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The jury is in and Google has triumphed in almost all phases of its trial against Oracle over the use of Java in Android. Oracle spent years nurturing its relationship with developers who use its products, including MySQL and NoSQL Database. But the company's aggressive move to assert its interest in Java - which is, after all, open source - puts the developer community's goodwill at risk. How badly has Oracle damaged its reputation?

The jury in Oracle's patent case against Google delivered a unanimous verdict in favor of the search giant today, exonerating Google's use of Java in Android and dashing Oracle’s dreams of millions of dollars in damages.

Google now owns Motorola. Chinese regulators followed the U.S. and Europe in clearing the deal earlier this week, removing the last barrier. Although the acquisition opens new territory for the search giant, its most immediate effect could be remaking the existing Android landscape. Will Google use its new arm to pound all competitors, or just Apple?

Oracle’s lawsuit against Google over alleged infringement of Java slipped from epic battle to soap opera this week: The relationships between the judge, jury, plaintiff and defendant have become a tangle of legal ambiguity and financial suffering — or is it avarice? The jury deferred to the judge on the extent of Oracle’s intellectual property protections. The judge, in turn, wrested from the jury control over the lion’s share of damages, yanking Oracle’s prize another few inches out of reach. With major issues still to be decided, it is becoming clear that Judge William Alsup holds the high cards - and that he has the tech smarts to play them intelligently and mercilessly.

The jury in the copyright case between Google and Oracle has returned a split, partial verdict as to whether Google infringed on Oracle’s copyrights of Java and its APIs. Are computing languages copyrightable? The answer is not exactly clear cut.

Even as the battle rages over native apps vs. the mobile Web, the real question is already becoming "What comes next?" Developers are looking for ways to disrupt the so-called "App Economy," especially as it pertains to Apple's handling of the App Store. Assuming that the mobile Web's cross-platform openness carries the day, as it has so many times before, what would such a mobile "Post-App Economy" look like and what would it offer for developers and users?

The case pitting Google against Oracle over the use of Java in Android is turning into a spat of epic proportions. The opening arguments are in the books, with Google trying to portray Oracle as a spurned girlfriend trying to wrangle money out of a failed relationship. Oracle, meanwhile, painted Google as a callous ex-boyfriend who blithely takes what it wants, when it wants, with no regard for anyone else.

Since Research In Motion made BlackBerry synonymous with smartphones in the early aughts, the company has taken a pounding for mis-steps, delays, intentional blindness, equivocations and most tellingly, mediocre products.

Those brickbats have often been well-deserved, but RIM should also have earned some respect, if not love, for the important role it played in smartphone development and popularization - not to mention a string of iconic-at-the-time devices that significantly advanced the state of the art.

James Pearce, head of mobile developer relations for Facebook, likes to point out that "you and your friends don't always have the same devices" or even use the same mobile platforms.

That's a problem for the company, as it has to support all the major platforms, from Apple iOS to Google Android and beyond - often putting it in the position of benefitting its competitors. But it's also a huge opportunity for Facebook itself to shape and dominate that common platform.

The most profound thing I've heard lately was from a guy standing behind the counter of an empty RadioShack on St. Patrick's Day in Boston. Smartphones are like the cereal aisle in the grocery store, he said. There are a thousand options but really, there are only a couple varieties. Applied to Google's relationship with Android, what we see is an ecosystem that has become increasingly commoditized. The Android brand has been diluted and while its core features come from Google, the search giant is not the first company that people think of when the platform is mentioned.

This is one of the reasons why the Android Market has been rebranded as Google Play. Android is a strong ecosystem, but for Google it has become a weakened brand. Android has the power to buoy Google's other floundering media properties. Play is part of Android, but it's also the hub of the company's bicycle spokes.