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).
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