart. I have seen many API implementations being pulled off by IBM, Oracle etc for lack of support. After quite many years, Android was the next best thing to happen to Java.
Like any organism or meme, I see this as the evolution of crawling Java to the two legged Android.
Android, live long and prosper!!
Jmat – mr. jobs is behind this. and mr. jobs to behind the “gemalto”.
i’am sure about that..
Almost as bad as apple suing everyone for MULTI TOUCH. Seriously how do you patent something that big…
Really is a douche bag move. This is going to scare developers away from Java. We are moving away from oracle products at my work to Microsoft based products. The support is actually cheaper for a sql server /.net implementation.
Hey guys, this isn’t about patenting source code. Oracle is broadening the scope to a copyright lawsuit. This isn’t just a patent case anymore. I just went through a copyright case at my work, where one of our competitors accused us of copying their source code. We did not, but ended up settling the case out of court to just get it over with.
Copyright covers direct copying (line for line copying) and making a derivative work (seems like Oracle’s angle with API calls, etc). Interestingly enough though, its not enough to prove copyright by just showing that the two end products are the same, Oracle has to show that Google copied it (did not get it from elsewhere)
Courts use the “Abstraction Filtration” comparison as a means of determining software copyright violations. Wiki has a good write-up on it. One thing to fall out of that test is that something cannot be subject to copyright protection if it is in the public domain. Since so much of Java code has been released on the Internet for so long, it should be interesting to see how Google fights this.
I thought that Java was free for everyone, if it’s not, die Oracle, die!
Google, please. Invent a new, easier, full featured, non-prolific better language with an amazing RAD IDE, write-once-use-everywhere (Android, Linux, OSX, and even Windows). Move to it and kill Java in the next years. Java is SAD (the opposite to RAD).
If I had a Embarcadero Delphi like tool whose compile to many target OSs I would be infinitely happier.
Question?
I am not a developer but so much of open source is being considered were I work. OpenDS, IDM all Java based solutions. We are looking to reduce cost and avoid as much vendor lock as possible. What do you see as the future for OpenDS, Java, Apache, ect, are we seeing the start of Oracle putting vendor lock in place for the enterprise. I just read about the mass walkout for OpenOffice. This is a concern I have and concern over the reliance of large software companies able to contribute and have such a large influeance in who serves on executive commities and the like. It seem as soon as free contributed development starts to bare fruit and gain excpetance you have an Oracle or a Novell or Redhat step in and push to have it’s agenda put front in center. It seems and I could be wrong this is a fundamental issue with enterprise acceptance of opensource since you never really know who will step in and push good developers to take up a new cause or direction after putting in years of work only to see that effort sqwashed like we are seeing in the Openoffice issue with Oracle.
There is no OpenOffice issue. There was, but people united to get the open source power back to the masses. OpenOffice died (for many of us at least), but LibreOffice was born from its ashes. Oracle was invited to set it free and join the movement, but they “had plans” to it and could not set it free. So… Diiiieee! grim.
As for Java. Think twice now.