Former Sun CEO Says Google Didn't Violate Patents

Story first appeared on CNET.

The Former Sun CEO took the stand in San Francisco today as a witness for the defense, and disputed Oracle's claim that Java APIs were proprietary code from Sun.

Google's lawyer asked whether, during his tenure at Sun, Java APIs were considered proprietary or protected by Sun.

He responded by stating that the JAVA APIs are open APIs, and that they wanted to bring in more people and build the biggest tent and invite as many people as possible.

Oracle contends that Google's Android platform violated some of its patents and copyrights around Java and its APIs, which it acquired from Sun in a $7.4 billion deal at the beginning of 2010.

The former Sun CEO corroborated testimony by former Google CEO (now executive chairman), who said that during meetings following the launch of Android the Sun CEO didn't express any concerns or disapproval regarding Android, nor did he state that Google needed a license to use Java APIs in Android.

Regarding a partnership between Google and Android, the former CEO said that Sun wanted Google to pay a big license fee to call its phone a Java phone, and join Nokia, Motorola, Blackberry (RIM) and others in developing apps that run across all the platforms. At this point Nokia was dominant, and Apple's iPhone was not in the market, and Java licensing was a $100 million plus business for Sun. Sun would profit by enlarging the Java community and creating more of a barrier to competition with the likes of Microsoft at the time.

The partnership with Google did not work out, even though Sun was willing to pay to have Google onboard with its Java platform. Basically, Sun did not want to cede control of managing the key components in the Java stack, and Google wanted more control over its destiny.

'We decided to grit our teeth'

The former Sun CEO stated that Sun didn't like what Google was doing with Android, but complaining about it wasn't going to stop it.

Google could have chosen to work with Microsoft, a major competitor for Sun, or an open-source Java implementation.  Without the Java community, Google would have to reinvent a whole community. Even though Android handsets bypassed the Sun brand and licensing restrictions, this was overlooked in the interest of furthering Sun as part of the value chain. Developers could use Sun's Java developer tools NetBeans to write applications. Sun developed JavaFX, which could run on top of the Android stack.

In cross-examination, Oracle's lawyer asked the former Sun CEO about a document referencing Sun's approach for granting intellectual property rights for independent implementations of Java, such as Android and Apache. It was stated that as long as Google, Apache or others creating independent implementations didn't call their product Java, Sun had no problem. 


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Acer To Load Android - Not Windows
Story from Daily Finance

Taiwan's Acer has been on a tear recently. The company gobbled up Gateway quite a while back and has been a top maker of red-hot netbook PCs so far this year. The PC maker has now said that it will be featuring Google, Inc.'s (NASDAQ: GOOG) 's Android operating system on future netbooks as an alternative to what it ships on most of its netbooks -- Microsoft Corp.'s (NASDAQ: MSFT) aging Windows XP operating system.

The difference here is that while Microsoft XP still may cost a little to Acer and all other PC makers circulating netbooks on the market, Android is a freely-available, open-source product. Acer won't pay a dime for each copy of Android in installs on its netbooks, which -- interestingly enough -- may be the first real head-to-head equitable competition between Google and Microsoft.

Even though the two internet behemoths already compete head-to-head in the mobile space, this is the first time they'll duel each other in the actual PC space with operating systems.

Acer no doubt will be able to offer future netbooks for lower prices with Android installed, and it will be interesting to see if consumers really prefer Windows XP for their Acer netbook or if the operating system really doesn't matter that much.

If email, web, word processing, spreadsheets and the usual suspects are offered through Android, does one really need Windows on an Acer netbook? Possibly -- Windows ships on the lion's share of netbooks from all manufacturers right now. Linux-based netbooks have been slow to catch on as consumers apparently feel more at home with Windows than with anything else. But still, would a "Powered by Google" moniker make more consumers take the plunge and move away from Windows XP? This will be an interesting battle to watch.