Google, Sun Headed for Showdown Over Android 124
narramissic writes "There may be trouble brewing between Google and Sun. Google has written its own virtual machine for Android, 'most likely as a way to get around licensing issues with Sun.' If Google used any of Sun's intellectual property to build Dalvik, Sun could sue Google for patent infringement. But here's where it gets interesting - Sun is a vocal advocate for open source and it would 'hardly appease the open source community to sue Google over an open source software stack.'"
To put it bluntly. (Score:5, Insightful)
In other words a none story.
Re:How about an Android for this Web ? (Score:3, Insightful)
Ahhhh, Slashdot (Score:5, Insightful)
Summary: There MAY be trouble brewing between Google and Sun...
TFA: Google COULD get in trouble with Sun, according to some analyst (but both parties declined to comment)
Reality: Move along, nothing to see here...
it's a real issue (Score:3, Insightful)
Releasing software under the GPL wouldn't give Google patent rights, since Google is not basing their software on Sun's.
and that other groups have produced versions of Java with out getting sued
Quite to the contrary: all conforming Java implementations that have ever been produced are produced under license from Sun, and Sun has used legal threats to ensure that.
There are a bunch of non-conforming implementations where Sun has chosen not to press the issue yet, but that doesn't tell you that Sun doesn't have the patents or doesn't enforce them. And, if you look at USPTO, you'll see that Sun has dozens of Java-related patents, some of them on fundamental aspects of the platform like bytecode verification.
OTOH, I suspect Google was careful about this, and this is one of the reasons Google didn't use a standard JVM. In the end, all Android shares with Sun Java is a fairly generic programming language and some fairly generic core APIs.
Re:To put it bluntly. (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:To put it bluntly. (Score:5, Insightful)
Unresponsive is slow. From a user's (and my) POV, I don't care if code executes in 10ms or 299ms if the GUI refreshes every 300ms. Why, because I use a program to do things, not to marvel at the effiency of the algorithim (unless I'm examining the code).
Additionally, a lack of progress bars leads to killing processes and restarting them, making them slower in reality.