“Google Inc., fighting a patent lawsuit filed by Oracle Corp., lost its appeals court bid to keep secret an engineer’s e-mail that says the Web search company should negotiate a license for Java technology,” Susan Decker reports for Bloomberg.
“The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit in Washington today denied Google’s request to overturn a judge’s order that the information could be presented to a jury when the case goes to trial,” Decker reports. “Tim Lindholm wrote the e-mail in August 2010, days before Oracle alleged in a lawsuit that Google’s Android operating system had been designed using patented and copyrighted features of Oracle’s Java programming language.”
Decker reports, “In the e-mail to Andrew Rubin, the executive in charge of Google’s mobile division, Lindholm said he was asked by company co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin to ‘investigate what technical alternatives exist to Java for Android and Chrome.’ ‘We’ve been over a bunch of these, and think they all suck,’ Lindholm wrote. ‘We conclude that we need to negotiate a license for Java under the terms we need.’ Google said the e-mail was mistakenly disclosed to Oracle.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: The drumbeats grow louder.
Related articles:
Oracle contradicts Google on damages, vows to fight hard for injunction against Android – September 23, 2011
Oracle seeks injunction against Android distribution as an ‘incompatible clone of Java’ – September 22, 2011
Google engineer admits to ‘strong indication that it is likely’ that he copied Sun code into Android – September 7, 2011
Do KNOW evil! 😉
Do you trust the guy you meet in the street who repeatedly says “trust me”? Of course not! So, why is anyone surprised when a company whose tagline is “don’t be evil” is ACTUALLY evil?
I believe that this lawsuit by Oracle will do more to kill Android than all the lawsuits of Apple, Microsoft, and anyone else – combined.
I believe that the lawsuits from Apple and Microsoft are to keep Android handset manners at bay, if they have to pay to use android then they’ll shy away to other less popular platforms to save money..
The Java lawsuit against google is to shut down the whole operation..
Would hate to be google today =p
Does it shock anyone a company which thinks ‘sucks’ is an appropriate word for a business would act like 3rd graders when it came to the respect of another companies intellectual property?
No. It shocks me that this company isn’t DEAD yet.
Hahahah EVIL is at hand!
Google do does evil and it’s trying to use technicalities instead of the truth to escape punishment.
checkmate
Google said the e-mail was mistakenly disclosed to Oracle.”
Talk about a mistake! Accidently sent the email to Oracle? Stupid
Oracle knew there was infringement, but this email is about the only fuse that would light up a jury, which is why Google wanted it quashed.
I wonder where Tim Lindholm is working today; Oracle?
wow MDN, was that a Joseph Conrad reference? if so, kudos! the more we learn about Google the closer we get to their heart of darkness!
MDN is showing more polish lately.
This is huge, Google are banged to rights now.
Did Google, even once, consider making their OWN alternative to Java?
Are their employees so untalented, so bankrupt, that they’re forced to plagiarize the work of others?
It’s disgusting, seriously.
They did, its called Dalvik.
The problems arose when Dalvik did certain things in a java way and as a step towards final compilation into a dalvik .dex executable the code is first turned into java byte code.
The compiled byte code of dalvik is very different from that of java byte code however. It is assumed that should Google lose to Oracle badly the workaround will be to replace the upper dalvik stack. Since the ending byte code is not java and not java compatible google will need either a different language such as the ECMA implementation of C# or will need to extend the changes from java even further.
I am clueless as to why they chose to follow anything java at all. They could have achieved all of this using ECMA C# and been totally clear since MS already figured out how to rip Sun off years ago. Its like they didn’t follow the high tech theft guide MS already wrote!
The problem is that when Sun was bought by Oracle, Google picked up a lot of talent from Sun.
The people that are working on these projects know nothing but working on Java.
@Fafu
Err, no they didn’t. Dalvik isn’t Google’s own original work – it’s a plagiarization of Java. That’s sort of the point.
Suck It, Google
It will be interesting to see whether Google (Eric Schmidt) tries to settle or continue to listen to their lawyers who say, “Yes, We can beat this! We will file more counter suits!”
Google lawyers to judge… We admitted that we re guilty, but can we just pretend we never did? … Please… Pretty please?
We promise we’ll never be evil again…
That’s akin to a muderer’s lawyer asking that the murder weapon or fingerprints be excluded!
Ridiculous!