FSF responds to Oracle v. Google and the threat of software patents

The Free Software Foundation has put out a statement about Oracle's lawsuit against Google. Not surprisingly, it finds Oracle's position to be "unjustifiable", but it also comes as no surprise that it isn't completely happy with Google either. "Unfortunately, Google didn't seem particularly concerned about this problem until after the suit was filed. The company still has not taken any clear position or action against software patents. And they 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. The GPL is designed to protect everyone's freedom—from each individual user up to the largest corporations—and it could've provided a strong defense against Oracle's attacks. It's sad to see that Google apparently shunned those protections in order to make proprietary software development easier on Android."

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