Google Loses Effort to Seal Records in Android Patent Lawsuit With Oracle | Hacker News Reader

Google Loses Effort to Seal Records in Android Patent Lawsuit With Oracle

bloomberg.com

25 pointsd0ne14 comments

I find it good practice to hand write, what at the time I deem very important, emails I'm not 100% certain I should send. Sleep on it and then read it the next day. If I still want to send it then I type it up and press Send.

Open articleView on HN

Do watch out that your handwritten notes can be used as evidence if known about. A co-worker saying you had notes and you not being able to produce them might get a little sticky depending on the industry.

If I write a paper letter to my lawyer but don't finish and drop it in the mail, is it protected by attorney-client privilege?

http://www.lawcollective.org/article.php?id=74

Best I could come up with.

Can someone better informed explain this Google-Oracale Java tiff to me. If Google is using Java, and they have gobs of money in the bank, why not just license it and be done with it? Don't they have more important patent fights to worry about? (I'm thinking about Apple). I just don't understand how all of this works I guess.

They have very competent corporate attorneys, so I assume they are making the right decisions. But I mean really, if there are emails like this laying around, just pay the fee and make this whole thing go away. What's the hold up?

Google are using Java (a derivative of the Apache Harmony implementation of Java) but compiling it to a different bytecode that runs on the Dalvik virtual machine.

Dalvik is very different from the JVM in a variety of fundamental ways. The Wikipedia article has plenty of info on this.

Oracle's patents are on many of the inner workings of the JVM. Java itself (the language) does not have many unique aspects which were patentable because Java is largely derivative from languages that came before it.

So basically (as I understand it), Android uses Java in a very superficial way, and the patent issues at hand are whether Dalvik infringes on Oracle patents on VM techniques.

Dalvik is also very similar to the JVM in a number of ways. For instance the instruction set maps almost 1:1 to bytecodes:

  OP_MONITOR_ENTER vs monitorenter
  OP_INVOKE_STATIC vs invokestatic  
  OP_THROW vs athrow  
  OP_CHECK_CAST vs checkcast  
  OP_ARRAY_LENGTH vs arraylength  
  OP_NEW_ARRAY vs anewarray  
  ...

If the question is "Dalvik was designed to run code written in what language?" the answer is "Java" without any doubt. This might be important to some legal question, whether Google created it with the specific intention to not pay license fees or something, or whether they broke a license for J2SE (they use Java a lot) that prohibits them from creating incompatible versions of Java.

The decision not to license Java was made before Android became crazy profitable, so maybe Google viewed it as expensive at that time. Of course, any license fee would have conflicted with Google's desire to make Android free. Even worse, all licensed JVMs must be compatible with either the Java SE or Java ME standards, both of which have major technical problems on smartphones. It's likely that an officially licensed flavor of Android would have been both more expensive and uncompetitive with iOS.

Not much meat in this article. It doesn't say anything about what the email was, just that Google had to disclose it.

But I guess anything with the word "patent" in the title will get some traffic around here.

Agreed that the article is a bit thin, but it does state what was in the email: the passage in question was from an internal e-mail in 2010 to Google executive Andy Rubin saying “the technical alternatives to using Java for Android ‘all suck’ and stating, ‘we conclude that we need to negotiate a license for Java under the terms we need.’”

I think maybe the article has been updated, or else I'm just blind. Cause I sure didn't see that when I first read the thing. Thanks for pointing it out.

there's more detail here http://www.pcworld.com/businesscenter/article/236924/google_...

"What we've actually been asked to do by Larry and Sergey is to investigate what technology alternatives exist to Java for Android and Chrome," Google engineer Tim Lindholm wrote in the Aug. 2010 e-mail, referring to Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin. "We've been over a hundred of these and think they all suck. We conclude that we need to negotiate a license for Java."

The e-mail's contents were revealed last week during a hearing on whether the findings of Oracle's damages expert should be set aside.

"You are going to be on the losing end of this document" if its contents are revealed to a jury, Judge William Alsup told Google's attorney during the hearing.

"That's a pretty good document for you," Alsup said earlier to Oracle's lawyer. "That ought to be big for you at trial."

Google, however, doesn't want such a potential smoking gun to make it that far.

The context is very important (and not appearing in the email, right). The HTC Dream (G1) came out in late 2008. It was running Dalvik then.

I think what is more likely is this: Tim Lindholm was asked to figure out how to run standard Java programs on Chromebooks and Android tablets without Dalvik or recompilation. They wanted to gain some backwards compatibility but concluded it was impossible without a licensed JVM. Android and Chrome still lack the feature.

read the judge fine print..he states that since it is not communication to be redacted and cannot be used in trial than it cannot be not made public..quite a bit different than Mr Mueller's spin..

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