The legal battle between Google and Oracle continues and the latter continues to maintain that Java, although a free language, is still very valuable and that Google failed to pay the price of using it. Now, an Oracle executive has re-iterated during court proceedings that the value of Java APIs is what made Sun a very valuable acquisition for Oracle.
The only chance that Oracle has, in winning this case, is to prove to the court that Java APIs are intellectual property and are covered by intellectual property laws. What Oracle originally alleges was repeated by Reinhold, who is the chief architect of Java platform group at Oracle. Reinhold stated that Google engineers copied line by line code from Java APIs and thus, infringed upon intellectual property of Oracle.
According to Reinhold, there are 37 Java APIs that have been used by Google in its Android platform without any formal license from Oracle. Earlier, the chief corporate architect at Oracle, Edward Screven had also asserted the value and important of Java APIs to Oracle, ‘Oracle is in the hardware and software businesses now. In software, people pay us for licenses to use our software. It’s important to us that we actually enforce intellectual property rights around our software. Otherwise, people would take our software without paying us, undermining our business model.’
Screven also mentioned in the court that Oracle acquired Sun solely for the reason that with this acquisition, Java also came along and that was totally worth it. According to him, he told Oracle’s CEO ‘we should buy Sun for no other reason than Java.’ And after the acquisition, he knew Java was easily worth the purchase price.’
[ttjad]
