

Google Loses Effort to Seal Records in Android Patent Lawsuit With Oracle - d0ne
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-08-02/google-loses-effort-to-seal-records-in-android-patent-lawsuit-with-oracle.html
I find it good practice to hand write, what at the time I deem very important, emails I'm not 100% certain I should send. Sleep on it and then read it the next day. If I still want to send it then I type it up and press Send.
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d0ne
I find it good practice to hand write, what at the time I deem very important,
emails I'm not 100% certain I should send. Sleep on it and then read it the
next day. If I still want to send it then I type it up and press Send.

~~~
protomyth
Do watch out that your handwritten notes can be used as evidence if known
about. A co-worker saying you had notes and you not being able to produce them
might get a little sticky depending on the industry.

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raldi
If I write a paper letter to my lawyer but don't finish and drop it in the
mail, is it protected by attorney-client privilege?

~~~
sigzero
<http://www.lawcollective.org/article.php?id=74>

Best I could come up with.

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bilbo0s
Can someone better informed explain this Google-Oracale Java tiff to me. If
Google is using Java, and they have gobs of money in the bank, why not just
license it and be done with it? Don't they have more important patent fights
to worry about? (I'm thinking about Apple). I just don't understand how all of
this works I guess.

They have very competent corporate attorneys, so I assume they are making the
right decisions. But I mean really, if there are emails like this laying
around, just pay the fee and make this whole thing go away. What's the hold
up?

~~~
rryan
Google are using Java (a derivative of the Apache Harmony implementation of
Java) but compiling it to a different bytecode that runs on the Dalvik virtual
machine.

Dalvik is very different from the JVM in a variety of fundamental ways. The
Wikipedia article has plenty of info on this.

Oracle's patents are on many of the inner workings of the JVM. Java itself
(the language) does not have many unique aspects which were patentable because
Java is largely derivative from languages that came before it.

So basically (as I understand it), Android uses Java in a very superficial
way, and the patent issues at hand are whether Dalvik infringes on Oracle
patents on VM techniques.

~~~
0xABADC0DA
Dalvik is also very similar to the JVM in a number of ways. For instance the
instruction set maps almost 1:1 to bytecodes:

    
    
      OP_MONITOR_ENTER vs monitorenter
      OP_INVOKE_STATIC vs invokestatic  
      OP_THROW vs athrow  
      OP_CHECK_CAST vs checkcast  
      OP_ARRAY_LENGTH vs arraylength  
      OP_NEW_ARRAY vs anewarray  
      ...
    

If the question is "Dalvik was designed to run code written in what language?"
the answer is "Java" without any doubt. This might be important to some legal
question, whether Google created it with the specific intention to not pay
license fees or something, or whether they broke a license for J2SE (they use
Java a lot) that prohibits them from creating incompatible versions of Java.

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monochromatic
Not much meat in this article. It doesn't say _anything_ about what the email
was, just that Google had to disclose it.

But I guess anything with the word "patent" in the title will get some traffic
around here.

~~~
metachris
Agreed that the article is a bit thin, but it does state what was in the
email: _the passage in question was from an internal e-mail in 2010 to Google
executive Andy Rubin saying “the technical alternatives to using Java for
Android ‘all suck’ and stating, ‘we conclude that we need to negotiate a
license for Java under the terms we need.’”_

~~~
monochromatic
I think maybe the article has been updated, or else I'm just blind. Cause I
sure didn't see that when I first read the thing. Thanks for pointing it out.

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chocopuff
there's more detail here
[http://www.pcworld.com/businesscenter/article/236924/google_...](http://www.pcworld.com/businesscenter/article/236924/google_wants_email_in_android_suit_redacted.html)

"What we've actually been asked to do by Larry and Sergey is to investigate
what technology alternatives exist to Java for Android and Chrome," Google
engineer Tim Lindholm wrote in the Aug. 2010 e-mail, referring to Google
founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin. "We've been over a hundred of these and
think they all suck. We conclude that we need to negotiate a license for
Java."

The e-mail's contents were revealed last week during a hearing on whether the
findings of Oracle's damages expert should be set aside.

"You are going to be on the losing end of this document" if its contents are
revealed to a jury, Judge William Alsup told Google's attorney during the
hearing.

"That's a pretty good document for you," Alsup said earlier to Oracle's
lawyer. "That ought to be big for you at trial."

Google, however, doesn't want such a potential smoking gun to make it that
far.

~~~
msg
The context is very important (and not appearing in the email, right). The HTC
Dream (G1) came out in late 2008. It was running Dalvik then.

I think what is more likely is this: Tim Lindholm was asked to figure out how
to run standard Java programs on Chromebooks and Android tablets without
Dalvik or recompilation. They wanted to gain some backwards compatibility but
concluded it was impossible without a licensed JVM. Android and Chrome still
lack the feature.

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shareme
read the judge fine print..he states that since it is not communication to be
redacted and cannot be used in trial than it cannot be not made public..quite
a bit different than Mr Mueller's spin..

