The ongoing Oracle and Google courtroom battle taking the pitch one after another as both the company trying their level best to defend themselves. The latest to add is Google’s Java mastermind Joshua Bloch speaks up and says that some of the code he contributed to Android was indeed “copied”. Oracle’s attorneys focused particularly on nine specific lines of code, constituting a method called rangeCheck — basically, a routine that checks to ensure if a given array of numbers are within a certain defined range. Bloch testified that he wrote the original rangeCheck code, present in a file called Arrays.java, back in 1997. Bloch worked at Sun for eight years before moving to Google in 2004; somehow show the connection strong.
What interesting here is that, the exact those same nine lines are also present in an Android file named Timsort.java, which Bloch testified he wrote in 2007. When asking about that did he copied the copyrighted Sun code directly for Timsort.java, he initially responded that “I don’t recall”. However, he states earlier that “the same order and same name is a strong indicator that it is likely that I did.”
When on Tuesday asked Google’s CEO Larry Page about Android’s important to Google as a whole. Page said: “I believe Android was very important for Google. I wouldn’t say it was critical.” Page stated that he wouldn’t be surprised if that was the case, but that he wasn’t sure he’d go that far when asked whether Google’s board of directors was told that Android was critical to Google. “We’d been frustrated getting our technology out to people,” said Page.
