> Of course, in reality Google's decision was probably a little of both, right? I wouldn't think that Google's development costs were part of the decision. The

> Of course, in reality Google's decision was probably a little of both, right? I wouldn't think that Google's development costs were part of the decision. There aren't that many Java APIs -- as the article says, it's ~11k lines of definitions -- so Oracle is seeking ~$818k per line. Assuming Google's lawyers predicted that there was some risk of a lawsuit like this, any engineering costs associated with redesigning the APIs would just be negligible compared to the legal risk. One could argue that it is quite difficult to design a good API, but Java's APIs are frankly full of mistakes: Date/Calendar, immutable collections with no type safety, "optional" methods like Iterator.remove, etc. It wouldn't take a team of world-class engineers to come up with something better with the benefit of hindsight. On the other hand, developer familiarity and compatibility with existing Java libraries could have had a significant impact on Android's adoption. I think that was what justified the legal risks.