Why didn’t Google just sign up for a licence and move on? Oracle’s lawsuit alleges that when Google used the Java programming language as the basis for its Android mobile operating system – without taking a licence – it misappropriated intellectual property Oracle acquired when Oracle bought Java, along with Sun Microsystems, in 2009. The trial is set to start today. A licence would not have been expensive. There is even a free, open-source version.
As Oracle tells it, Google built Android out of Java building blocks so that it would be easy for the legions of existing Java developers to write Android applications. But it didn’t want to make Android fully compatible with other Java-based platforms, which taking a licence would have required.
The idea was to keep the applications within the Android ecosystem, and under Google’s control. Developers can check in, but they can’t check out. This damages “the entire Java ecosystem”, according to an Oracle lawyer, because part of the value of any Java application is in its ability to “talk” to all the others.