#oracle

UPDATE: The jury verdict is in. They found no infringement of the patents!

But Judge Alsup wasn’t convinced. He told the court he had learned to code in Java for the trial — implying that he knew other languages as well — and he said that he had written some of the infringing code at least a hundred times since Oracle filed its suit in August 2010. “I can do it. You can do it. It’s so simple,” he said, adding that it takes less than five minutes. Then looked directly at Boies. “You’re one of the best lawyers in America — how can you make that argument?” he demanded.

But Judge Alsup wasn’t convinced. He told the court he had learned to code in Java for the trial — implying that he knew other languages as well — and he said that he had written some of the infringing code at least a hundred times since Oracle filed its suit in August 2010. “I can do it. You can do it. It’s so simple,” he said, adding that it takes less than five minutes. Then looked directly at Boies. “You’re one of the best lawyers in America — how can you make that argument?” he demanded.

The last couple of days, there's been a fair amount of blogosphere angst over Coding Horror's "Please Don't Learn to Code." Ironically, the best argument for learning to code appeared this morning, when it turned out that Judge William Alsup in the Google case could program, and learned Java in the course of the trial, and wasn't going for Oracle's claim that a short range-checking function was days of work. Alsup recognized immediately (and says he wrote the function hundreds of times during the course of the trial) that it's just a few minutes work for a competent programmer.

"If Ellison gets his way, then the suite will get re-written in JavaFX. That will not only hurt development but set back a suite that's been slow to close the gap on Microsoft's Office. Such a move will also be seen by open-source supporters as early proof that Oracle is putting its own corporate goals ahead of the community's when it comes to running Sun's open-source projects. That'll further spook people alredy concerned about the future of MySQL."

Well... I guess 150MB is actually "small-footprint" for Oracle.