Oracle and Google hit the courtroom two days back and both the company planning the fullest in order to defend itself. The latest to add, the search giant has issued the slideshow presentation which is accompanied with Google’s opening statement. According to the slideshow, Google considering Java as a language that is openly acknowledged to be free, upon which Google built Android using legitimate means.
Google’s presentation begins by using Ellison’s own words to bolster its argument that Java is free, quoting a deposition from 2011 during which the Oracle CEO agreed with the statement that “nobody owns the Java programming language,” and that it is possible for anybody to use Java without paying a royalty fee.
Google takes the stance that without APIs Java isn’t functional and that if the language itself is considered free, it’s a logical assumption to make that said APIs should be as well. The company again quotes of the chief architect of the Java Platform Group at Oracle, Mark Reinhold: “Well, if there were no APIs, we would only have a language. You would be able to write basic computations that never did any IO, had any communication with the outside world or the underlying platform.”
Google then referencing a 2006 email from Google’s then-CEO Eric Schmidt to Sun’s Scott McNealy, where Schmidt suggests the two companies partner around Google’s Open Handset Platform, and then by detailing a list of Android’s open-source bona fides. The core of the dispute, however, falls back to those same 37 APIs. This is the starting there are surely more to come from both ways.
