Dana Blankenhorn has been a journalist, writer and part-time futurist for over 30 years.
Dear Dana,
Actually the issue is a little bit more complex than the picture highlighted by Perens. In fact, even including AWT and the other parts of J2SE, Android could not have been claimed "conformant" unless it passed the TCK compliance test, and this would have added substantial restriction to the future autonomy of Android evolution (for example, Sun could have asked for removal of features conflicting with a specific Sun technology). So, I really believe that Google never could have gone through that road.
Actualy, Android was specifically designed *not* to be Java (I wrote a little bit here: http://carlodaffara.conecta.it/?p=478 ) and I believe that for the copyright part they are absolutely on the right side, as they never claimed to be Java, Java derived or Java compliant (and, as recently found, ?copyright in computer programs does not protect programming languages from being copied? - see SAS vs. WPS). On the patent side, since Dalvik is quite different from the HotSpot and traditional JRE, Oracle had to find quite broad patents to attack, and I believe that the patent are weak and generic enough not to be a real problem, especially in the post-Bilski world.
Also, I still believe that even the implicit patent grant that is part of GPLv2 ("any patent must be licensed for everyone's free use or not licensed at all"..."if a patent license would not permit royalty-free redistribution of the Program by all those who receive copies directly or indirectly through you, then the only way you could satisfy both it and this License would be to refrain entirely from distribution of the Program.") is sufficient to claim under US law that patents were given as part of the distribution; Google can use this as a trick to include a licensed part (the relevant code section of OpenJDK) within Android, through the classpath exception - that is, Android can include an external piece of OpenJDK by going through an intermediate class that is under the same license as Android (OpenJDK is GPL+exception for class libraries).
Since Bill Gates left Microsoft to become Andrew Carnegie, open source has lacked a convenient villain against which to contend.
After pretending to kindness for many months, Larry Ellison has stepped up to be that villain. (I’m certain this costume would fit him nicely, just $799.95 from Buycostumes.com.)
The Google suit and abandonment of OpenSolaris led programmer-blogger Joe Cheng to come up with a handy one-word curse for Ellison’s Oracle — SCOracle. (Tim Bray’s tweet, unfortunately, is not work safe as Cheng’s is.)
For many analysts, that’s plenty of ammunition to condemn Oracle for all time.
For Bruce Perens, however, it’s not. He’s not just an open source advocate, of course, he’s a law professor.he is an authority on open source. (My apologies for again calling him a legal professor.) And Prof. Perens says Google violated its Sun patent grant by not including AWT or Swing. SiliconANGLE agrees Oracle may have a case. (But if the invention isn’t tied to a specific machine, Groklaw notes, the patent may be tossed.
Joel West adds that even if Google re-engineered Java in a clean room, the patent argument is compelling, and Java was never more than “semi-open.”
There is no such ambiguity in the closing of Solaris. Oracle is closing the software off to open source developers, and will only release open source code in the future after a commercial release. Contributor Steven Scallion called that “a perversion of the open source process.”
The question to ask is, will open source sensibilities force Oracle to pay a high price for its embrace of the dark side?
Microsoft has already tried to capitalize with a mySQL to SQL Server migration tool, but that brings up an important point about Oracle, one that will make taking a pound of open source flesh from it problematic.
Oracle is not in the consumer market. It’s not even in the small business market. Oracle is, and always has been, an enterprise company. It deals with customers who know they have to pay for what they get, negotiate and sign contracts they will follow, and who can afford legal bills with several zeroes in them.
The fact that Java is part of many consumer products, or that OpenOffice is a consumer product, or that mySQL was designed with small businesses in mind is incidental. These are markets Oracle has never showed an inclination toward serving before, and having these markets angry with them is no big deal.
The question open source advocates must ask is, can it be made into a big deal? Maybe even a big Biden deal? How? We can’t expect help from the law or the government. It’s a market question.
Discuss.
