The copyright phase of the Oracle and Google trial has been going on for almost two weeks now, but today saw Google calling one of its last witnesses in its defense: former Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz. Despite him having led the company whose copyright claims lay at the heart of the case, Schwartz's name has been increasingly invoked over the last few days, with several Google employees stating that they took his public praise as approval of Android's use of Java's APIs and class libraries.

"Only one could be called 'Java'"

Schwartz started off by describing the landscape from which Java first emerged: a 1990s world where Microsoft dominated computing, and Java — along with web browsers — offered an opportunity for innovation in the application space. "Wherever a webbroswer appeared you could run that application," he said. "Write once, run anywhere, versus write a check to Microsoft to run it." Sun had always intended, he said, for both the Java language and its APIs to be free for anyone to use. Where Sun wielded power was in its ability to grant approval for companies to use official Java branding and claim Java compliance. Even though other implementations such as GNU Classpath and Apache Harmony were in the marketplace and free to ship their code if they wanted, "only one could be called Java," Schwatz said, and that was the version from Sun.

Schwartz's 2007 blog post, in which he congratulated Google on the official announcement of Android, has been raised several times this week; Andy Rubin stated