Oracle’s ongoing dispute and legal issues with Google continue, with the revelation of Oracle’s expected demands for compensation from Google being leaked.
Oracle are said to be demanding up to a staggering $6.1 billion in the Java patent dispute according to Google attorneys, following claims that Google directly copied code used in the JVM for their Android platform which was owned by Sun Microsystems at the time – which Oracle subsequently bought. According to reports, even the low figure for compensation – still an astonishing $1.4 billion – is said to be tens of times the money that Sun ever made from licensing its Java technology.
There’s not much information available to the public regarding the Oracle / Google case as both parties are demanding confidential information from each other. The case is not going to court until towards the end of this year and there are undoubtedly going to be some fireworks when it comes down to it.
However, what is clear is Oracle’s habit of stepping on open source projects that were fostered by Sun. In the time since it acquired the company for nearly $7.5 billion, it has alienated the OpenOffice.org community before giving the project’s dead husk to Apache; caused licensing worries for MySQL; and more.
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