Intel wishes we were inside - The Evil Dr Spinola
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Judge rejects Oracle's damages claims
A US JUDGE has thrown out Oracle's requests for large amounts of damages from Google over its alleged infringement of Java patents.
Last week US District Court Judge William Alsup complained that both parties were behaving unreasonably as neither looked likely to want to bend on how much one wanted in damages or how much the other wanted to pay it.
Oracle argues that Google has infringed its Java patents and is pushing for billions in reparations as a result. Predictably this is something that Google does not want to do, and while Oracle has lawyers that can argue for this so does Google have lawyers that can argue against it.
Because of this the arguments roll on, and since we reported that both parties wanted the moon on a stick at the end of last week, the judge has rejected Oracle's claim for billions of dollars.
Judge Alsup, who sounded really peeved with both parties at the end of last week, has given Oracle a rather large window of opportunity though, and offered it a chance to postpone the matter until November, and presumably find a new damages expert.
Google, which doesn't really want to pay Oracle anything, is hoping that Oracle will find itself another damages expert that it can eviscerate just as well as it apparently did the first one. µ
Tags: Google
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Nothing but a money grab, pure and simple.
For the same kind on reasons.
This is a patent suit, mostly over VM technology, and the judge is mostly coming down on the side of Oracle (Google want to pay $0, Oracle want $6Bn, the judge is thinking somewhere in the middle, definitely not $0).
Dalvik/Andriod is fragmenting the Java code base, just like MS tried to do with their windows specific VM. Oracle don't want that (at least without any license fees) so are fighting the case.
IBM make rather a lot of money from their patent licensing division, they also employ lots of lawyers with sharp, pointy teeth. IIRC Apples' departing chief patent attorney is ex IBM. Most companies would rather pay than risk their wroth so you don't hear of too many court cases.
Think about it, IBM held 167,000 patents and with that they could sue Apple, Microsoft and any other company in this world. If IBM did that, there will be no Microsoft, no Apple, no Intel and millions of jobs.
I downloaded the Java code that Oracle claims Google copied. In the headers, it says "free", , the only binding is GPL. Search in Google for "policynodeimpl.java source" and select the first link.
Sun promoted Java as open source and open source communities like Apache helped Java in wide adoption. Java borrowed so many things from open source community. Look at all the XML packages in Java.
Wntire JVM source is publioshing in Oracle site openjdk.java.net and the faq says:
Oracle makes the OpenJDK source code available under an open-source licensing model. It's both gratis, and free (as in freedom) software.Oh yeah? Free as in see you in court?
Site also says "Go hack yourself"