I'm not an insider, but I think the decision making is pretty clear: they bought Android (the company). They could have started something from scratch, but the

I'm not an insider, but I think the decision making is pretty clear: they bought Android (the company). They could have started something from scratch, but they felt they could get to the market faster buying up a company that was already part of the way there. Android could easily have been built on the GPLed version of Java. But again the reasoning behind the decision of building your own JVM is pretty clear: Android wanted someone to buy their company and felt that the GPL might make the sale difficult. Of course with Google buying, they probably wouldn't have cared, but by the time Google was doing the buying, the decision was already made. Pretty typical story.