Java APIs stand as a very central part of the Oracle-Google Android trial that got underway this week in San Francisco. The legal wrangling comes at a time when APIs (Applications Programming Interfaces) are increasingly seen as “open” and “public,” thanks in part to the strategies and successes of  Facebook, Twitter and (none other than) Google APIs.

Tech’s biggest “Larries” - Larry Ellison of Oracle and Larry Page - testified in the first week of the trial, along with Mark Reinhold, Oracle Java Platform Group chief architect and Timothy Lindholm, Google engineer, and others. Both Reinhold and Lindolm were formerly with Sun.

According to trial documents, Google is asserting that “computer programming languages are not copyrightable, and neither are Oracle’s APIs.” Google says that “the Court should hold that the structure, selection and organization of the APIs are un-copyrightable.”

http://itknowledgeexchange.techtarget.com/soa-talk/oracle-and-google-have-at-it-as-apis-go-to-court/

If i build my own string class and if i write a toString method to do something better than what java does today then am i in trouble too ?

Oracle missed the mobile bandwagon bigtime, larry doesnt know how to make more money out of java  and this is all about doing that.

Larry is a businessman and not a technologist.

He should have kept those smart SUN engineers around and come up with a better efficient way of running java on mobile devices ( thats what google did).  he would make more moeny out of that than this battle of the APIs & licenses.

Larry had better watch his step.

Obama can haul his butt into court on antitrust charges at anytime.

The genius of Sun Micro was the development and opensourcing of Java.

Even Oracle can't screw that up.

While Oracle and Google have a go at eachother, IBM is making all the money using Java :)

On a serious note, I think Oracle is in a 80s time warp.