The linked article is very unclear about what Oracle is suing about. From this article, it appears that they're claiming patent infringement (not copyright viol

The linked article is very unclear about what Oracle is suing about. From this article, it appears that they're claiming patent infringement (not copyright violation): http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/d95fbb12-a671-11df-8767-00144feabdc0.html http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/d95fbb12-a671-11df-8767-00144feabd... Sun/Oracle's Java implementation was released under the GPLv2, which doesn't include a patent license. I don't know if they included any patent license with the open source release. Even if they did, it doesn't help Google, because Android doesn't use the Sun/Oracle code, so it wouldn't benefit from any patent license that goes with it. Android is based on the Apache Harmony libraries on top of Google's own Dalvik VM. (Most of the Android code is Apache-licensed.) That code was all developed independent of Sun's Java and the implementation might infringe their patents, even though it doesn't use their code.