Dalvik is a cleanroom VM. I'm not quite sure what you're saying with this?
The OpenJDK comes with a patent grant. Cleanroom VMs have no such grant and it's impossible to make one without infringing on the patents.
Anyway, Dalvik does not even claim to execute Java bytecode, but its own language. Does that not mean that it is in pretty much the same legal footing as, say, the Python bytecode interpreter?
And there exists plenty of prior art on the VM, all the way back to 1966 ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P-code_machine ), so I am not so easily convinced that the patent is going to survive the trial.
To my knowledge Harmony has never been given a patent grant. When they tried to obtain the blessing, Sun responded by releasing the OpenJDK, which they bound (with conditions) their patent grants to.
If something else happened that I am ignorant of, please tell me, but to my knowledge Harmony has zero patent protection.
As an aside, the reason Sun refused to grant Harmony a patent grant was that there was the open possibility that it could cannibalize J2ME (at the time Sun was fairly successful in that space, so they were deeply protective, whereas they were failing on the desktop)
Dalvik, otoh, makes no claim or effort to be spec compliant, and there's no reason to expect they should get the grant.
I'm not defending Oracle here, btw. I think the suit is ridiculous, but on the more general grounds that software patents are inherently a bad idea that stifle innovation. I just don't think it helps anything to distract from the core issue by spreading FUD about Apache's exposure.
The Sun patent license grant is completely incompatible with the Apache License. As is it is impossible to combine the two. Apache isn't just grandstanding -- the conditions made it impossible for the patent grant to apply.
There is no FUD about Harmony. Harmony has zero patent protection. Any other cleanroom implementation has zero protection, exactly as I said, until you essentially bow to Sun cum Oracle. My original statement is factually correct.
Harmony doesn't have a patent grant now, that's true. But the reason it doesn't is because it refuses to accept the current license terms. I don't think this is "grandstanding" - it's absolutely critical, and I completely side with Apache. But the simple reality is that Harmony is in a much more secure position than Dalvik, and Apache has a much more defensible position than Google. To claim otherwise is pure FUD.
Why does it matter? Because people should care about the Google suit independent of the idea that Apache might be next. When you try to sell that idea, you make it sound like this lawsuit isn't actually all that bad compared to what it could be, but that's wrong. This is the case that matters, not some hypothetical against Apache. Get pissed now.
The Sun spec-compliant patent grant is impossible to bind to an open source license, outside of the targeted grant they provided OpenJDK (with its own conditions). Feel free to parade your ignorance though insults, but it doesn't prove your (completely wrong) claims.
http://en.swpat.org/wiki/Java_and_patents
ASF would be loudly crusading if they themselves thought they were actually directly affected by this lawsuit and the patents.