For the first time, miraculously, Oracle succeeded in outpacing Team New Zealand upwind, the latter very nearly capsizing after a furious tacking battle. Big money, big data, big win.]]>
All the same, the incident was a wake-up call to many. (Thanks @HotSoup for the link.)]]>
The former G-Cloud head slammed Kelly and Crothers for rubber-stamping the deal, which he described as an outrageous waste of money.
The ERP tender, worth between £250m and £750m, is being led by the Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO) as part of the government’s shared services strategy. It will cover existing Oracle platforms across departments.]]>
Alsup is worried that Google and Oracle may have "retained or paid print or internet authors, journalists, commentators, or bloggers who have and/or may publish comments on the issues in this case." The information could "be of use on appeal or on any remand to make clear whether any treatise, article, commentary, or analysis on the issues posed by this case are possibly influenced by financial relationships to the parties or counsel." Due by Friday 17 August.]]>
After one partial victory on the issue of whether Google infringed copyrights, Oracle lost its argument that Google violated patents. Oracle then lost a ruling that held that the structure of the Java APIs asserted by the company couldn't be copyrighted at all. The rulings left Oracle little room except to appeal, and today in court the two sides agreed to a damages total of "zero." That's only a few billion less than Oracle originally sought. Wonder if Google wrote it on a cheque with a flourish.]]>
This time, though, Larry Ellison’s company gets to be the good guy. In a lawsuit filed in Wisconsin federal court, Oracle is asking the court to invalidate four patents belonging to a patent troll that has been terrorizing corporations and small software developers across the country. Oracle's claim against Lodsys is to say "we don't infringe your patents and neither do our customers." Clearly, it's trying to draw it into a court fight, perhaps to bankrupt it. Apple is also trying to do the same, because Lodsys's approach is bad for app developers. (Thanks @modelportfolio2003 for the link.)]]>
In short, Oracle woke up and realized it's in a pickle of its own making. It was too clever by half, and now reality has struck. It clearly is worried that if they go to the damages phase now, it will gain a big fat zero in damages. It should have thought of that before it asked for infringer's profits, but there you are. The problem with Groklaw's analyses is that it imputes motives that just don't exist, and acts as though Google's lawyers are geniuses, and Oracle's are idiots. Given that Oracle's lead attorney is David Boies, who prosecuted the Microsoft antitrust trial in 1998, you'd think its writers would be more conflicted. Apparently not.]]>
Although the case has nuances, the court was clear that although software itself could be copyrighted, its externalities -- the function it performs, the programming interfaces it exposes, and the data structures it uses -- cannot be. This is entirely reasonable. Without such a division, interoperable technology markets would be impossible.]]>
On Monday, as the Google-Oracle case entered its fourth week, a jury ruled that Oracle has proven that Google infringed the overall structure, sequence, and organization of copyrighted works of 37 APIs used by the Java platform. In building Android, Google created a new version of the Java platform known as the Dalvik virtual machine, and this mimicked the Java APIs, or application programming interfaces, which are essentially a way for a Java application to talk to the platform.
But the jury was unable to reach a decision on whether Google’s Java clone constituted “fair use.” A fair use decision would let Google off the hook.]]>
“The implementation code in Android is completely different than the implementation code in Java,” Duke University computer science professor Owen Astrachan said on Friday, though he added that the two use the same “method signatures,” code that defines the inputs and outputs for part of a computer program.
...Astrachan’s testimony contrasted sharply with that of Stanford University processor John Mitchell, who was originally called by Oracle on Monday and returned to the stand on Friday. Mitchell said that at least in some cases, Google must have copied code from Oracle’s Java platform. “I don’t think there is any way [Google] could have come up with it on their own,” he said, when asked if he thought Google copied code for the Java application programming interfaces, or APIs.
Google says Dalvik is a “clean room implementation,” meaning it was built from scratch. But Mitchell disagreed. “Whoever inserted that code into the codebase had access to it,” he said. “This wasn’t a clean room implementation.”]]>
“Oracle’s argument that the patent ‘trial’ has not yet started is wrong,” Alsup’s ruling, filed late Wednesday, read (PDF). “Oracle will be required to stand by its word and live with the dismissal with prejudice.” Tough on Oracle, tough on the causes of.. This does show how messed up the US patents system is: patents can circle around, being granted, killed off, then revived.]]>
But reading the exhibits, you see that an independent implementation was always viewed as possible by Google, Lindholm even mentioning one possibility, just not ideal. In fact, apparently someone in 2010 told Safra Katz of Oracle that maybe Google would just use something else, and this apparently seemed to disturb her, as on page 7 it says the "threat" to move off Java "hit her hard". Of course Google has the technical ability to do pretty much whatever it wants to take on. They're designing driverless cars and how to mine asteroids. I mean. Really. Replacing Java would be annoying but not impossible.
p> But part of what Google was trying to make happen in 2009, as you can see on page 30, was getting Sun to "get Java more fully open sourced" which, by then was seen as urgent in that they thought Sun was "going to fail sometime soon." Why did Google care? Because, as one email that year in the same thread pointed out, Google was already highly invested in Java. Replacing Java in Android wouldn't have been impossible for Google, but it would have been very, very, very difficult. This long analysis of nothing-very-much also overlooks the fact that Bray has worked at Google for some years, so presumably could tell its lawyers exactly what parts of Java were GPLd and what weren't. (Thanks @modelportfolio2003 for the link.)]]>We've known each other ever since I vocally opposed Oracle's acquisition of Sun Microsystems (not because of Java), but that's history as I fully respect the European Commission's clearance decision and the subsequent closing of the deal. This will make him even more of a hate figure in Groklaw's comment threads, if that is possible. (People there won't admit to having read his blog, won't link to it, but denounce everything he does.) Müller has reckoned from the start that Google has a copyright infringement case to answer. Groklaw reckons Larry Ellison has a tail and smells of sulphur, and that Google walks on water and smells of roses. Either way, it's up to the jury now.]]>
The company suffered a setback in its patent dispute with Oracle last week when a U.S. judge denied Google's request to keep an internal Google email out of the case record. The email, written by a Google engineer, could suggest to a jury that Google knew it needed a license to use Sun's - now Oracle's - Java technology in Android. Interesting backdrop to the trial now in process: the email at issue is known as the "Lindholm email", about alternatives to Java, in which Lindholm says "We conclude that we need to negotiate a license [sic] for Java under the terms we need." Google wanted the email kept out of the trial; Oracle fought, and won, to have it included.]]>