It doesn't matter whatever it's critical area or not... it's still copyright infringement.
http://fosspatents.blogspot.com/2010/11/copyright-part-of-or...
http://docs.justia.com/cases/federal/district-courts/califor...
I'm not even sure how core those files are to running Android - it looks like they could easily be replaced by Google with new code.
However, to me, copyright infringement matters a lot more... If someone is getting free code then at least they could respect the LICENSE.
Unfortunately, I'm sure that now a few floors of lawyers are salivating at all the hours they're going to bill. In the end, the laywers will get a pile of money, oracle will gain some pocket change at google's expense, and the java community will be hurt the most.
Doesn't Oracle have better things to do? What do they gain from this?
Given the breadth of the infringement (making it open source w/ OEMs shipping tens of millions of devices based on it), the damages could be substantial.
What does Oracle have to gain from this? Money of course.
Unless Google has a good response to this, one thing I guarantee will happen is the engineer who checked in these files is going to be looking for a new job.
This is assuming it's a part of the code that actually makes it onto devices. Some of the other comments in this thread suggest they may be from a testing framework.
Sure, whatever opinion you have about Oracle might be valid, particularly with the way they're handling the JCP and OpenSolaris. Whatever. However, there is an underlying issue that is a bit bigger here, and the blog author is pointing that out in a reasonable fashion. It doesn't matter who is suing and who is sued; copyright infringement is copyright infringement.
You could make the argument that this isn't any of Oracle's business, but they absorbed everything about Sun: their IP, their liabilities, and so on. Sun was perhaps considering this action before Oracle bought them, and we'll never know.
What if the companies were reversed? Would you make the same remarks?
Given google's reputation for being open, they're not likely to pursue a law suit like oracle just because there's money in it. The media outrage will hurt their reputation more than the monetary gain.
It's silly to imply that Oracle brought this suit against Google just to score a few bucks, but easy to say when you dislike Oracle. The alternative, and very likely real reason for the suit, is that Oracle actually cares about its intellectual property and would prefer that Google not do what they will with it.
I think it's far more likely that Oracle has seen a way to get a slice of the Android pie, and the rapidly growing long-term revenue stream that it likely represents.
Again, they don't need a long-term revenue stream. I'd wager that their revenue stream from Oracle Database and other products, as well as the long-term support contracts for those products, shadows Android in comparison. Bold, I know, but Oracle is widely, widely used in the enterprise sector. The salary for an Oracle DBA alone speaks volumes regarding this.
In your world, Oracle executives sit around and think: boy, we could score a small percentage of that Android market. It pales in comparison to what we can make off of enterprise customers, but that cash flow is definitely worth the negative publicity and community recoil!
Completely ridiculous.
Your comment is merely another angle of repetitive arguments attempting to make Oracle out to be the bad party for suing Google. While I dislike Oracle just as much as the next geek for their treatment of open-source products, they might actually have a point with this lawsuit. That's all I'm saying, and watching my karma swing around wildly for taking the middle ground instead of jumping on the anti-Oracle bandwagon is amusing.
The people who buy their software understand things like duty to shareholders, and Oracle has historically determined that exercises like this are part of that duty.
About suing for money: The accumulation of patent in large companies is necessary because if they don't patent everything, someone else will and they'll be in trouble. But suing another big corporation "just to protect the patent" is mutually assured destruction because the company being sued has probably patented a lot of petty little things that the company suing is using and can counter sue. Unless there's a lot to gain, they don't because the only people that will get anything out of it is their patent lawyers.
Oracle does have a case against google, but saying that they're doing it just to protect their intellectual property is a bit naive.
One of the few positive things about our legal system is that it at least attempts to take "intent" and "proportionality" into account when making judgments.
Hopefully who ever makes decisions about this case will think about what was actually done. There's a world of difference between a hard-working team inadvertently cribbing a little code, and a large company gaining a massive strategic advantage by violating copyright on mission-critical source code.