[bondolo]

This would seem to call in to question their being "friends of the court" rather than associated with a particular litigant, especially in the cases where they chose to also work for Google and likely have an a interest in the outcome of this specific case. As opposed to legitimate amici who are generally more concerned with the precedent.

[zucker42]

If you're talking about the 78 programmer amici brief, only 12 have any connection at all to Google (only 5 are employees), and each of those are affected personally, beyond association with Google. This is addressed directly in the brief.

Also when the commenter said "wrote the API", he was referring to the Oracle/Sun Java API, not the Google Android API.