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• the choice of the 37 accused packages was made by Oracle - Authored by: webster on Monday, May 21 2012 @ 08:18 PM EDT
  • the choice of the 37 accused packages was made by Oracle - Authored by: Chromatix on Monday, May 21 2012 @ 08:52 PM EDT
  • the choice of the 37 accused packages was made by Oracle - Authored by: hardmath on Tuesday, May 22 2012 @ 07:35 AM EDT
• Judge Alsup asking about the wrong packages - Authored by: BJ on Tuesday, May 22 2012 @ 01:26 PM EDT
  • Community effort, critical mass - Authored by: hardmath on Tuesday, May 22 2012 @ 01:43 PM EDT

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Sun's Position:

• Throughout Sun's history, we have stood for open systems, open standards and we have been fighting hard for interoperability in our sector.

• Sun believes in innovation and invests billions of Euro each year in software development. We believe in protecting these investments.

• However, Sun believes that this protection should be balanced to allow for the creation of products which can interoperate with the protected products to safeguard competition in the sector and to provide greater choice and lowers costs for consumers.

• Interoperability is of crucial importance to preserve choice for European consumers between competing offerings, and to preserve the equality of opportunity that the European IT sector needs to flourish.

• Regardless of whether CII patents are desirable to foster innovation in Europe, if such patents could be used to prevent software vendors from developing new programmes which can communicate with other programmes used by the customers, users may find themselves locked into buying programmes from only one vendor. This would result in increased cost and reduced choice for consumers while also hindering the growth of the overall EU market for computer implemented inventions.

• To avoid stifling innovation and reducing users' freedom of choice, Sun believe that an interoperability exception is needed in the draft CII Directive.

• Article 6 proposed by the European Commission, and incorporated into the Council's Common Position, is needed to stop patents on software from preventing developers from engaging in the processes of reverse engineering permitted under the 1991 EC Software Copyright Directive for the purpose of achieving interoperability. However, although Article 6 allows for the development of products through reverse engineering, it does not allow for the manufacture, sale and use of such products without a license from the right holder. This effectively leaves existing dominant rights holders with a de facto veto over new and competing products.

• More generally, even for products which are not produced through reverse engineering, an Article 6a is needed because without it software patent holders could invoke their patent rights to prevent the production and sale of software which will interoperate with the patented and other software.

• Sun therefore proposes a new Article 6a which addresses this problem by providing a narrow exception permitting the use of patented technology to the extent "indispensable" for the development and sale of products which interoperate with the products protected by the patented technology or with other products.

• Sun believes this is a limited, well-defined and clear exception to the exclusive rights of patent owners which strike a proper balance between the legitimate interests of patent rights owners and third parties, including both third-party software developers and end-users.

(My emphasis)

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• Interoperability of CODE/LANGUAGE and not programs. - Authored by: Anonymous on Tuesday, May 22 2012 @ 08:19 AM EDT

Google has said time and again that they had to implement the 37 packages in order that prior code written to utilize those packages can still do so.

Although Google has said that many times, the Judge can't just take their word for it. He's asking for proof. What prior code used it, with specifics. What subsequent code used it, with specifics.

This is where the Android community could help out, and come forward with a number of specific examples that demonstrate interoperability.

Here are some examples of open source (LGPLv2, BSD, Apache, et. al.) Android projects that use Java for interoperability:

• AndEngine
• cocos2d-android
• SDL This is the purest case of a library written in C, that uses Java bindings for interoperability between the C code and the Java language.
• rokon
• libgdx This is another pure case of an Android library using Java for interoperability. The library itself is Android/Java and allows the developer to do all testing and development purely in Java, and when complete create an Android or Java final version. It's must faster than testing on the Android emulator.

There are many, many more examples out there in both the opensource and commercial world.

--nyarlathotep

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• Using the 37 Java packages purely for interoperability. Specific Examples. - Authored by: Anonymous on Wednesday, May 23 2012 @ 04:59 AM EDT