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| Authored by: mschmitz on Friday, April 20 2012 @ 11:54 PM EDT |
Google sure never have claimed Android is Java - I shudder at the mere thought
of having an operating system kernel written in a language like Java :-) Reminds
me of the 'Linus, why can't we use C++ for the Linux kernel' days.
Dalvik is a small portion of Android - a clever portion but only a small part in
the whole. Its only purpose is to permit third party applications to be written
in a language most modern-days app and GUI developers are familiar with. But it
most definitely is not a classic Java VM - Google made sure of that, for good
technical reasons (to do with their security model IIRC).
Not calling it Java yet being capable of executing Java bytecode (assuming the
programmer restricted themselves to the right subset of the Java API, plus some
of the Android API) was designed to keep Google's activities just outside Sun's
legal reach, of that I have no doubt.
The only way Oracle now have to extract licensing revenue from Google's use of
most-definitely-not-quite-Java is extending the reach of their copyrights in
Java to include the language and API design. No one in the industry is buying
their argument, but for some reason they hope the court will.
The side effects of leaving all sorts of language and API designs open to legal
challenges by such precedent will mightily please their puppet master, I'm
sure.
-- mschmitz
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