As most of you will be aware the Oracle vs Google court case has final begun (they failed to negotiate a deal outside court).
Oracle are making their arguments first and have posted their opening slides here (makes for an interesting read).
Should be interesting to see who comes out on top.
Read it all, interesting read.
My thoughts? I just hope the ultimate outcome benefits java and the java community.
Other than that, it seems google made a bit of a dick move and should’ve at least adhered android compatibility to the java TCK. Why didn’t they anyway?
I know it makes sense, but it is sad that nobody cares that all developers prefer having android being java-based :P.
Business ruins developments :/.
I would love to know why the negotiations broke down over licencing java. It would seem Google did see this coming so I hope they have a strategy for how to deal with it.
What I’m wondering is how Oracle got these apparently secret e-mails 
Seems like a pretty clear case, from this point of view at least. will have to wait for google’s response.
Everyone leaks everything.
Groklaw has really good coverage of the case. The highlight from yesterday’s hearing being Oracles Larry Ellison taking the stand and being questioned by Google’s lawyers.
I just come from spacee, what is the issue?
I don’t quite like the huge amount of misleading remarks by the Google lawyers, but I guess they are paid to do exactly that.
[quote]And you understand that nobody owns the Java programming language, right?
[/quote]
The only answer is to agree, otherwise you look stupid.
Why do they resort to these low tactics?
And rightly so in this case. When you sign a contract it will state that all the stuff you’re producing for your employer is your own work (which you’re signing over all rights to typically) and is free from any legal/licensing issues unless you’ve informed management. I surely wouldn’t want the shadow of a lawsuit against me from both Google and Oracle. Back when I was doing custom video/audio & speech codecs I had clients ask me (on the phone of course)…“Hey! Can’t we just pretend we don’t know about patents X,Y,Z?” Man, screw that.
Basically that Google more than willing went stomping all over patented and copyrighted materials.
Well, they want to win. There’s no such thing as a fair fight.
For once in my life I’m not sure whose side I’m on. I’m pissed off with Google foisting a half-assed Java implementation on the world as a defacto standard. But then I’m pissed off with Oracle making them do it by being unreasonable on the terms in the first place. If Oracle win, will we get proper J2SE on Android and some serious performance gains? If Google wins, will Java start to fragment significantly? Do I even care so long as Eclipse still makes bytecode for either of them using the same syntax if not necessarily the APIs?
Cas 
James Gosling lays out his position here.
[quote]In Dan Farber’s recent article on CNET titled “Oracle v. Google: Ex-Sun execs on opposite sides” he got my position on the case totally backwards and totally misinterpreted my comments. Just because Sun didn’t have patent suits in our genetic code doesn’t mean we didn’t feel wronged. While I have differences with Oracle, in this case they are in the right. Google totally slimed Sun. We were all really disturbed, even Jonathan: he just decided to put on a happy face and tried to turn lemons into lemonade, which annoyed a lot of folks at Sun.
[/quote]
Also they are out of options.
Google stole the stuff; there is not much more to it.
If they still wanna win this, they have to go all out.
The sports term for this would be “rooting for injuries.”
I’d still like to see Oracle get the worst of it, otherwise you can look forward to paying for Java on a per-CPU basis.
[quote]I’d still like to see Oracle get the worst of it, otherwise you can look forward to paying for Java on a per-CPU basis.
[/quote]
Does that necessarily follow? Oracle does acknowledge that Java is free, just certain aspects of it aren’t, yes? Or am I missing something?
At what point does an independent game company cross a line into licensing issues for Java itself? When it includes a JVM with the app? I’m not really clear on just what part of Java is considered proprietary.
I guess I am okay with paying a small royalty, comparable to a “compulsory mechanical” or ASCAP license in music, assuming it is for commercially sold software. But it would have to be a very small amount.
Obviously Google are in the wrong, but in this case I simply don’t care.
This might strike at the very heart of copyright law itself, but I don’t feel the law is serving it’s intended purpose.
Sun’s repeated failures at creating a viable consumer platform for Java development are evidence enough that penalizing Google’s success does not serve scientific progress.
It’s the dichotomy of where to draw the line between the word of the law Vs the spirit of the law.
Oracle really should win based on law. I’d be much happier if software patents took a hit though (I assume the they didn’t drop the patent bits.)…because software patents suck. Poster child case: arithmetic encoding help nobody, hurt everybody. Patent pools like MPEGx would suffer, but man patents have gone out of control.
The slides seemed to only focus on the copyright infringement of the API design and implementation.
On a side-note this slide puzzles me:
(Oracle’s Slide 76)
[quote]Java Specification License Requirements Are Designed To
Avoid Fragmentation
License Requirements:
• Adhere to Java requirements
• Don’t do less or more than what
is required
• Do a “clean room” implementation
• License and pass compatibility
tests
[/quote]
How does requiring a “clean room” implementation reduce fragmentation?
100 monkeys writing 100 independent implementations of any given method will result in 100(+) different bugs.
J2ME is a perfect example of this; it’s API might have been consistent across the many hundreds of different handsets, but each implementation was so riddled with unique bugs that the platform itself became nonviable due to fragmentation.
Perhaps this is a failing of the compatibility tests (or Sun’s historically lackluster enforcement of them), rather than a problem with clean room implementations per se.
Though if that’s the case, I think it’s naive to expect even the most thorough of compatibility tests to catch all problems.
Doesn’t a “clean room” implementation just mean that the full java API should be available to the coder and that the coder doesn’t have to worry about any other external resources except for for the std java api?