This article is more than 1 year old

Google ditches JavaOne over Oracle's Android suit

Sharing thoughts now 'impossible'

Google has said that due to Oracle's lawsuit against the company over the use of Java in Android, it will not be attending the annual JavaOne developer conference this fall. Following Larry Ellison's acquisition of Sun Microsystems, JavaOne is now run by Oracle.

Google says that it has attended JavaOne every year since 2004.

"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," Google open source programs office man Joshua Bloch said Friday in a blog post.

"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."

Notice that Bloch characterizes Oracle's suit as an attack "against open source" — not just Google — echoing an earlier statement from the company. Some parts of Android are proprietary, but it is mostly open source, including its Dalvik virtual machine.

Earlier this month, Oracle filed a complaint in a Northern California federal court accusing Google of deliberately infringing various Java-related patents and copyrights that Oracle acquired with its purchase of Sun Microsystems. The suit waves seven patents, claiming infringement by Android, including Dalvik and the Android software development kit.

Dalvik — like the rest of Android's open source code — is published under an Apache 2 license, and it's built on a subset of the Apache Software Foundation's Project Harmony, an open source version of Java Standard Edition (Java SE). ®

More about

TIP US OFF

Send us news


Other stories you might like