[cwyers]

I think you're conflating Java the language and the Java Virtual Machine. Android does not run the JVM, it runs Dalvik and now ART. Android is going to continue to do this. But it has and will continue to use Java the language, not some language based off Java, as well.

And in fact Oracle's lawsuit is about neither the language or the runtime, it's about the APIs. Yes, they were taken from Apache Harmony. Oracle insists that Android's use of them infringes because Google created a derived work, incompatible with the full Java API, from the Harmony implementation of the Java API. Google, in fact, is replacing the Harmony code with OpenJDK[1], Oracle's official open-source implementation of the Java API. (Which is one of about a billion reasons why your claim that Android uses a language based on Java instead of actually using Java is so baffling -- it's so based on Java that they can replace their code with Oracle's official Java implementation!)

[1] http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2016/01/android-n-switche...

[coldtea]

>But it has and will continue to use Java the language, not some language based off Java, as well.

Java is not the syntax, though, it's the whole specificication -- down to the bytecode.

Google just borrowed the syntax (and API).

(As did other people and projects who did "clean room" clones of Java, while not calling their product/project Java).

>And in fact Oracle's lawsuit is about neither the language or the runtime, it's about the APIs.

Yeah, that's what I wrote above: "That's just at the superficial API level though, which Oracle contested in court".

[cwyers]

I mean, up until a year or two ago, Google just shipped Oracle's javac compiler with its Android build toolchain. This makes about as much sense as saying that if you use musl libc instead of glibc that you're using a different language.