Google faces a lawsuit by Oracle over copy-pasting Java code into Android OS

Google is facing a lawsuit over patent and copyright infringement in developing its Android operating platform. Google is accused of copying at least seven and as many as 43 Android files directly from Oracle's Java source code. It is not known yet whether the files were actually included with the shipping version of Android, but they were open sourced by Google under an Apache license, and that alone could be legally problematic for the company.

"[The alleged copied code] is really about the Android's team's credibility, its approach to intellectual property issues," Florian Muller, who spotted the files in question, tells The Register. "This looks arrogant, reckless, aggressive. What does it imply about the team's overall approach?"

Oracle filed a lawsuit last October and as a part of the filing it handed six pages of Android code to a federal court, claiming they were directly copied from Oracle Java code.

However, FOSS Patents blogger Florian Muller pointed to six more Android files that "show the same pattern of direct copying" – apparently, Google used a decompiler – and he claimed that unlike the file in Oracle's exhibit, these files were part of the open source trees for the most recent Android releases: 2.2 (Froyo) and 3.3 (Ginderbread). He also turned up 37 other files tagged with "PROPRIETARY/CONFIDENTIAL" and "DO NOT DISTRIBUTE!" notices by Sun.

Google had also said that Oracle removed headers from its exhibit, and according to Muller, the missing headers also read "PROPRIETARY/CONFIDENTIAL". "I don't think that the missing parts are favorable to Google. Actually, the opposite is true," he wrote.
Meanwhile, Google points out in a court filing that Android's Dalvik virtual machine uses a subset of Project Harmony, Apache Foundation's open source Java incarnation. But Apache has said that the code in Oracle's exhibit is not from Harmony.

Oracle's exhibit and the six files where Muller discovered similar copying are in the "unit test" area of the Android open source code tree. As ZDNet 's Ed Burnette points out, unit test code isn't likely to ship with a final product, and the files in question have been deleted from the tree. But they were still open sourced.

If Google lifted the code from Sun, this may be problematic – whether Sun eventually open sourced the code or not. Java was open sourced under a GPL license, whereas Android uses the incompatible Apache license. "GPL is a one-way street," as Muller points out. "As a third party, you can't just turn a GPL file into an Apache file. It doesn't matter whether the Sun code was proprietary or GPL, because either way there's no way it could be licensed under Apache."