Comment by nwallin | Hacker News Reader

Comment by nwallin | Hacker News Reader

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> Oracle bought Sun, and with that purchase, the ownership of intellectual property in the form of the Java API. Google then proceeded to copy that property into their own property without abiding by the usage restrictions Oracle, the property owner, specified.

You have the order backward. Google made Android with the full consent from Sun. Their CEOs had a handshake deal, and neither of them believed there was any need for a legal contact.

Fourish years later Oracle bought Sun and promptly sued Google. The handshake deal wasn't legally binding, apparently.

I know this doesn't necessarily change the legal picture, but it certainly changes the ethical one. Your timeline makes Google out to be a predator, maliciously stealing Oracle's precious IP. The actual timeline makes Oracle out to be the predator, buying Sun for little other purpose than to sue people.

I suspect Google wouldn't have gone with Java if it were owned by Oracle at the time. Which would have made for an interesting alternate timeline. Maybe they'd have gone with D? Who knows. C++03 was kind of ass, but if they'd have gone with c++ we'd have new c++ as a first class citizen which would also be rad.

That is not what the wikipedia article says: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_v._Oracle_America

> Android, Inc. was founded in 2003 by Andy Rubin, Rich Miner, Nick Sears, and Chris White to develop a mobile phone platform.[7][8] Google purchased Android in 2005 and continued developing the Android operating system.[8] During development of Android, Google wanted to incorporate the Java Standard Edition libraries. Google's executive chairman Eric Schmidt had approached Sun's president Jonathan I. Schwartz about licensing the Java libraries for use in Android. Sun offered a licensing deal of between US$30 and 50 million. Schmidt said Google would have paid for that license, but they were concerned that Sun had also requested some shared control of Android along with the fee.[9][10][11] Google states that they wanted more control in order to open source the language and allow third parties to take better advantage of its code;[9] Oracle states that Sun refused because Google's intention was essentially to fork Java to a Google version of the language, and to prevent it being inter-operable with other versions, an idea which was "anathema" to the "write once run anywhere" basis of the language.[12] Because of these differences of view, the negotiations failed to reach a deal and Sun refused Google a license for Java.[12]

> At this point in time, the OpenJDK implementation offered by Sun was not as mature or complete as the Java Standard Edition.[13] Instead of licensing Java, Google chose to develop a cleanroom version of the Java Standard Edition libraries

After the deal fell through, Schmidt literally wrote a public blog post as CEO on suns website welcoming Google's use of Java in Android.

The wiki article is leaving out a suspicious amount of facts in the case.

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