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Would it be legal for Google to indulge in some payback? | 360 comments | Create New Account
Comments belong to whoever posts them. Please notify us of inappropriate comments.
Would it be legal for Google to indulge in some payback?
Authored by: Anonymous on Friday, June 01 2012 @ 03:06 PM EDT
Why stop there. Start moving android to other platforms
that Oracle is trying to sell Java licenses.

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

How would it be illegal?
Authored by: Anonymous on Friday, June 01 2012 @ 03:09 PM EDT

One could philosophically argue that "by having the person who assaulted you charged with assault you are acting on revenge", there's absolutely nothing wrong with exercising a clear Legal right to deal with something someone did which was clearly wrong.

So if Google decided to get into the database game - perhaps to improve PostgreSQL for their own back-end needs... I certainly wouldn't view that as wrong even if Oracle knew for certain Google only made that move due to Oracle's choice to sue.

There's is absolutely nothing Illegal in competing Legally :)

As a side note: Microsoft tends to have trouble with the differences between legal and illegal competion, often confusing the two.

RAS

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

By heavily investing in, and promoting postGres
Authored by: Anonymous on Friday, June 01 2012 @ 03:52 PM EDT
Surely a mere few hundred million $ or so investment ought
to be enough to add features to make postGres look more
attractive to the
enterprise.

Teamed up with an application server based on Harmony, and
given high quality tools to ease import of data stored in
Oracle systems...

They could even turn it into a business by providing managed
cloud hosting for it (as an extension to appEngine), and
providing free limited test
accounts for businesses to try out their enterprise software
on the platform before committing to it and potentially
hosting their own. Tight integration with BigTable for
highly scalable key/value data could be a bonus too.

That would be money well spent IMO, it would advance the use
of free software, and at the same time make Oracle feel the
pressure.

(Note, I have no idea how much it would cost to do this, but
if I were Google, I'd be investigating options...)

Alternatively if they were feeling really twisted, and
wanted to rub Oracle's nose in it further, they could fork
GPLed MySQL and extend it to be competitive with Oracle's
commercial offerings at the enterprise level. If Oracle were
to use the GPLed code in the offical MySQL release, they
would be shooting themselves in the foot even more.

Oh look, they could even release it under the Apache license
http://www.mysql.com/about/legal/licensing/foss-exception/

:)

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

Would it be legal for Google to indulge in some payback?
Authored by: Gringo_ on Saturday, June 02 2012 @ 12:35 AM EDT

Google has some tremendous skill in working with large data sets. They don't talk about it too much, but it's their pride and joy. How do you suppose they "index all the world's information"? That is a heck of a lot of data - I would say googlebytes of data. For sure they could license their home- grown database software and it would blow away anything Oracle or even IBM has.

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

Oracle likely has better patents here
Authored by: Anonymous on Saturday, June 02 2012 @ 05:49 PM EDT
Google would be best served by leaving Oracle alone to do whatever it does.
Revenge may be sweet, but it distracts from your day job. Who knows whether any
of Google's internal code could be fodder for another Oracle patent lawsuit, and
Oracle might have done a better job of patenting things than Sun. As long a
Google's code stays proprietary, it's pretty hard for Oracle to find
infringement.

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

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