We'll just say this straight out: from a technical perspective, these objections are completely valid. The files in question do appear to be test files, some of them were removed, and there's simply no way of knowing if any of them ended up in a shipping Android handset. But -- and this is a big but -- that's just the technical story. From a legal perspective, it seems very likely that these files create increased copyright liability for Google, because the state of our current copyright law doesn't make exceptions for how source code trees work, or whether or not a script pasted in a different license, or whether these files made it into handsets.

The single most relevant legal question is whether or not copying and distributing these files was authorized by Oracle, and the answer clearly appears to be "nope" -- even if Oracle licensed the code under the GPL. Why? Because somewhere along the line, Google took Oracle's code, replaced the GPL language with the incompatible Apache Open Source License, and distributed the code under that license publicly. That's all it takes -- if Google violated the GPL by changing the license, it also infringed Oracle's underlying copyright. It doesn't matter if a Google employee, a script, a robot, or Eric Schmidt's cat made the change -- once you've created or distributed an unauthorized copy, you're liable for infringement.*

I did find one odd thing about the first 7 files. Sun published those files on its web site to help developers debug and test their own code. For some reason, the Android or Harmony developer who was using them decompiled and rebuilt them instead of just using the ones from Sun. Later an Apache license got incorrectly pasted to the top of the files, perhaps by some automated script. The solution to this earth shattering conspiracy? Replace them with the original files from Sun which have the correct comments. Or just delete them. After all, they’re not shipped with Android.

Ivan Dimkovic: Ako je bot pod vlasnistvom Google Inc-a to IMHO ne menja stvar ni malo... mislim moze da bude i Sergey-eva macka koja je promenila licencu, ali to i dalje ne menja sustinski stvar da je Google uzeo Oracle kod i bez ikakve dozvole distribuirao isti pod stranom licencom.

To samo po sebi ne bi bilo neki enorman problem inace (to se plati ako Oracle tuzi, advokati uzmu svoje dnevnice i to je to...) - problem je sto je u isto vreme Google tuzen za Java patente i Oracle zahteva runtime royalties... ovo svakako nece pomoci tom slucaju i samo moze da ucvrsti teoriju da je Google svesno "klonirao" Javu, koristeci jos pritom i standardne Sun/Oracle testove + jos nonsalantno menjajuci licencu.

To kombinovano je malko veci problem od prepravke licence. Pretpostavljam da Oracle zeli da predstavi Google kao lopove koji svesno uzimaju tudji IP - ovo ce samo biti samo jos jedan dokaz za takvo ponasanje po Oracle-u.