Google to Oracle: If You Win This Patent Suit, We’ll Cut You in on Android | Hacker News Reader

Google to Oracle: If You Win This Patent Suit, We’ll Cut You in on Android

allthingsd.com

24 pointsdaegloe13 comments

.015% is pretty funny as a "fuck you" number. On a billion in revenue, that's 150k, or probably about what they pay one senior developer in a year.

If, like most software patents, it is the sort of "invention" that a senior developer could independently discover and implement in less than a year, that sounds pretty fair to me.

What I first thought. I need 0.015 minutes to invent this sort of things.

Google also offered Oracle a 0.5 percent of Android revenue through the end of this year

Anybody knows how much actual revenue Google generates directly from Android?

They get ~$2.5 billion from mobile, but that's not just Android, so it's an extreme upper limit.

Amazingly enough, Google's mobile revenue might not actually be an upper bound.

Earlier in the trial, Oracle wanted to include damages based on Android's impact on Google's non-mobile advertising revenue. They were allowed to do some discovery on this point, though I don't know how that particular issue turned out.

Does anyone else feel that the fact that Google made this offer and Oracle rejected it, seems to indicate that they believe that they are going to lose this fight with Oracle?

Hardly. Modest settlement offers to make a problem go away are very common, even when companies don't expect to lose.

Also, the difference between "expect to win" and "expect to lose" can be the difference between 49% and 51%. Civil cases turn on simple preponderance of the evidence.

Legal battles are expensive. Also, these settlement talks were court-mandated: http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=2012032323250553

What could this mean for Python?

Is there an argument that some of the patents in play here are also a potential concern for Python? Do non-JVM Python implementations share relevant implementation details with Dalvik?

You're right, but my question was more about if there's any possibility that Google bring more support to the development of apps other than using for example SL4A, since the recent legal problems with Java. But I get your point, this means a major change in the Dalvik infrastructure.

There's no particular reason a Python-to-Dalvik compiler couldn't be built, though it'd look very different from CPython and likely any other current Python implementation.

Given Google's apparent predilections, however, I think a more likely outcome of the hypothetical scenario you seem to be positing ("switch from Java to something else") would be a migration toward Dart, JavaScript, Go, or some combination thereof.

I don't see that scenario as being particularly likely, though.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com