Can’t we all just get along? Oracle, new owner of the Java programming language, has been in court for a couple of years trying to convince a judge and jury that Google has been infringing upon various APIs in the Java programming language. Apparently they did a poor job because, as ZDNet reported last month, the jury found that Google did not infringe on the patents. Today ZDNet is saying that Google will pay $0 in damages. To add insult to injury, the judge has given Google 14 days to submit the paperwork requesting that Oracle pay legal fees.
Unfortunately it appears that this battle isn’t over yet as Oracle plans on appealing the decision. While it’s unclear what grounds the company has for an appeal, these sorts of things seem to drag on so we wouldn’t be surprised to see the two sides going through another trial. However it’s also possible that the mere threat of the appeal may persuade Google to forgo filing for legal fees.
The majority of the case seemed to revolve around nine lines of code within the rangeCheck function. While blatantly plagiarizing is obviously wrong, the code was fairly elementary and clearly wasn’t stealing some important trade secret. In case you haven"t already seen it, here is the infamous code that the case revolved around.
private static void rangeCheck(int arrayLen, int fromIndex, int toIndex) { if (fromIndex > toIndex) throw new IllegalArgumentException("fromIndex(" + fromIndex + ") > toIndex(" + toIndex+")"); if (fromIndex arrayLen) throw new ArrayIndexOutOfBoundsException(toIndex); } Source: ZDNet