Then Google lets the court decide instead.

Imagine someone sues you for spilling coffee on them. They are willing to settle if you cut your hand off. You disagree, go to court, and the court awards the plaintiff twenty bucks. Same thing happens in the corporate world, too.

Honestly, Oracle's patents should be easy to find prior art for. Nothing in computer science is new, even if a patent examiner or some dude working 9-5 at Sun say they are.

Wondering what you mean by "license to BigTable".

BigTable is using GFS, so it will not be much use to Oracle without GFS. Also, since Google nicely described some of the major ideas behind BigTable in a paper, there are few Open-Source implementations of it. I expect that like many database systems - getting a license is easier than building and maintaining a stable system :)

BigTable seems overhyped to me. When you read the details on the very scarce reported facts (remember, there's no source anywhere to be seen) things either don't add up or don't look that revolutionary. For example their super-secret compression technologies (Zippy in particular.) Also Jeff Dean's talk last year seems to completely miss work on integer compression in the previous 4 years.

Claims on slides and videos don't cut it for me anymore (I used to be borderline fanboy of Google's tech reports, like so many others.) Stonebraker has a great paper analyzing Google's claims with respect to databases (and it doesn't look so revolutionary.) That's why I'd be surprised if Oracle buys Google's hype just like that.

I've been hearing this one quite a bit as well. It could just come out in the form of a non-monetary settlement, a cross-licensing deal for $0.