Saturday 11 September 2010

Android vs Oracle contradictions

There has been a lot of talk in the tech world about Oracle's patent infringement claims against the Android operating system. Oracle have not disclosed the details of the claims, and are highly unlikely to do so before the case goes to court. While I respect the right of Oracle to protect it's intellectual property, it seems this non-disclosure is more aimed at scaring people away from Android, even though ultimately they will be seeking some form of licensing arrangement for whatever patents/copyrights have been infringed in Android.

The best thing Oracle can do at the moment is to disclose the basis of their claims, not only are they hurting Android but they are also hurting the open-source Java community in its entirety, and in doing so the value of arguably the biggest asset they acquired in their takeover of Sun (i.e. Java). One wonders how they can't see this, possibly they think Java is too big to fail now (sound familiar?).

The whole thing rings of the IBM vs SCO case of a few years ago. They made claims Linux infringed their patents, would not disclose any information about it and then when the case came to court, they didn't really have much to stand on. SCO eventually filed for chapter 11 bankruptcy protection and looks like it will go out of business. The lesson that could have been learnt is that these frivolous patent claims cost everyone money and to proceed you would want to be quite sure of wining, even though the lack of disclosure indicates they aren't really that sure.

It all adds a lot of weight to the argument that the patents system needs drastic reformation for use with software, which is re-used as a general development practice. Until this happens patents will be used as a tools for revenue generation and most likely result in mutually assured destruction for businesses looking to (mis)use them for revenue generation purposes.

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