The legal case between Google and Oracle has been going forward pretty swiftly. Initially, a number of personnel from both companies came to the stand to record their testimonies. And now, Android chief Andy Rubin came forward to record his testimony in the copyright portion of the trial. Rubin was of the opinion that his team at Google never believed they need a Java license from Sun.
Rubin’s chief focus, during his testimony, was on the fact that Android was an open-source platform and that it was being offered to a number of companies without making them pay any money. So it was essentially a free product.
Moreover, Rubin also elaborated on the time and efforts of the team that worked on shaping up Android. According to him, there are 15 million lines of code in Android right now and initially, it took three whole years for the team to release just the first version of Android back in 2008.
Interestingly, when Rubin was asked about the language used by Android app developers, he did say that such developers will have to include Java in their code. This is pretty much required so that Android apps could furnish legacy support for third-party applications such as games from notable developer companies.
According to Rubin, ‘”The whole purpose of that project was to implement a clean-room version of the Java APIs. The Apache Software Foundation also has their own version of an open-source license. It’s a small legal document that basically describes your rights as a customer of this open-source project.’
There is at least one case in point where an organization makes use of Apache Harmony for commercial purposes without acquiring a license from Sun. It was the Apache Software Foundation, Rubin stated. Oracle, however, countered this by saying that the said organization worked for non-profit purposes to which Rubin didn’t really agree.
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