A Google engineer who wrote an e-mail that is now one of the key pieces of evidence in Oracle's patent and copyright infringement lawsuit against Google testified yesterday that he did not mean to imply that Google needed to obtain a Java license from Oracle or any other company.

In August 2010, Google engineer Tim Lindholm wrote an e-mail to Android chief Andy Rubin that said "What we've actually been asked to do (by Larry [Page] and Sergei [Brin]) is to investigate what technical alternatives exist to java for android and chrome. we've been over a bunch of these, and think they all suck. We conclude that we need to negotiate a license for Java under the terms we need."

Oracle presented this e-mail as evidence that Google knew it needed a license to Java and did not obtain one. Google has argued that the Lindholm e-mail was simply a strategic discussion of what to do in response to Oracle's threat to sue.

While testifying yesterday, Lindholm was asked by Oracle lawyer David Boies if he meant that Google needed to get a license from Sun, to which he answered "that is not what I meant," according to the Wall Street Journal. At the time he wrote the e-mail, Sun was already owned by Oracle, which bought the company in January 2010.

Oracle's lawyer pressed Lindholm further, asking if he meant Google should have gotten a license from some other company. Lindholm replied "It was not specifically a license from anybody." Lindholm worked for Sun from 1998 to 2005 as a distinguished engineer, where he was one of the developers of Java, and has been with Google since 2005.

Google CEO Larry Page testified earlier this week that "we worked hard to negotiate a business license with Java," but acknowledged that "I don't think that we did" ultimately obtain a license from either Oracle or Sun. Oracle is accusing Google's Android team of infringing two Java patents, and is making a copyright infringement claim involving the alleged copying of 37 Java APIs and 11 Java source code files. The lawsuit was filed on August 12, 2010, and the trial got underway on Monday of this week.