Quote:
Originally Posted by fjtorres
Right down to the comments.
That is what guaranteed the loss.
Again: It is legal to duplicate the functunality of somebody else's software...as long as you do it *independently*. Once it became clear the Google guys had used the Java code the case was lost.
Google tried to muddy the waters by fighting over the APIs but it all came down to process, not product. It's not what they produced, but how. They cut lots of corners in creating Android and it all came back to bite them. And their OEMs.
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Precisely. A "clean-room" reimplementation of the Java language and library not based on Oracle's source code would have been entirely legal. Google gambled on ripping off Oracle's source and lost.