Well, this story will likely be the tech talk of the day. Oracle, which purchased Sun Microsystems and now owns the Java programming language, had sued Google for IP infringement. I haven’t found any more detailed analysis at this point, but it’ll be interesting, to say the least. The only thing at stake is the fate of Android OS, that’s all.
I recall reading (ahh, here it is) an article on how Google had cleverly avoided violating (at the time) Sun’s licensing. The gist, if I understand it correctly, is the virtual machine used in Android does not interpret normal Java bytecode, but an entirely different byte code. So they are just using the Java syntax, but not claiming it to be a Java platform and, in fact, it’s not because of the Dalvik VM. Thus, they’ve side stepped the licensing.
I don’t know enough about the patents surrounding Java to know if the language itself is considered IP. Further, I believe that Java has been open sourced- although I don’t know if Oracle’s purchase of Sun change that. Again, no idea how that fits (or if it does at all) into the equation.
I’ll have to keep an eye out for some analysis.