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How does the BSD license avoid something like the Oracle lawsuit against Android? From my understanding it wouldn't have made a difference.

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The Oracle lawsuit is based on the Java ME licensing restrictions: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embedded_Java#Licencing_restric...

A pure BSD license does not have these restrictions.

Originally, the Oracle lawsuit had some patent claims in it, IIRC. They were thrown out though. I can't recall if they were thrown out by the judge or if Google spent the time/money/lawyers to get them invalidated.

Any open source language, even those not affiliated with a company, could be vulnerable to that though.

Now, in this particular case (for those who can digest legalease): http://golang.org/PATENTS

IANAL, I don't think that's true for the Apache license, because it includes a clause that explicitly reassigns patents (or at least licenses any relevant patents).

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