News for hackers. Stuff that matters.
Re:Oracle sues Google over use of Java in Android by tptacek on Thursday August 12, 2010 @08:56PM (#1599666)
Of course you can. There'd be no such thing as an enforceable software patent if any company could just sponsor an open source project to implement each part of its product that infringed a patent. Presumably --- hopefully 'grellas will clear this up --- Oracle can measure damages incurred by Google supplanting Sun/Oracle Java with their own Java in terms of percentage points of global smartphone revenue.

Here's some more context:

http://blogs.gartner.com/brian_prentice/2009/08/06/google-op...

Re:Oracle sues Google over use of Java in Android by tzs on Thursday August 12, 2010 @09:15PM (#1599714)
I think you slightly misinterpreted Seldo's point. I think what he's getting at is that Java was made open source by Sun. At the very least I'd say that raises some kind of estoppel defense against any alleged infringement of Sun patents.

Patent owners can't just go around encouraging people to infringe, and then come back later and sue.

Re:Oracle sues Google over use of Java in Android by patrickaljord on Thursday August 12, 2010 @09:16PM (#1599716)
Sun licensed Java under the GPL which gives access to all of the patents on Java. But Google uses its own Java, not Sun's GPL licensed one, maybe they should have gone with the GPL instead...
Re:Oracle sues Google over use of Java in Android by chmike on Friday August 13, 2010 @01:35AM (#1600158)
Why didn't they do it ? Is it because of lack of ARM support ?
Re:Oracle sues Google over use of Java in Android by Andys on Friday August 13, 2010 @09:10AM (#1600794)
It was too bloated, among other things
Re:Oracle sues Google over use of Java in Android by sorbus on Thursday August 12, 2010 @09:15PM (#1599715)
So if I, as a company, release something as open source (licensing the patents[1] with no royalty to anyone who's interested, as long as they follow the rules in the license), then I, as the same company, can turn around and sue anyone who uses it for infringing those same patents?

[1] I assume that when software covered by patents is released as open source, the patents are also implicitly granted as part of the license, because if they weren't no one would be able to use it for anything because they would be infringing on the patents.

The only situation this can possible make sense in is if Google has somehow violated the license, thereby revoking their permission to use the relevant patents and exposing them to litigation.

Re:Oracle sues Google over use of Java in Android by wmf on Thursday August 12, 2010 @10:18PM (#1599843)
You can probably sue somebody who uses different software that infringes your patents, which is what this lawsuit is about.
Re:Oracle sues Google over use of Java in Android by Timothee on Thursday August 12, 2010 @10:23PM (#1599855)
As others have said, it sounds like you misinterpreted the comment. The open-source software Seldo is referring to seems to be Java, not Android.