Will Oracle End Up With a Piece of Android?
Oracle's legal strategy could pay off big time if it wins damages in this trial, because the Android device market is growing fast and is hugely profitable.
"The
real question is: Does Oracle get a piece of Android, or not?" Tyler Ochoa, a copyright professor at Santa Clara Law in Silicon Valley, told Reuters.
"The money is so large we can see why they are willing to spend a lot
of money fighting over it."
The Java programming language itself, used to connect and activate various applications and devices over the Internet, was
released to the open-source community back in 2006 by its creator, Sun Microsystems, and is free of charge but governed by the
GNU Public License. However, Oracle claims the application programming interfaces used to develop and connect Java software applications to other systems have been its own since Jan. 27, 2010--
the day Oracle acquired Sun in a $7.4 billion deal.
Oracle: Lots of Legal Business to Handle
Oracle's lawyers will be busy this year in court. The case is the first of four big tech trials involving Oracle scheduled for the next few months. Three are to take place in Northern California and one in Nevada.
The others include one scheduled for the end of May against Hewlett-Packard over the Itanium microprocessor, a
retrial against SAP AG in June over alleged copyright infringement, and another copyright case against smaller competitor Rimini Street expected later in the year.
Chris Preimesberger is Editor of Features and Analysis at eWEEK. Twitter: @editingwhiz
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Chris Preimesberger was named Editor-in-Chief of Features & Analysis at eWEEK in November 2011. Previously he served eWEEK as Senior Writer, covering a range of IT sectors that include data center systems, cloud computing, storage, virtualization, green IT, e-discovery and IT governance. His blog, Storage Station, is considered a go-to information source. Chris won a national Folio Award for magazine writing in November 2011 for a cover story on Salesforce.com and CEO-founder Marc Benioff, and he has served as a judge for the SIIA Codie Awards since 2005. In previous IT journalism, Chris was a founding editor of both IT Manager's Journal and DevX.com and was managing editor of Software Development magazine. His diverse resume also includes: sportswriter for the Los Angeles Daily News, covering NCAA and NBA basketball, television critic for the Palo Alto Times Tribune, and Sports Information Director at Stanford University. He has served as a correspondent for The Associated Press, covering Stanford and NCAA tournament basketball, since 1983. He has covered a number of major events, including the 1984 Democratic National Convention, a Presidential press conference at the White House in 1993, the Emmy Awards (three times), two Rose Bowls, the Fiesta Bowl, several NCAA men's and women's basketball tournaments, a Formula One Grand Prix auto race, a heavyweight boxing championship bout (Ali vs. Spinks, 1978), and the 1985 Super Bowl. A 1975 graduate of Pepperdine University in Malibu, Calif., Chris has won more than a dozen regional and national awards for his work. He and his wife, Rebecca, have four children and reside in Redwood City, Calif.Follow on Twitter: editingwhiz
