Oracle vs. Google Lawsuit
Prepare for battle. Oracle’s lawsuit against Android (Google) just got a little bit juicer. Florian Mueller has been on a tear these past few months with his unearthing of various tech patent suits on his FOSSpatents blog. The biggest one he’s found is a pretty major bombshell: at least 43 Android source files that appear to have been directly copied from Java. That’s huge for Oracle, seeing as Oracle is currently suing Google for patent and copyright infringement in Android — which isn’t a hard case to prove when you’ve got 37 Android source files marked
“PROPRIETARY / CONFIDENTIAL” and “DO NOT DISTRIBUTE” by Oracle / Sun and at least six more files in Froyo and Gingerbread that appear to have been decompiled from Java 2 Standard Edition and redistributed under the Apache open source license without permission. In simple terms? Google copied Oracle’s Java code, pasted in a new license, and shipped it.
News android, google, HTC, java, lawsuit, motorolla, oracle, patent, source code
With Apple’s resounding success in their App Store, major carriers and phone manufacturers are jumping on the app store bandwagon to avoid being a “dump pipe” or just another hardware manufacturer. With loads of new app stores and new ways to download applications, this is by far a better user experience than in the past than having to browse from a clunky interface on the web and syncing it on the phone or downloading it from unfamiliar and risky 3rd party sites.
Now with everyone and their mother implementing an app store, developers are the last piece of the puzzle to develop and fill up their catalog. But what carriers and new app store promoters don’t realize in the resounding success of Apple’s App Store is that it was on a narrow target of mobile phones and operating systems. This alone cuts down on the difficulty of the developer to develop and maintain a stable and worthwhile experience of applications so that the end-user aka customer can enjoy and return for more. With Windows Mobile, Symbian, Brew, Java, Android, Apple, Blackberry, and other OS’s, it gets pretty overwhelming to maintain and update across all these different operating systems. Let’s say you narrowly focus on two or three OS’s, Apple, WM, and Android, you not only cut yourself off from 50% of the market but you also expand the number of phones and screen sizes to develop for. Apple’s success was that it was a homogeneous product of devices (iPhone and iTouch) with little deviation between the two.
My advice to these new app stores, don’t try to preload every phone with access to the app store. Only preserve it for the higher end phones that can handle this and narrow down the hardware that it can work universally without having to pressure developers to program specifically around for a particular phone.
News android, app store, application, blackberry, brew, iphone, itouch, java, mobile, ovi store, windows mobile