News

• Google files for new trial on copyright claims in Android suit

  Google is seeking a new trial on copyright claims in Oracle's intellectual-property lawsuit against it over the Android mobile OS, according to a filing made late Tuesday in U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California.

• Google and Oracle battle over Lindholm, Schwartz testimony

  Oracle and Google have each tried to jettison potentially damaging testimony in their intellectual-property dispute over Android, as a jury deliberates over Oracle's copyright allegations and prepares to move on to the patents part of the case.

• Developers fear they'll be stifled by judgement in Oracle-Google suit

  If Oracle prevails in its contention that APIs can be copyrighted, software developers could be stifled in how they work and innovate, say observers of the ongoing Oracle-Google trial, in which Oracle claims Google improperly used Java technology in the Android mobile software platform.

• 1

  Java creator: Fears over consequences of possible Oracle trial win may be overblown

  Should Oracle prevail in its intellectual-property lawsuit against Google over alleged Java patent and copyright violations in the Android mobile OS, it shouldn't result in the "industrial meltdown" some observers fear, Java creator James Gosling said in a blog post late Tuesday.

• Oracle to issue 88 security patches

  Oracle is planning to release 88 patches on Tuesday, covering vulnerabilities affecting a wide array of its products, according to a pre-release announcement posted to its website on Thursday.

• LibreOffice 3.5: The best Office killer yet

  OpenOffice.org has long been one of the top competitors to Microsoft Office, but the open source productivity suite's future was clouded in 2009 when Oracle acquired Sun Microsystems.

• 1

  Oracle drops one of its patent claims against Google

  Oracle has decided to give up on one of the patent claims it brought against Google in its lawsuit over alleged Java intellectual property violations in the Android mobile OS.

• Juniper exec gives inside look at QFabric

  R.K. Anand, executive vice president and general manager of Juniper Networks' Data Center Business Unit, was employee No. 12 of the network startup back in 1996, leaving a job as a microprocessor designer at Sun Microsystems. Years later he left Juniper for a brief stint at another startup, but came back to help finalize the company's QFabric product and get it out the door. QFabric began shipping in September 2011. Network World Editor in Chief John Dix recently caught up with Anand at the company's headquarters in Sunnyvale, Calif., for a deep dive on the company's answer to high-end data center demands.

• LibreOffice 3.5 arrives

  The Document Foundation on Tuesday announced the availability of LibreOffice 3.5, which it described as the third major release of the open-source productivity suite derived from the OpenOffice.org codebase.

• Oracle to issue 78 patches, including 27 for MySQL

  Oracle is set on Tuesday to release 78 security fixes for vulnerabilities in its database, middleware and applications, according to a preview announcement posted to the company's website this week.

• Oracle set to unveil cloud-themed application server, WebLogic 12c

  Oracle is planning to announce the next version of its flagship WebLogic application server during an online event Dec. 1, according to information on the company's website.

• Sun was close to licensing Java patents to Google for $28M

  Google and Sun Microsystems' discussions to co-develop Android ultimately broke down because of disagreements over control of the platform, Google wrote in a trial brief late last week related to its dispute with Oracle.

• McNealy: I would have run HP if they'd asked me

  Scott McNealy, the former chairman and CEO of Sun Microsystems, would have accepted the job of running Hewlett-Packard if he had been asked, he said this week.

• Oracle shows JavaFX on iOS and Android

  Oracle on Tuesday showed JavaFX rich client software running on both an Apple iPad and a Google Android-based Samsung Galaxy tablet, along with introducing a separate project using HTML5 to bring Java to Apple's iOS platform, called Project Avatar.

• MySQL hits new development milestone

  Oracle is making the open-source MySQL database more stable and feature-rich through a shift in development philosophy, MySQL Vice President of Engineering Tomas Ulin said during a keynote address Monday at the OpenWorld conference in San Francisco.