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Comment by ajross | Hacker News Reader

So, now that the recrimination phase of the trial has begun: where did Oracle go wrong? I mean, at this point they've lost everything and it's abundantly clear that Sun would have been better off just blessing whatever Google wanted to do as "Java". At the very least, they'd have gotten some branding karma and been able to sell an "Official Android Pro SDK" product or whatever.

But at what point was that clear? Who missed that call?

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Well, I got the distinct impression (though it may be colored by hindsight and the journalists it was filtered through), that Oracle originally thought the patent portion of the case contained the real offenses, with the copyright arguments more limited (and restricted to just code copying, which I recall they were fairly vague with at first, implying many more instances of direct copying than there was).

It was only as the patents were knocked off one by one that the copyright portion of the suit became their major complaint and what they were pinning expectations and their hopes to.

No, Oracle was betting more on copyright, because copyright protections are much stronger than patents. Here are some big differences:

(1) copyright lasts longer

(2) copyright infringement is easier to prove

(3) in most cases having the copyright of something is indisputable

On the other hand patents ...

(1) are often discovered to be invalid (many "inventions" are unpatentable)

(2) the monopoly lasts for only 20 years and in this industry most worthwhile things have been invented before the nineties

(3) there are huge amounts of prior art

(4) patent infringement is hard to prove

If anything, this is really great news, because if Oracle could claim the copyright-ability of Java APIs, then our industry would never be the same.

In a recent case an appeals court in the US noted that something like 60% of patents that were ever challenged in court were eventually invalidated.

It is great news, I agree.

I think Oracle bought Sun, at least in part, thinking they could do a better job monetizing Java than Sun had done.

That's where they went wrong.

I have to agree.

Oracle's only possible course in purchasing Sun was litigation. (And I think most expected nothing less from Larry Ellison.)

Google seemed like a vulnerable target.

Alsup was a spanner in Ellison's plan. It could be argued that Google's legal defense was another.

> Oracle's only possible course in purchasing Sun was litigation.

To be fair to Oracle (OMG I can't believe I just typed that) it's not clear to me that they realized that at the time.

Oracle has a relatively large, locked-in, and well-monetized customer base. They have tools and languages and interefaces too. I imagine that most of the time they don't end up litigating against their customers.

Sun had a good customer base and a lot of them were fairly deeply committed to Sun hardware, Solaris, and yes, Java. Often they were running Oracle on Sun hardware and developing database data entry apps in Java.

It's possible that they were thinking "There's a good synergy here with the market footprint, opportunity for vertical integration, we both have some server tools, developer tools used by committed/locked-in corporate users. Sun isn't getting any revenue from Java because they're just too much "Mr. Nice Guy". We can fix that, we know how to monetize an app platform in the corporate market.

It may also be that I am hopelessly naive and they bought Sun solely as a ticket to sue Google.

Edit: See example "Mr. Nice Guy" blog post at http://groklaw.net/article.php?story=20110723095928839 How would an Ellison interpret that?

No, I think you're correct.

Oracle on Sun hardware was like peanut butter & jelly for a long time. It would have been very bad for Oracle's business if IBM had purchased Sun and used the hardware as a wedge to sell middleware. So while I'm sure Oracle wanted to monetize Java as much as possible, buying Sun was largely a defensive move.

So then why sue Google for using Java in Android?

The staff lawyers were getting bored and Ellison fell for the old "must defend our intellectual property or lose it" routine?

Just in the hope of picking up a little short term cash by shaking down the deeper pockets in the Java community at the expense of making .Net look to 3rd parties like a legally safer ecosystem?

On one level, the Sun people went to great efforts to prevent 'fragmentation' of the Java platform, and I think they felt honestly wronged by what Google did. Sometimes people sue over the principle, not the law.

On another level, it was probably just dumb greed.

But I do agree Oracle aggressively wanted to remind the industry they owned it. And that they don't really care if Java is COBOLized. (COBOL is still big business!)

I think they felt honestly wronged by what Google did

On the contrary, "Jonathan Schwartz, then CEO of Sun Microsystems, praised Google and others for incorporating Java into Android back in 2007" - http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20110723095928839

Actually, I wouldn't have been surprised if IBM (if it had purchased Sun) had dumped Sun's hardware division. It was losing money hand over first, and IBM was doing a pretty good beating Sun with its hardware offerings. Between IBM's x86, Power, and Mainframe hardware product lines, it really wouldn't need sparc. So the only question is how quickly IBM would have been able to transition what was left of Sun's hardware business to IBM's x, p, or z series machines.

As a result, that's probably why Oracle was willing to pay more than IBM. Both IBM and Sun wanted to be able to make sure they could continue to use Java --- and preserving the freedom of action against lawsuits was I'm sure high on both company's minds. But Oracle could also find a good use for its hardware division, where IBM probably would have tried to sell it off.

Well, platforms like Solaris/Sparc are never just dumped. No matter who ended up with it would be milking it all the way down, making it that much more expensive & obscure every year, until the users finally say uncle. Generally that's when the customer wants a new CRM or something and gets two birds with one stone.

That's why it would have been disastrous for Oracle if IBM got them. Everytime a Sun customer ordered a new stick of RAM, the IBM software sales team would have been circling around.

(Note: I'm sure there's some niches where Sun hardware is very strong, but those are only going to get narrower over time.)

Food for thought: SAP had been going down the path of being a dual stack company, using both Java and ABAP. The Java side was being invested in to provide better (i.e. more modern) integration capabilities and Oracle's acquisition of Sun succeeded in getting SAP to take a step back on this strategy.

They didn't step back that far. SAP just announced earlier this month they would help port OpenJDK to PowerPC:

http://mail.openjdk.java.net/pipermail/discuss/2012-May/0026...

If that's true then I would expect them to reduce their future investment in developing Java.

Just my opinion:

Sun probably knew that at the time but due to hubris didn't want to admit it, so they just willingly looked the other way and kept doing what they were doing. So you get Jonathan Schwartz, in 2007, wishing that Google would take a license, but begrudgingly congratulating them anyway, but not doing the "Official Android Pro SDK" thing you suggest. (http://web.archive.org/web/20101023072550/http://blogs.sun.c...). So that was a small mistake, a missed opportunity, but life went on.

Then at some point (maybe even before they purchased Sun, maybe after?), Oracle decided to waaay up the stakes with this lawsuit. Given how it's turned out, I'd call that a much bigger mistake.

So it was probably a little clear even to Sun in 2007 that alienating Google was the wrong call but/so they decided not to do anything about it, and then Oracle, well, I don't know whether it's correct to characterize this as missing a call vs intentionally taking a big risk in hopes of a big reward.

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