Jurors in the Oracle-Google trial got a crash course on Java APIs Thursday after listening to testimony from the two companies' chief executives earlier in the week. At stake is Oracle's claim that Google copied its Java code without obtaining a license to create the Android mobile operating system, which if upheld could have repercussions across the broader high-tech industry.
On Thursday morning, Oracle's Mark Reinhold took the stand in a San Francisco federal courtroom to talk Java, specifically addressing 37 Java APIs, or application programming interfaces, that Oracle claims Google infringed upon in creating Android, according to CNET.
Reinhold, chief architect of Oracle's Java Platform Group, attempted to explain to jurors the ins and outs of the Java programming language, how the APIs and class libraries used by programmers to build software applications out of source code like Java's work, and "also got into the technical weeds with documentation extractors, compilers, and comments that begin with a slash and two stars," according to the tech site.
Under questioning from Oracle lawyer Michael Jacobs, Reinhold contended that "each page of the [Java] language specification includes a copyright notice," which is the heart of Oracle's case against Google. The search giant claims that APIs for open-source software like Java cannot be copyrighted, and thus do not require licenses, because they are created by a hodge-podge of coders and not just those employed by the source code's owners.
Thus, in its cross-examination of Reinhold, Google's legal team attempted to establish that a portion of the 37 Java APIs at issue were not written by Oracle or Sun, the original owner of Java, which was acquired by Oracle in January 2010, but rather by unpaid members of the Java Community Process.
Thursday's proceedings were certainly less high-profile than the headline-generating appearances by Oracle CEO Larry Ellison and Google CEO Larry Page earlier in the week.
Ellison, 67, told a packed courtroom on Tuesday that Google failed to take one of three types of Java licenses despite being instructed to do so when the search giant was using Java software to build Android.
Page, 39, testified over the course of two days, claiming that Google only used elements of the Java programming language that are freely available in the public domain. But after being admonished from the bench for evasive responses to Oracle questioning, the Google CEO finally admitted that his company never obtained a license to use Java code in its own software.