Google says Oracle ruling a win for �entire Android ecosystem,'

"BartSimpson" said
I'm not against patents on software as that encourages creativity, but I do oppose patents on computer programming languages (like Java) for the reason that this can award a hostile company like Oracle a cross-platform monopoly.

In a hearing in the US District Court today, it was determined that Google will pay a net total of nothing for Oracle's patent claims against them. In fact, Google is given 14 days to file an application for Oracle to pay legal fees to Google

For those who do not know about this case yet, here's a rundown. Android is based on a variant of the Java programming language/platform called 'Dalvik'. Java's copyrights was owned(at the time) by Sun Microsystems. Then, in April of 2009, Oracle bought out Sun Microsystems(primarily to gain access to Java's patents, since Java is one of the most commonly used programming languages overall). Due to the similarity to the function/method calls(called APIs) between Java and Dalvik, Oracle thought that they could have a legitimate claim against Android for violating their own patents. The initial complaints against Google were filed in 2010.

However, API's are one of the most commonly replicated pieces of software(even though, that doesn't mean that the two methods perform the same action in the same way with the same efficiencies). Providing a precedent for API's being able to be patented, would ensure that most companies that write software would then have to pay large numbers of licensing fees(which in and of themselves aren't cheap) to their original makers, even though they may do their operations in two completely separate manners. This would be similar to a company attempting to claim that a comma could be patented, and therefore, people who use commas in their writing should have to pay them money for using them, even though the comma may be used in completely different contexts and for completely different things. A comma just simply describes how you go about saying the sentence itself. Ultimately, this is the question that Oracle was proposing to the court.