I think this is much bigger than just Java. The patents in question relate to the whole field of VM implementation, not simply Java VM implementation. On the

I think this is much bigger than just Java. The patents in question relate to the whole field of VM implementation, not simply Java VM implementation. On the surface this really appears to have very little to do with Java the language. For a start, Dalvik is not a JVM implementation at all, in fact it's quite a different beast. See, e.g.: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_application_virtual_machines http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_application_virtu... which lists Dalvik as a register machine rather than a stack machine: definitely not a trivial difference. Google's toolchain converts from JVM bytecode to Dalvik bytecode, which is probably what Oracle are going after with #5,966,702 but the rest of the patents are much more general. If anything Oracle are turning VM implementation in general into a patent minefield, not Java alone.