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Comment by bilbo0s | Hacker News Reader

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?

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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.

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