Oracle Questions Google Engineer About Key Email

The Oracle versus Google software copyright court case in San Francisco rumbles on, with testimony shifting from the respective CEOs to a Google software engineer, over a crucial email he wrote.

Oracle attorney David Boies showed several Google emails to the jury during the day’s opening statements, describing them as “prime evidence” that Google took Oracle’s intellectual property without obtaining a proper license.

Java Clash

At the copyright and patent trial in federal court, which began 16 April, Oracle is charging Google with stealing parts of its Java software suite to help build its highly successful Android mobile device operating system. Oracle is seeking about $1 billion (£628m) in damages and a possible injunction against Google using the software.

While the Java programming language itself belongs to the open-source community and is free of charge to use, it still must be licensed for commercial deployments under the GNU Public License. The application programming interfaces of Java may be another matter, since APIs are made up of software, specifications and techniques.

Oracle claims in the lawsuit that the “specifications and implementations of the APIs are not a method of operation or system.” Google claims it used only software that is free to use and did not need a license for its development project.

On 19 April, Boies asked Google engineer Timothy Lindholm to take the stand and answer questions about an email written in 2010 that has become a critical piece of evidence in the case.

Lindholm is a former Sun Microsystems employee who began work at Google in 2005, five years before Oracle acquired Sun. In mid-2010, Lindholm wrote an email to Google Android project manager Andy Rubin, indicating that he had been asked to research technical alternatives to using Sun’s Java in the Android operating system.

Lindholm’s email, blown up for the judge and jury to see, read: “We’ve been over a bunch of these, and think they all suck. We conclude that we need to negotiate a license for Java under the terms we need.”

Licence Issue

In answer to Boies’ question, Lindholm said that he did indeed write the email, but he added that he was not necessarily talking about obtaining a licence from Sun. “It was not specifically a licence from anybody,” Lindholm said.

Sun – now Oracle – however, is the licence holder on all commercial Java deployments. Oracle utilises the GNU Public Licence for Java users, which does not require a fee of any kind but does require that certain open standards be maintained in the implementation.

The Java APIs (application programming interfaces), which consist of software, instructions and techniques used to create Java applications and implementations, are what are in question in the court case, which may well have lasting implications in the software industry.

Lindholm subsequently told a Google attorney, Christa Anderson, that he thought the software was free for use by anybody because it was property of the open source community.

Case Background

Oracle first filed suit in August 2010, claiming that Google illegally used seven Java APIs that Oracle owns to help build the Android operating system. Google contends that the APIs it uses cannot be copyrighted because doing so would be similar to copyrighting a technique used to perform a task. Legally, techniques are not considered intellectual property.

Google contends that Oracle was planning on getting into the smartphone business itself, would have been a competitor to Android and simply wants to horn in on the profits of the popular open-source mobile device system. Ellison testified 17 April that Oracle did at one time consider acquiring Research In Motion, maker of the BlackBerry smartphone, and Palm Computing.

Android, released in 2008 by Google to partners such as Samsung, HTC and other manufacturers for smartphones and tablet PCs, now runs more than 300 million mobile devices.

How well do you know your operating systems? Take our quiz.