Oracle's suit against Google over its Android mobile operating system signals a major reversal in the stewardship of Java under new management, and will likely be the first of many battles over the ubiquitous web programming language.

Java was created by Sun Microsystems in 1995, where it was conceived as a lingua franca for the web, and it quickly won broad acceptance among developers as a powerful platform for adding features that could not be handled by HTML. It was purchased by Oracle as part of its acquisition of Sun in January – a transition that may have planted the seeds of the coming fracas from the start.

"During the integration meetings between Sun and Oracle where we were being grilled about the patent situation between Sun and Google, we could see the Oracle lawyer's eyes sparkle," Java co-creator James Gosling wrote on his blog Friday. "Filing patent suits was never in Sun's genetic code."

Gosling quit his job as an Oracle VP in April after his job transferred from Sun.

Oracle filed a federal lawsuit (.pdf) Thursday in San Jose, California, charging that Android breaches Java's open source license. The lawsuit seeks unspecified damages, and demands a federal judge immediately block distribution of Android, the No. 3 mobile operating platform.

"Google will continue to realize unjust profits, gains and advantages as a proximate result of its infringement as long as such infringement is permitted to continue," the lawsuit said.

“We are disappointed Oracle has chosen to attack both Google and the open source Java community with this baseless lawsuit," Google fired back in a statement. "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.”

No hearing date has been set.

Many questions about the prospects of the suit remain unanswered, and the long-term impact of the suit is very much up in the air. Nevertheless, the suit drew a fearful response from the open source community on Friday.

Sun had been selling Java under paid licensing agreements, and also giving it away as open source. Java was moved to the Free Software Foundation's GNU General Public License in 2006.

"I consider this a patent attack on free software and open source," said Florian Mueller, who founded the NoSoftwarePatents campaign.

The suit is complicated by the deep involvement of Google staff in the original development of Java. Google CEO Eric Schmidt once led Java development at Sun.

Open source guru Bruce Perens says Google may have compromised its license to use Java ME, the mobile version of the language, by dropping the language's Swing widget toolkit and AWT graphical user interface class, replacing it with Google's own GUI. "My question is why would Google have made technical decisions that lost them the patent grant? It would have been easy enough to keep it," said Perens. "So, I guess they weren't worried about being sued by Sun.... I think Android handset implementers will want to see a patent agreement in place or they'll want to see Google comply with the terms of the patent grant."

Bernard Harzog summed up what he thought the legal flap was about on The Virtualization Practice blog:

The issue appears to be related to Dalvik, a Java compatible Java Virtual Machine, or JVM, that Google apparently developed in a “clean room” by people with no prior knowledge of how the internals of the Sun Java JVM worked. The result of Dalvik was that developers could use the Java language and Java development tools (like Eclipse), and that Google could put its JVM into the open source realm without having to deal with Sun or now Oracle in the process. Some of the key applications that run on Android like the e-mail that is included in the smartphone OS are apparently written in Java and run on Dalvik.

Harzog also wondered: "Could this be a precursor to an attempt to get licensing revenue out of the broader open source Java community?"

The suit comes as Java's momentum has slowed in the past few years, in the face of the growing popularity of scripting languages such as PHP.

"I suspect that this is the beginning of the end for Java," said author Nathan Torkington, former chair of the OSCON open source convention. "It was already wobbly – the last few versions of Java had muddled and lackadaisical uptake with the developers I know, and I sense that it had lost its momentum. It'll never go away, the same way COBOL never entirely went away, but it's becoming legally murky enough that there's room for competition."

"Google will just be the start," said Torkington. "The Android license agreement doesn't offer distributors indemnity, so HTC and Verizon and every other company will be checking each other's foreheads for the red dot of Boies, Schiller, and Flexner LLP" – Oracle's law firm.

Michael Calore contributed to this report. Photo: Peter Kaminski/Flickr