Google Not Participating in JavaOne - The UpStream

Google Not Participating in JavaOne

posted Sunday Aug 29, 2010 by Scott Ertz

Google Not Participating in JavaOne

Early this month, Oracle joined the ranks of every other technology company on the planet and filed suit against Google. Oracle has claimed that Google violated patents they acquired when they purchased Sun Microsystems, namely Java-related patents, with their Dalvik virtual machine on the Android platform.

This lawsuit has led Google to pull their participation in the JavaOne developers' event, now led by Oracle. Google has participated in every JavaOne event since 2004, but feels it is no longer appropriate for them to participate in an event about the future of Java and open source software run by a company that files lawsuits over open source licenses.

For more on the lawsuit and Google's thoughts on JavaOne, hit the break.

Google's manager of open source programs, Joshua Bloch, said in a blog post,

Like many of you, every year we look forward to the workshops, conferences and events related to open source software. In our view, these are among the best ways we can engage the community, by sharing our experiences and learning from yours. So we're sad to announce that we won't be able to present at JavaOne this year. We wish that we could, but Oracle's recent lawsuit against Google and open source has made it impossible for us to freely share our thoughts about the future of Java and open source generally.

While Google may not usually be the good guys, in this case they seem to be in the right. Android is not entirely open source, but the entire Dalvik virtual machine is as well as most of the rest of the OS. The entire project is published under the Apache 2 license and is built using the open source Java Standard Edition, which means that if this suit ever makes it to court, it will most likely never pass a laugh test because Google has done everything right to be considered open source and apply for fair use of their Java virtual machine.

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