Continuing to listen to Chris’s rant, I have more comments:
1. He definitely did buy the Oracle narrative, hook line and sinker, to the point that he says “I wish Oracle would win”, and damn the implications to free reimplantations. This issue is not about dual licensing – is just what Oracle would like you to think.
2. What does the GPL gave to do with anything? The license in question is the non-software license of the Java spec. The only thing that is GPL in the whole damn thing is the OpenJDK distribution, which didn’t exist when Google did what it was accused of doing, and that Google switched to last year (under full compliance).
3. Google should have taken a license to get security updates for zero day vulnerabilities. Seriously ?!? What part of “reimplantation” did you bit understand? Different code, different vulnerabilities. The rest of that argument details into fantasyland about some Java CVE that supposedly needed a patch in Android.
4. Google destroyed net neutrality by working with Verizon? Can you possibly be more disconnected from reality? Google kick-started the whole net neutrality thing by competing against Verizon on the network block allocation thereby forcing the FCC to define wiress networks as open networks: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_2008_wireless_spectrum_auction#Google_involvement
5. The thing with the Google engineers emails that is being repeated over and over is blown way out of proportions. As a software engineer, I’ve done IP compliance for several companies (some of which easily as large as Google) and I learned 2 things: (a) engineers either worry too much about licensing or don’t care at all, they rarely understand the concepts and when a license is actually needed, especially when we go into those murky “free” and “open” waters; and (b) that executives often understand even less and always prefer to over-license. The fact that some people, even top executives, in the company discussed licensing and thought that they’d need to pay some money to make everyone feel better, is not a proof that a license is actually required. If Oracle can produce an email from a lawyer that says something like “after analyzing the situation I think we need to get a license” (discussions of the likes I have been involved as part of my work), *only then* it would mean anything.
For a rather long summary of all the email discovery in favor of Oracle, see Florian Mueller’s FOSS Patents blog , though do note – while Florian Mueller says that his blog is “not affiliated with any party in any way whatsoever”, he was a paid consultant for Oracle at the time.