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Comment by tzs | Hacker News Reader

If they were talking about Oracle's patents, it would make sense. It's the talk of it being copyright infringement that has me confused.

Android is basically, as far as I've read, a Linux kernel, with Google's own user space on top of that--their own equivalent of libc and their own windowing system. On top of that, they run their own JVM, which they wrote themselves and which is NOT even compatible with Oracle's at the byte-code level. Android apps are written in Java and compiled/JITed for Google's VM.

So, unless the Java compiler itself takes code from Oracle's compiler, it is hard to see what in their would contain copies of Oracle code.

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If you read the complaint itself (http://www.scribd.com/doc/35811761/Oracle-s-complaint-agains...) it becomes clearer - see Count 8, copyright infringement: The Java platform contains a substantial amount of original material (including without limitation code, specifications, documentation and other materials) that is copyrightable subject matter under the Copyright Act, 17 U.S.C.

so because the Android platform APIs also include the Java APIs Oracle thinks there is a case. I'm not aware of any precedents that would indicate the likelyhood of this succeeding, but its possible there could be a problem here.

Note that http://developer.android.com/reference/packages.html contains the java.* API's, and in the past Sun was pretty strict about companies not hosting that Javadoc itself publicly (eg, they stopped one site that was building interlinked Javadoc references).

One thing missing from your list: the standard java libs like java.lang.* etc. Are those google's implementations?

They're from the Apache Harmony project, not from Sun's Java.

> So, unless the Java compiler itself takes code from Oracle's compiler, it is hard to see what in their would contain copies of Oracle code.

This is about patent infringement, not copyright. Whether or not code was copied is irrelevant.

UPDATE: Sorry, maybe both are at stake. The author of this article seems sadly ignorant of the difference between patent and copyright, as he seems to use them interchangeable. So who knows....

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