If you’ve been following the long running Oracle vs Google copyright infringement case, there is (yet) another new victor emerging from court last week.
This is the not the first time, and likely not the last time, that these two behemoths will face off in court about the validity of Oracle’s claims that Google infringed upon their Java programming language when reverse engineering some processes to work more easily with their Android operating system.
We pulled the quote below from AndroidHeadlines –
Oracle co-CEO Safra Catz took her moment on the stand and explained that Oracle did not buy Sun simply to sue Google for Java, but mostly to keep it away from IBM, who they were scared would… well, do exactly what Oracle did, actually.
In the meantime, open source wins the day, Google is declared the current (temporary) victor, and Ellison’s minions will be back in court ASAP filing the appeal and starting the next round.
If you have no idea what we’re talking about or what any of this means – in a nutshell, Google’s position is that a door is always called a door. You don’t have to rename the door every time you want to build one because someone else has already called it a door. Or a gate. Or a whosiwhatsit. It serves the same function, so it should have a universal, non-copywriteable name.
Oracle’s position (and let’s not forget these are the same guys that cheated and got caught in the America’s Cup two years ago!) is that if they buy a company who has built the door, then they own the copyright to the word door. And you can either call it a whosiwhatsit or they’ll sue you.