Android Chief Andy Rubin crumbled in court on Monday as Oracle’s lawyer, David Boies hammered him with questions pertaining to Java and copyright infringement.  Rubin’s questioning was cut short as he took the stand during the latter part of the hearing on Monday, so he again appeared in court yesterday followed by Google executive chairman and former CEO Eric Schmidt, who somehow managed to save face.

Rubin’s second day

Rubin sidestepped many of the questions thrown at him, stating that he was getting confused with Oracle counsel’s use of words, especially the word “fragmentation.”
Boies asked Rubin about software engineer Tim Lindholm’s email to him regarding fragmentation, but Rubin stated he wasn’t sure whether Lindholm or Sun Microsystems had the same definition of fragmentation.

“I had my own definition of what I thought fragmentation meant, yes,” Rubin stated.

Schmidt takes the stand

Schmidt took the stand and defended Google’s honor by stating that what they did back then, he thought were permissible and they didn’t see anything wrong with what they were doing.  He even stated that Jonathan Schwartz, who took over as Sun’s CEO after Scott McNealy stepped down, knew that they were using Java APIs and never said anything about Google needing a licensing for that.  Schmidt’s statement was backed by Google lead counsel Robert Van Nest, displaying a blog post from Schwartz that encouraged Google’s Android work.

Boies stated that Google was the only one who didn’t acquire a license from Sun but had every intention of using Java for Android from the start.

Schmidt cleared that Google planned to use Java from the start of the Android project, but stated that he didn’t agree with the vocabulary Boies used in describing the Java programming language and platform.

“An interface is a specification. A name,” Schmidt said curtly. “There’s a collection of those names that forms the standard that Java uses. We, Google, implemented those interfaces in our own way.”

“Just to be clear,” Boies responded, “you copied the 37 Sun Java API specifications?”

“We used the interface names, which is how one does this, and then did our own implementation of those services,” Schmidt said.

“Are you saying is that the only thing you copied was the names?” Boies asked. And Schmidt said “yes.”

Schmidt recalled how the Android development began, and how they initially tried to partner up with Sun.  They discussed the option to then Sun CEO McNealy, but that wasn’t fruitful.  Oracle showed e-mail evidence written by McNealy stating that, “I’m worried about how we’re going to replace the revenue.  This is likely going to submarine,” referring to the proposed partnership with Google.

Schmidt stated that this was a typical Sun response, “I interpreted this as, ‘We need money from you,’” he said. “[McNealy] understood the value of a billion users.”  Schmidt stated that the negotiations weren’t fruitful because it became clear that Sun would not allow Google to touch the Java source code.  Schmidt pointed that it was the main issue, not the $30 to $50 million Sun wanted for the partnership.  “We would have paid that,” he said.

Schmidt then stated that they created their own version of Java, a “clean room implementation” of Java, even though Rubin already told the court that doing that was impossible since most of the Googlers who worked on Android worked on Java when they were still as Sun.

Still, Schmidt insisted that they created their own version of Java known as the Dalvik virtual machine, and that Google’s team of engineers did not run afoul of the law.

“It involved a team that didn’t use Sun’s intellectual property, so I was told,” Schmidt said. “[Sun] was extremely aware of our implementation.”