Oracle Versus Google and How it Affects Apple

It has been a long a winding road to get here, but after two years of failed settlement talks and pre-trial motions, Oracle began its infringement and copyright lawsuit against Google this week in a U.S. District Court in San Francisco. Many believed a deal would have been reached long ago, preventing all of this drama. Yet there they were, the two tech giants hauling each other's CEOs up to the stand for public spectacle. Ugly.

What are they fighting about?

Money, basically. In January 2010, Oracle finalized a deal to buy Sun Microsystems, including the Java computer programming language and all of its related technology. Just seven months later, on August 12, 2010, Oracle filed a lawsuit against Google, claiming the Android operating system infringed on patented Java technology. However, Google let it be known that before Oracle bought them, Sun was a huge supporter of Android, and that the Java programming language was open source and free to use.

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