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Comment by muhfuhkuh | Hacker News Reader

"It'll be interesting to see Oracle's stance toward other alternate JVMs such as IBM's."

IBM could completely paralyze the entire computer industry with their portfolio. That they don't is a testament to how much money they earn in simply letting others do the "hard" PC stuff while they singularly engulf the big iron market.

IBM was the only company that I know of that actually outlasted the US government in antitrust litigation. The DoJ, after 15 YEARS of litigation, simply dropped the case due to lack of will and resources to continue. Oracle wouldn't dare try IBM in court.

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IBM's JVM is licensed. They had a legal agreement with Sun over it and I have no reason to believe that it won't carry over with Oracle.

Also, as the article j-g-faustus linked pointed, Google did something special to avoid the GPL, so JVMs that followed the usual rules won't be affected.

This makes me think that cscotta's point on uncertainty is not so strong. It'll be certainly an unpopular measure among developers, but Oracle can say that the case against Google is similar to the one against Microsoft and use the usual "fragmentation" argument.

That's interesting. I wonder if Google could buy IBM and then have them drop the lawsuit?

I don't know if you're trying to make a joke, but that might be a bit difficult for Google to do since IBM is worth more than they are.

http://www.google.com/finance?catid=66529330&sort=MARKET... Cap

There's no reason this comment should be voted down.

There's no reason your comment should be voted down either. I upvoted it at least.

For those of you who are relatively new here, meta-discussion is discouraged on hacker news. Now everyone quickly downvote me!

I wasn't trying to make a joke. I figured Google would have a very high market valuation compared to IBM. But my point still stands, why can't Google buy a company that owns some patents that Oracle is currently infringing on?

Jonathan Schwartz had a great article about patents and IP where he relayed some stories about the stand offs between companies with regards to patents. Seems very relevant here: http://jonathanischwartz.wordpress.com/2010/03/09/good-artis...

It's quite possible that Google already owns some. We will find out when and if they find a counter-suit. Counterclaims of patent infringement are a standard tactic.

I assume Oracle is angling for a settlement here. I can't imagine they want to make Android apps not be written in Java, they just want a piece.

I think the V8 technology in Chrome is based on much older Smalltalk VM technology that Google bought. Given that everything in software violates software patents, I think it is reasonable to assume that Java does.

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