So Oracle has two distinct claims in its lawsuit against Google over Android: copyright violation and patent violation. The copyright claims are extremely vague and its hard to see how they could apply, given that what Java code Android does contain comes from the open source Apache Harmony project. I suppose it's possible that Oracle will make a SCO-like claim that some source code that they owned was open-sourced without their consent, though this seems improbable. More likely this is a "let's throw this in and see if anything sticks" clause.

The patent claims are the main event. If, as I'm guessing many Java enthusiasts do, you'd like to see them dismantled, read this longish post from longtime Java developer Charles Nutter, who regards most of them as overly broad, obvious, or invalidated by prior art. This is a fairly typical response of a well-informed technical non-lawyer to software patents; unfortunately, it hasn't always been borne out in court, and patent cases are decided in court, not on blogs.

James Gosling also put up an amusing blog post in which he reveals that Sun didn't get serious about software patents until it lost a patent fight with IBM, at which point Sun's legal department demanded patents on everything. Sun's engineers apparently treated this as a lark, trying to see who could get the goofiest patent accepted by the PTO. He seems fairly careful to not come out and say that any of the patents used as a basis for the lawsuit are a result of this competition, but it sure would be intriguing to call an ex-Sun engineer to the stand to say that the patent had been filed in bad faith. We will have to wait and see how it turns out -- and at the rate that the legal system moves, we'll have a long time to wait.