I See – Oracle Is Pissed Because Goog Copied Their Code

I forgot the story behind this but I thought it involved a collaboration between two companies, one eventually bought by another, to develop something integral for the other company’s product, then that collaboration ended somewhat abruptly with Google forking the software toward the Dalvik thing while still preserving elements, like what’s in this article’s accompanying image, even though they were possibly entering a legally gray area and because of the whole open source vibe maybe figured it wasn’t a big deal — meanwhile Oracle / Sun sits quietly until Android is a big success when they know, provided this case has significant merit to it (I don’t know), squeeze a hefty settlement out of Google to make this go away and Google does that from time to time, settle. So this unveiling of two pages of code side by side should come as no surprise if I’ve got this thing right.

However not fighting this particular case may be seen by programmers as a blow of sorts to the open source community so perhaps Google, and again I don’t know how good the case is against them, would be more reluctant than they’d otherwise be in the same situation to settle.

Not to say what Google may or may not have done is wrong (for the fifth time I don’t know much about the case), if you ask me there should be a tight statute of limitations on this sort of thing to clean out the tactical golddiggers. Not a groovy way to make a living.