Oracle CEO Larry Ellison made it quite clear 16 months ago when he said he was buying Sun that he expected to clean up on embedded mobile Java – widgetry Sun never turned much of a buck on – so it should come as no great surprise to anybody that he’s suing Google and its problematic Android operating system for not anteing up.

Oracle filed suit against Google last Thursday in district court in California charging it with infringing seven patents issued to Sun between 1999 and 2008 as well as for undefined copyright infringement connected with Java code, specifications, documentation and “other materials.” It wants a jury trial.

The action, seeking an injunction and treble damages, has got open source knickers in a twist.

See, it’s unclear whether Oracle will seek to monetize other Java projects or whether any license cut between the two companies would cover downstream makers of Android widgets or Android developers. So there’s talk of it having a chilling effect on an industry in a hurry to embrace a free Android while at the same time having a possible warming effect on Microsoft and its mobile phone ambitions. Windows 7 Mobile might start looking safer.

Altogether it promises endless entertainment.

Oracle told the Wall Street Journal that the “suit is specifically about Google and that’s it.” Java is covered by both commercial and free open source licenses and Google tinkered with Java to avoid paying the tax.

Android’s open source Dalvik virtual machine, for instance, isn’t Java-compatible and has been a problem for Sun and its control over Java from the beginning. Android programs are written in Java but Dalvik compiles their code into Dalvik bytecode rather than Java bytecode. Warnings that Sun could sue date to 2007.

The Oracle suit says, “Google’s Android competes with Oracle America’s Java as an operating system software platform for cellular telephones and other mobile devices. The Android operating system software ‘stack’ consists of Java applications running on a Java-based object-oriented application framework, and core libraries running on a ‘Dalvik’ virtual machine (VM) that features just-in-time (JIT) compilation. Google actively distributes Android (including without limitation the Dalvik VM and the Android Software Development Kit) and promotes its use by manufacturers of products and application.” Oracle America is Oracle’s name for Sun.

Apple, of course, is already suing Android phone merchant HTC for treading on 20 of its iPhone patents and Ellison and Apple CEO Steve Jobs are buddies. So far Google has extended no overt aid to HTC, which is understood to have a pretty thin patent portfolio.

Google – which may not have much more patent protection than HTC – immediately denounced the move and played the open source card. “We are disappointed Oracle has chosen to attack both Google and the open source Java community with this baseless lawsuit,” it said. “The open source Java community goes beyond any one corporation and works every day to make the web a better place. We will strongly defend open source standards and will continue to work with the industry to develop the Android platform.”

James Gosling, the erstwhile Sun executive credited with being the father of Java, blogged that he wasn’t surprised. “During the integration meetings between Sun and Oracle where we were grilled about the patent situation between Sun and Google, we could see the Oracle lawyers eyes sparkle. Filing patent suits was never in Sun’s genetic code….With Oracle, everything is always about money. It is the only metric they know.”

Oracle claims Google’s infringement is willful hence the demand for treble damages. The suit says it was aware of Sun’s patents for at least five years since it had hired a bunch of Sun Java engineers.

The Journal, quoting unidentified sources, says Sun tried to negotiate a license with Google but the companies couldn’t come to terms. Oracle then supposedly pursued the talks after it bought Sun. The lawsuit, however, says nothing about any failed discussions.

Google CEO Eric Schmidt used to work at Sun. He is currently supposed to be selling 200,000 Android phones a day. Gartner said late last week that Android phones had pushed past Apple iPhones to claim 17.2% of the market. Android tablets are expected to start flooding the market soon. Dell just started selling one last week.

Ironically Oracle’s new lawyer David Boies, whose firm defended SCO in its great, unsuccessful suit against Linux, is now teamed with Michael Jacobs of Morrison Forster, who led the team representing Novell that drove SCO into the ground. Boies won the Justice Department’s antitrust suit against Microsoft.

The patents Oracle struts out cover “Protection Domains To Provide Security in a Computer System (US No 6,125,447); “Controlling Access to a Resource” (US No 6,192,476); “Method and Apparatus for Preprocessing and Packaging Class Files” (US No 5,966,702); “System and Method for Dynamic Preloading of classes through Memory Space Cloning if a Master Runtime System Process” (US No 7,426,720); “Method and Apparatus for Resolving Data References in Generate Code” (US No RE38,104, a Gosling patent); “Interpreting Functions Utilizing a Hybrid of Virtual and Native Machine Instructions” (US No 6,910,205); and “Method and System for Performing Static Initialization” (US No 6,061,520).

The suit was lodged at the same time Oracle pulled the rug out from under OpenSolaris, making the open source community uneasier still.

For the complaint, see http://www.scribd.com/doc/35811761/Oracle-s-complaint-against-Google-for....