Oracle and Google To Finally Enter Courtroom 175
Fluffeh writes "After around 900 motions and filings, not to mention a timeline of two years, Google and Oracle are finally putting their case before a jury which will be selected on Monday. While Oracle originally sued for billions, the possible damages have come down to a more reasonable $30-something million (the details vary depending on if you ask Google or Oracle). However, the sides are still far apart. Oracle's proposal was a minimum, not a maximum, and Oracle has asked for a tripling of damages because of the 'willful and deliberate nature of Google's infringement.' For ongoing royalties from future sales, Google has proposed payment of just over one-half of one percent of revenue if patent infringement is proven, but Oracle wants more. Beyond financial damages, Oracle has asked for a permanent order preventing Google from continuing to infringe the patents and copyrights. The case is planned to start on Monday afternoon, after jury selection or Tuesday at the latest."
This really is a bizare course of action for Oracl (Score:5, Insightful)
I still have no god damn idea why Oracle is doing this other than amazing short sightedness.
Android is one of the few things left stopping coders fleeing to dot net , its literally a lifeline keeping java alive, and Oracle in their stupidity want to sever that.
*WHY* would they engage on a path so god damn harmful to the health of one of their most important intellectual properties. Its frigging bizare.
I mean ok, sure get a pound of flesh for licencing costs, whatever, billionaires suing billionaires is not my interest. But their "rememdy" seems to effectively involve killing davlik, which would be catastrophic to java coders who have had a huge new source of work from android.
Even if the companies aren't trashy ... (Score:3, Insightful)
... the trend now is the lawyers, who invented nothing but hot air, gonna be the ones who rake in the $$$
Re:This really is a bizare course of action for Or (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:This really is a bizare course of action for Or (Score:5, Insightful)
Seriously dude. Oracles remedy seems to involve killing davlik. That means no java on the android. Its a scorched earth aproach to IP litigation, and you better hope oracle fails on that.
Re:This really is a bizare course of action for Or (Score:5, Insightful)
You have to be kidding. Java is so firmly entrenched in the enterprise application space that Android is a blip on the radar. It could go away tomorrow and people who write real applications - booking engines, investment monitoring, vehicle tracking, stock management, supply line tracking - will never even blink.
Re:This really is a bizare course of action for Or (Score:5, Insightful)
Yup.
Java is huge in the kind of stuff that doesn't make the news very often.
More importantly, a lot of these systems are so large that "switching to .NET" isn't really a practical option.
Even if all Java development ceased tommorow.. I suspect Java would still be around for a long, long time. Java could become the next COBOL!
Re:This really is a bizare course of action for Or (Score:5, Insightful)
Go would actually be an excellent option. Its a really clever language that solves a whole ton of C related pain-points, and compiles surprisingly snapilly.
I mean google might be concerned that not many people know it, but Apple took the exact same punt with objective C, but ultimately objective C's strengths as a rapid development platform won over a lot of coders who might otherwise be spooked away from it.
900 motions and filings == how many lines of code? (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm just trying to imagine what both companies could have done, if the money for this had been spent on R&D projects. Probably both companies and their ecosystems would have been better off. Conflict between two titans rattles the earth, and shakes and frightens smaller beings.
Two years of hard core litigation? Which small companies can afford that? Even if a small company is clearly in the right, a giant can litigate them out of existence, before the truth comes to light.
'tis uneasy waters, in which we tread today, my fellows.
Re:This really is a bizare course of action for Or (Score:4, Insightful)
Android chose Java because Java was popular, not the other way around. You must be unaware of the other uses of Java in this world.
Re:This really is a bizare course of action for Or (Score:3, Insightful)
In the Apple/Moto fight in Germany, Moto got an injunction against Apple for infringing some Moto patents. They got the injunction because Apple had not negotiated in good faith [stalling for five years]. However, latest ruling appears that Apple might reverse this on the FRAND argument.
They can argue FRAND in that case because Moto has actually signed a bunch of disclaimers [slashdot.org] when they submit their patents to the standard org. I very much doubt you can argue FRAND on a random technology by claiming that it is a "de facto standard".
Re:How might Google try to get around the patents? (Score:5, Insightful)
As others have pointed out, if they actually do stop Davlik entirely, then their "win" is to have less people interested in Java. From what I hear about Java for the past couple of years, though, they seem to be willfully killing it off through mismanagement anyway. So perhaps they really don't give a shit about it at all. What kind of revenues they get due to Java?
They're not killing it, they're turning it into COBOL 2.0 - a realm of humongous "enterprise" solutions chock full of incomprehensible code that requires very expensive consultants to maintain, much less update. In other words, the kind of turf on which Oracle knows how to play very well.
Re:How might Google try to get around the patents? (Score:4, Insightful)
you havn't been coding enterprise applications either., Some code is more complex than other, way more complex. Massively, stupidly, craply, suckfestly more complex.
Not because it is somehow special, but because there was money to be made in dragging the thing out as long as possible and making it as complicated as possible with the cheapest and most useless developers and the most expensive consultants you could imagine.
And most of these shitty shit shit applications are written in Java for people who have budgets bigger than their overstuffed bonus payouts.