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The information on Groklaw is not intended to constitute legal advice. While Mark is a lawyer and he has asked other lawyers and law students to contribute articles, all of these articles are offered to help educate, not to provide specific legal advice. They are not your lawyers.

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Please stop spreading this misinformation | 438 comments | Create New Account
Comments belong to whoever posts them. Please notify us of inappropriate comments.
But notice what he isn't commenting on...
Authored by: greed on Thursday, April 26 2012 @ 07:21 PM EDT
Please point to the statute which prohibits "fragmentation" of a
software ecosystem.

No-one sued over UNIX fragmenting.

No-one sued over K&R C fragmenting.

No-one sued over ARM C++ fragmenting.

No-one sued over HTML fragmenting.

Why is Java special? Why should they get this magic "fragmentation"
protection against implementations that don't even use their trademark?

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

  • java trademark - Authored by: Anonymous on Thursday, April 26 2012 @ 09:27 PM EDT
Please stop spreading this misinformation
Authored by: jbb on Thursday, April 26 2012 @ 07:46 PM EDT
If Google had wanted to, they could have built Android on top of the open-source OpenJDK. But they didn't, because they didn't like the OSS GPL license.
That is not true. The Android project was already well under way before OpenJDK was started. Someone (Rubin, I think) testified that switching from Harmony to OpenJDK would have cost them more time.

In addition, even if OpenJDK were available when Android was started, Google could not have used it without violating Sun's intellectual property rights. If they used the TCK in order to get a license for Sun's patents then they would be in violation of the GPL. If they skipped the TCK then they would have been violating Sun's patents.

We also have testimony that shows the negotiations for a deal between Sun and Google to work on Android together broke down because Sun steadfastly refused to give Google a license for an open-source version of Java. Sun claimed (or at least implied) they have patents that are practiced in OpenJDK. Sun refused to license those patents to Google to use with OpenJDK. So even if OpenJDK had been available it was still not a viable option.

---
Our job is to remind ourselves that there are more contexts than the one we’re in now — the one that we think is reality.
-- Alan Kay

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

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