Oracle's flagship product is their relational database, the first version of which they shipped in 1979. However, the bulk of the patents on relational database technology were held by IBM; if IBM had chosen to be dicks about it, they could have squashed the nascent Oracle like a bug.
Fast forward 30 years and the biggest player in the Java space after Sun is... IBM (in fact, IBM has probably made more money out of Java than Sun ever have). Given the size of IBM's patent portfolio and if they got spooked about the potentially chilling effect on the Java ecosystem that this litigation might have, they could make things very uncomfortable for Oracle.
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Dangerous game
This could come back to bite Oracle.
Oracle's flagship product is their relational database, the first version of which they shipped in 1979. However, the bulk of the patents on relational database technology were held by IBM; if IBM had chosen to be dicks about it, they could have squashed the nascent Oracle like a bug.
Fast forward 30 years and the biggest player in the Java space after Sun is... IBM (in fact, IBM has probably made more money out of Java than Sun ever have). Given the size of IBM's patent portfolio and if they got spooked about the potentially chilling effect on the Java ecosystem that this litigation might have, they could make things very uncomfortable for Oracle.