Oracle v. Android
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.