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Originally Posted by darryl
The Oracle case is indeed "a bit more" than the SCO one. An unfortunate parallel with SCO is the uncertainty and the threat to third parties, in SCO's case end users, in this case app developers. And, of course, the possibility of selling licences as a form of insurance until the matter is finally decided. Unfortunately whilst SCO's case seems to have had little merit, the same cannot be said of Oracle's. I expect SCOTUS will hear the matter, but there are of course no guarantees. Where I thought the ZDNet article was going overboard is its talk of an imminent mass exodus from Android, particularly one involving a boom in IOS and a resurgence of Windows Phone. It's not that it is impossible, but I am not expecting it to happen, conservatism and potential risk notwithstanding. There simply does not seem to be an acceptable alternative to reach all of those Android users, though there may be a lot of money to be made by anyone who can quickly provide such an alternative. I haven't followed the situation too closely but there were a number of alternatives under development, some of which could actually run Android software, though I would be very surprised if they were able to manage this without the use of Android API's.
There will certainly be a lot of nervous developers around, especially the larger ones, who will no doubt be seeking advice as to their exposure. I'm no expert in US law nor am I am aware of Google's full Android licensing terms. I'm simply not sure what exposure developers may have over and above Google's exposure. The damages situation alone is fascinating. If only Sun had held on!
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My understanding is that Sun actually licensed Java as open source via the GNU General Public License. Oracle put out a new licensing agreement in 2010 which gave people and corporations a free license for development, testing and internal use, but production use is only free for general purpose computing. Frankly, java would have never taken off like it did with Oracle's license in place.
Oracle is well known for pushing the envelope with regards to licensing claims. Back in the mid 90's, Oracle claimed that the company that I worked for (large fortune 500 company) rather than pay a license for each server, should pay a license for every customer who connected to that server to access a program that used the Oracle database. They were not successful in pressing their claim.
My guess is that if this Oracle case is ultimately successful, then you will see big companies start to eliminate java. I know that a lot of companies are starting to move away from Oracle to go with some of the Open Source database products.