New evidence supports Oracle's case against google

[Josh]

Google faces a steep challenge in its defense against Oracle's lawsuit over seven Java patents and some copyrighted material. More than five months after Oracle's complaint, Google appears unable to countersue Oracle over patent infringement, while evidence is mounting that different components of the Android mobile operating system may indeed violate copyrights of Sun Microsystems, a company Oracle acquired a year ago.

I have discovered additional material that Oracle might present to the court as examples of copyright-infringing material in the Android codebase:

   *      Two months ago I took a close look at Exhibit J to Oracle's amended complaint, which contained a synopsis of source code shipped by Google and Sun's original Java code. I have since found six more files in an adjacent directory that show the same pattern of direct copying. All of them were apparently derived with the help of a decompiler tool. Those files form part of Froyo (Android version 2.2) as well as Gingerbread (version 2.3), unlike the file presented by Oracle.
   *      In addition, I have identified 37 files marked as "PROPRIETARY/CONFIDENTIAL" by Sun and a copyright notice file that says: "DO NOT DISTRIBUTE!" Those files appear to relate to the Mobile Media API of the Sun Java Wireless Toolkit. Unless Google obtained a license to that code (which is unlikely given the content and tone of those warnings), this constitutes another breach.

Interestingly, the original version of PolicyNodeImpl.java -- a redacted version of which is shown in Exhibit J to Oracle's amended complaint -- also had a "PROPRIETARY/CONFIDENTIAL" designation at the relevant time (Java version 5.0). In version 6.0 the file has a GPL 2 header. Google said in its formal response that Oracle had omitted "copyright headers". That is correct, but now that I have seen two versions of the original file, I don't think that the missing parts are favorable to Google. Actually, the opposite is true. Whether under a proprietary license or the GPL, the related code could not be legally relicensed under the Apache license by anyone other than the right holder (Oracle/Sun).

Source

[zridling]

Like so many of these, I'm sure an "agreement" will be worked out. The Italian government spent years nailing Google to the wall, and recently Italy settled very quietly. After Oracle acquired Sun, its first press release stated they would essentially become SCO and sue everyone in the tech world, and as of today, they DO have active infringement suits against 20 major companies.

Oy.

[Mark0]

ZDNet - Oops: No copied Java code or weapons of mass destruction found in Android

Stop the presses! Juicy “evidence” of Google’s evil side turns out to be much ado about nothing.

Sometimes the sheer wrongness of what is posted on the web leaves us speechless. Especially when it’s picked up and repeated as gospel by otherwise reputable sites like Engadget. “Google copied Oracle’s Java code, pasted in a new license, and shipped it,” they reported this morning.

Sorry, but that just isn’t true.

Including quite a debate between the authors of the two articles in the comment sections! 

[40hz]

Ars Technica is also on it. Link here.

This incident is very clearly not a case of Android stealing code from Sun or J2ME. It's a handful of test cases from an unrelated and publicly available Sun reference implementation that got uploaded by accident to AOSP in a zip archive supplied by a third party. It's a tacky mistake, but it's hardly serious or damaging. At worst, it warrants a takedown notice. It's certainly not a smoking gun as one might assume when viewing the code out of context.

Mueller's new findings offer several new files that weren't known before, but it's still basically the same stuff that Oracle presented in its previous filing that everyone dissected back in October. You can see Groklaw's untangling of the issue from last year.

[Renegade]

In this corner wearing Red trunks and weighing in at a market capitalization of $165,000,000,000.00, ORRRRRRRRRRRRRACLE~!

And in this corner wearing olive and yellow trunks and weighing in at a market capitalization of $196,000,000,000.00, GOOOOOOOOOOGLE~!

LET'S GET READY TO RRRRUUUUUUMMMMMBBBBLLLLEEEE~!

[40hz]

Yeah! "Let's get it on!!!"

[attach]