Redwood Shores (ip-192.com): In a lawsuit filed against Google, Oracle claims that the Android operating system infringes Oracles patents and copyrights related to Java. The Java platform provides a system for developing application software and deploying it in a cross-platform environment. Java was acquired in 2009 by Oracle as part of the $5.6 billion Sun Microsystems takeover.
"In developing Android, Google knowingly, directly and repeatedly infringed Oracle's Java-related intellectual property. This lawsuit seeks appropriate remedies for their infringement," said Oracle’s spokeswoman Karen Tillman in a statement. Oracle says that Java is now a key asset for Oracle and is seeking an injunction to stop Google from building and distributing the Android OS. The Redwood Shores based company is also claiming monetary damages.
In the end, the uncertainty seeded by the law suit may have the power to shake up the mobile industry for years to come. Google says that about 200,000 Android powered phones are being sold every day.
The Android operating system uses a virtual machine called Dalvik that Google re-compiled and that competes with Java. On its Android developer website, Google says that "Android includes a set of core libraries that provides most of the functionality available in the core libraries of the Java programming language." It continues saying that "Dalvik has been written so that a device can run multiple VMs efficiently."
In a clever move, Sun made the "free java" source code available under the GPLv2 license to gain the support of the open source community. However, the "standard edition" of Java had some exclusion to the GPLv2 license. It stated that only the platform code itself was open source, but not the user code running on it.
The lawsuit was filed in the U.S. district court in San Francisco.
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