Maybe they should've given out TCK licenses then? You know, the thing that exists to prevent fragmentation of Java except you're not actually allowed to use it?

TCK is free for OpenJDK forks, and I believe IBM has more than enough money to pay for it.

Also, java is one of the few languages with complete specifications, instead of saying that here is the reference implementation, what it does is the spec.

> TCK is free for OpenJDK forks, and I believe IBM has more than enough money to pay for it.

But it's not available at any price for independent implementations like Dalvik (I'm sure if it were merely a matter of money Google would've paid up). Most people who built the Java ecosystem were bait-and-switched: we were told the language would be free and the trademarks etc. were just to stop incompatible implementations, but that turned out to be false.

> Also, java is one of the few languages with complete specifications, instead of saying that here is the reference implementation, what it does is the spec.

Allegedly. Given that there are no independent published implementations (various organisations claim to have independent implementations but none of them are readily available), we should be sceptical in practice.

> But it's not available at any price for independent implementations like Dalvik

Then how are there plenty of independent JVMs that can legally call themselves Java?

There aren't. There are OpenJDK forks and there are some mythical JVMs that pjmlp and like two other people have supposedly used but aren't actually available even if you are a billion-dollar hedge fund offering to pay the price that they're allegedly for sale at.

To be slightly less snarky there are also some pre-Oracle ones like JRockit; back in the Sun days the TCK licenses do seem to have actually been available.

No it wasn't a matter of money as the emails revealed during the case proved.

Apparently not rightfully so since the courts struck it down.

Unfortunately, hence the Java community got screwed by your employer and now have to put up with Android Java.

I'm not employed by Google, and never have been; not everyone who disagrees with you has been paid off to do so.

... Really? Do we really want it to be possible to copyright API's?

That was not decided in the lawsuit, only that in this case google copy was fair use.

But for fair use to exist there must be copyright, right?

Yes, and since code is copyrightable, and API is code, the default is that APIs are copyrightable. What was decided that this reuse by Google was fair use (which might give precedent to similar issues, but in itself doesn’t mean that APIs would not be copyrightable)

Someone had to make the work to create them, they did not ask a genie for them.