Google vows to fight Oracle lawsuit as Java creator speaks out

My first reaction was thinking, "I thought Sun released Java under the GPL!" Then, I see they released a "majority" of it. I'm guessing Google was dinking around with the non-Free parts, then. I'm really curious to see what bits the claim comes from.

Not really. It's a matter of circumvention, patent grants, and license requirements. Take a look at these, in order:

http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20100813112425821

http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20100815110101756

Patents aren't like copyright. Circumvension with a patented thing means doing things a completely different way, pretty much...

Circumvention of a Patent means doing something different than what is claimed in the Patent. Meaning, if a patent specifies that something requires 'X', and you use 'Y', chances are good that you're outside the patent (watch out for "ideal embodiment" though).

Whereas, with "non-literal elements" covered by copyright, if someone uses XYZ and you use XyZ, there's still a good chance that you've still infringed on the copyright, especially if y produces the same results as Y.

Darren:

Is "ideal embodiment" a term of art? How does it compare/contrast with the "reference implementation" in a patent application?

dupe deleted by me.

"ideal embodiment" is the term that a patent attorney had me use when writing up a patent on a particular approach to speech recognition.

It allows a certain amount of "wiggle room" so that a competitor can't make a minor cosmetic change to circumvent a patent.

See this patent for another example: http://www.docstoc.com/docs/50367838/Hair-Curler---Patent-58...

OK, got a pretty good explanation on this from http://www.betaversion.org/~stefano/linotype/news/110/

Since Google is not using Java ME to derive Dalvik (as much as I understand it), Oracle may have some trouble with this one. Going to be an interesting ride.

Quoting:"I thought Sun released Java under the GPL!" Then, I see they released a "majority" of it.

Yes, but that was several years ago an from what I know the OpenJDK project provides a complete JDK. At least I never tripped over missing stuff and never heard anyone complaining... so if there's anything missing, it's nothing useful ;)