[/img]
Florian Mueller has been killing it these past few months with his
analysis of various tech patent suits on his FOSSpatents blog, and
today he's unearthed a pretty major bombshell: at least 43 Android
source files that appear to have been directly copied from Java.
That's a big deal, seeing as Oracle is currently suing Google for
patent and copyright infringement in Android -- which isn't a hard
case to prove when you've got 37 Android source files marked
"PROPRIETARY / CONFIDENTIAL" and "DO NOT DISTRIBUTE" by Oracle / Sun
and at least six more files in Froyo and Gingerbread that appear to
have been decompiled from Java 2 Standard Edition and redistributed
under the Apache open source license without permission. In simple
terms? Google copied Oracle's Java code, pasted in a new license, and
shipped it.
Now, we've long thought Google's odd response to Oracle's lawsuit
seemingly acknowledged some infringement, so we doubt this is a
surprise in Mountain View, but we're guessing handset vendors aren't
going to be so thrilled -- especially since using Android has already
caused companies like HTC and Motorola to be hit with major patent
lawsuits of their own. We'll see what happens, but in the meantime you
should definitely hit up Florian's site for the full dirt -- it's some
47 pages worth of material, and it's dense, but if you're into this
sort of thing it's incredibly interesting.
Update: It appears things aren't this simple, but they're still not
great. Check here for the latest.
No comments:
Post a Comment