FSF Lashes Out at Oracle for its Patent Lawsuit Against Google Android

FSF finally responds to the whole Google vs Oracle legal tangle and the threat posed by software patents. FSF lashed out at Oracle for suing Google over various Java patents, even calls the actions by Oracle as 'unjustifiable.' FSF also adds that, "nobody deserves to be the victim of software patent aggression, and Oracle is wrong to use its patents to attack Android".

Free Software Foundation

Excerpts from the original article
Oracle's lawsuit threatens to undo all the good will that has been built up in the years since. Programmers will justifiably steer clear of Java when they stand to be sued if they use it in some way that Oracle doesn't like.

One of the great benefits of free software is that it allows programs to be combined in ways that none of the original developers would've anticipated, to create something new and exciting. Oracle is signaling to the world that they intend to limit everyone's ability to do this with Java, and that's unjustifiable.

Google could have avoided all this by building Android on top of IcedTea, a GPL-covered Java implementation based on Sun's original code, instead of an independent implementation under the Apache License. It's sad to see that Google apparently shunned those protections in order to make proprietary software development easier on Android. But none of that excuses Oracle's behavior.

[via FSF responds to Oracle v. Google Lawsuit and the threat of software patents]