Yesterday’s column on Android’s Patent Wars was written on Friday and scheduled for publication on Monday. Over the weekend, the folks at Groklaw dug-up an old page from the Wayback Machine that would seem to bode well for Google in their patent fight with Oracle concerning Android and Java.
What they’ve found is a page dated November 5, 2007 from the blog of Jonathan Schwartz, who was president and chief operating officer at Sun Microsystems, the company that held all rights to Java at that time. In the post, Schwartz praises Google and the Android OS’s use of Java:
“I just wanted to add my voice to the chorus of others from Sun in offering my heartfelt congratulations to Google on the announcement of their new Java/Linux phone platform, Android. Congratulations!”
Although this certainly doesn’t qualify as a smoking gun, it does show that the folks at Sun, at least at that time, weren’t too concerned about the possibility that Google might be infringing on some of their patents. I wouldn’t be surprized now to see Schwartz and Sun founder Scott McNealy make an appearance on Google’s behalf when this case goes to court on October 31 – and their testimony just might be instrumental in helping Google win this case.
Kudos to Groklaw, where you can see Schwartz’ entire blog post, for digging this up.
Christine Hall has been a journalist since 1971. In 2001, she began writing a weekly consumer computer column and started covering Linux and FOSS in 2002 after making the switch to GNU/Linux. Follow her on Twitter: @BrideOfLinux
