Dalvik: Sun's worst nightmare.

It turns out , as Stefano Mazzocchi so nicely illuminates here, there's more story to be told concerning Google's use of their own, proprietary java VM (Dalvik) and their end-run around the Java Community Process.

There's a licensing angle here, and Google's is playing the game like a Grand Master.

Java, you see, is now licensed under the GPLv2 - this wins open-source friends for Sun. However, it's only the platform itself that's GPL'd; code written in Java does not have to adhere to the same licensing - there's an exception built into the licensing allowing the user code to be exempt from the GPL.

Unless it's Java Mobile Edition. Apparently In this case the basic Java ME licensing requires that all software written on that platform be open sourced as well. There is, however, a commercial version of Java ME that is licensed differently - it's this commercial version that many for-profit software developers go for, because it allows them tighter control over what their IP.

Got all that? If so, you're smarter than me, 'cause it took me a while.

So now Google comes along with Android, and Dalvik, and licenses the whole thing under Apache v2. How? Well, by creating their own proprietary VM for running the Java code, and having the Java code compile into their own bytecode. They use the Java syntax, some Java-friendly dev tools (Eclipse), but the underlying engine is all their own, and they're very careful not to describe the language as "Java".

Slick moves on Google's part.