According
to Oracle, Google’s free distribution of Android has greatly
damaged Oracle’s business. The database giant
reportedly told a US federal court that giving Android to handset
makers for free destroyed the revenue it could have made on licensing
Java.
Oracle's co-chief executive Safra Catz reportedly told a San
Francisco jury hearing the firm's suit against Google that this had
had “a very negative impact.” Catz claimed Samsung cut its Java
royalty payment from “about” $40m to $1m. She also claimed Oracle
had offered Jeff Bezos’ Amazon a 97.5 per cent discount to use Java
for its Paperwhite e-reader after Amazon switched from Java, which it
had used on Kindle, to Android for its Fire device.
According to Catz, Oracle tried, and abandoned, development of its
own phone project. She also reportedly told the jury she’d
confronted Google’s general counsel Kent Walker at 2012 bat mitzvah
over Android and Java licensing, and claimed Walker had told her:
“Google is a really special company and the old rules don’t apply
to us.”
Oracle is claiming $9bn over Google’s claimed copyright
infringement of Java in a re-trial after Larry Ellison’s firm saw
its initial case reach deadlock in 2012. Executive chairman of
Google’s parent company Alphabet Eric Schmidt told the trial this
week he believed Google was free to use Java as he’d unveiled the
language as Sun Microsystems chief technology officer in 1995. The
day before in her testimony, Catz denied Oracle had bought Java
creator and trademark owner Sun Microsystems in 2010 simply to own
Java and sue Google.
Oracle swooped after IBM demurred on picking up Sun for its
hardware server and storage business, to deliver the hardware part of
the full Oracle stack chief executive Larry Ellison had so long
wanted, and Java. Sun was a shell of a company, having spent a decade
failing to extricate itself from the dot-com crash of the 2000s and
reporting nothing but losses.
Oracle swooped after IBM demurred on picking up Sun for its
hardware server and storage business, to deliver the hardware part of
the full Oracle stack chief executive Larry Ellison had so long
wanted, and Java.
Sun was a shell of a company, having spent a decade failing to
extricate itself from the dot-com crash of the 2000s and reporting
nothing but losses.
Software was Sun’s only growth area: in 2009 – a year after
the first handset – licensing from Java at Sun grew 28 per cent to
$281m – it had grown one per cent the year before and 13 per cent
in 2007. And yet that was small change for Sun, which lived on
systems and server revenue of multiples of billions of dollars -
despite losses.
Oracle acquired Sun in 2010 and sued Google after negotiations
broke down. The jury was deadlocked in a trial in 2012. If the
current jury rules against Google on fair use, then it would consider
Oracle's request for $9 billion in damages.
Google has argued that Sun welcomed Google's use of Java, but
Oracle plotted to sue upon acquiring the company. However, an Oracle
attorney asked Catz about emails from 2009, in which former Sun CEO
Jonathan Schwartz described a dispute with Google over Java. "He
told us that they'd been talking with Google and had been trying to
get them to licence Java," said Catz, noting that Android was an
unauthorised version of Java because Google did not have a licence.
Oracle proceeded to acquire Sun, Catz said, because Java was too
strategically important to Oracle's products for it to be bought by a
competitor.
It was Sun’s continued control over the licensing and Java
trademark that led to Harmony, a clean implementation of Java at the
Apache Software Foundation. Harmony was fully supported by IBM, put
out at Sun's continued control of Java, and it happened to be an
implementation that used a JVM called Dalvik, whose libraries were
picked up initially by Google for Android.
Oracle chased ASF to try to prove a link between Dalvik and Java,
but it failed to produce the necessary smoking gun.
No comments:
Post a Comment