Android threatens Oracle’s embedded Java business

Oracle’s lawsuit against Google has uncovered an interesting fact: Before last week, not many people knew what Android was, exactly. Most industry watchers understood it was an open source Linux-based OS that ran code written in Java. But the relationship between Android and other, more conventional Java implementations is convoluted.

Here’s what is clear, though: Android is a direct threat Oracle’s mobile Java licensing business, which is one of the few direct revenue streams that the Java platform brings to its corporate parent. The lawsuit is a move to protect that cash cow.

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There are three versions of Java platform: the Standard Edition (SE), which is the foundation for the language; the Enterprise Edition (EE), for app servers; and the Mobile Edition (ME), for phones and embedded systems. While Java SE is open source and distributed free of charge, OEMs must pay a fee to put Java ME on their gadgets.

This worked nicely for Sun while embedded systems were underpowered enough to need Java ME’s specialized, stripped-down code base. But in the last few years, advances in processor power have produced embedded platforms that are capable of running Java SE — so, oops, no need to pay for Java ME. To prevent this from happening, Sun added so-called field-of-use restrictions to Java SE’s license terms; essentially, if you want your implementation of Java SE to be certified as official Java, its license has to forbid its use on anything other than a “computer,” defined narrowly enough to exclude most things that aren’t standard PCs or laptops.

This sort of restriction was anathema to the Apache Software Foundation; as a result, the open source Apache implementation of Java SE, Harmony, never got Sun’s seal of approval. And it was a subset of the Harmony libraries that Google used as the basis for the Android programming environment, a move that was being referred to as “routing around Sun’s IP” and potential trouble back in 2007.

Android’s programming environment isn’t really Java, and Google doesn’t claim that it is. It’s an environment where you can write apps in a specialized subset of the Java language, with the business under the hood operating quite differently from a standard Java VM. But it’s close enough for Android to be able to attract legions of Java developers eager to use their skills to write code for cutting-edge smartphones.

That huge developer community is the commodity that Sun nurtured for more than a decade — and Oracle has no desire to see those developers adding value to a platform that doesn’t pay a dime back to Java’s owner. Official Java ME is in place on BlackBerry devices and on second-tier “feature phones,” but it’s been left out of the great iPhone-Android battle for smartphone supremacy. And the fight isn’t just about phones: Android is at the heart of the embryonic Google TV, and that’s another market where Oracle would love to see Java ME thrive.

The courts will eventually decide on the legal merits of Oracle’s complaint. But the business motivation for the lawsuit is clear: For embedded Java to remain a revenue stream for Oracle, Android has to be either stopped or forced to pay up. Oracle’s management has decided that litigious means are the best path to that end.

This story, “Android threatens Oracle’s embedded Java business,” was originally published at InfoWorld.com. Get the first word on important tech news with the InfoWorld Tech Watch blog.