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In August, Oracle filed a lawsuit against Google, claiming that its Android software infringes on patents and copyrights related to Java, patents acquired when Oracle purchased Sun Microsystems. And today, Google expanded on its initial comment that the Oracle lawsuit was "baseless," with a detailed response to the lawsuit's claims, and asking the U.S District Court to dismiss the suit.

Google's motion refutes Oracle's allegations, claiming it has not infringed on any Oracle IP. contains a "Factual Background" section, detailing the history of Java, its development, Sun's decision to open source part of it, and Oracle's voice among others encouraging the full open-sourcing of Java - right up to the point when Oracle acquired Sun Microsystems.

At this week's Nokia World 2010 event in London, Purnima Kochikar, Nokia's developer chief, announced to the audience during her keynote speech that there is a real "hunger for Java applications" out there in the world, and people are willing to pay for them.

Although the Silicon Valley tech press is caught up with iPhone and Android because they're the focus of the Valley's developer ecosystem, that group is "about to get a lot more competition," Kochikar warned, because today Nokia is launching the first touchscreen SDK (software development kit) for feature phones - the phones that still have the largest install base on the planet.

Java gets a bad rap. It's considered old-school. People say that young developers prefer Ruby on Rails and other Web-based hot stuff. True - but these aren't bad times for Java at all.

James Governor of RedMonk wrote a post that provides several good reasons why Java is really doing quite well.

Elance shows the current demand for people with Google App Engine skills is greater than those knowledgeable about Amazon Web Services. Audrey Watters of ReadWriteCloud saw the news and posted on the topic of IT jobs as the question for our weekly poll.

A new report from Forrester analyst Jeffrey Hammond makes the case that Google's support for open-source is endearing the company to developers, who will in turn use Google's development tools to drive enterprise penetration. Hammond also argues that the company's appeal to end-users, through search and tools like Google Docs, will encourage IT managers to spring for Google's enterprise services like Google Apps.

Terracotta and companies in the new world of distributed data environments have an increasingly important role in the cloud computing universe.

Simply due to the fact that they are forcing more change in the database market then we have seen in the past 20 years.

Terracotta is a case in point. Today, the company announced its new version of Ehcache, which can store a terabyte of data and 100 million objects in a single cache.

After a month-long test run running completely without it, PC Magazine writer Larry Seltzer has come to an interesting conclusion: "Java as a client-side platform is pretty clearly a failure, and all that remains of it is a big fat attack surface on your computer."

While that may be true, we think there are a few other things to consider before attempting at making your machine a Java-free runtime environment.

Last night in Portland, Oregon, the National Center for Women in Information Technology presented Kim Polese with the NCWIT Symons Innovator Award. The award is given annually to an outstanding woman who has successfully built and funded an IT company, in honor of the late Jeannette Symons, founder of Industrious Kid, Zhone Technologies, and Ascend Communications.

Listed in 1997 as one of Time Magazine's "25 Most Influential Americans," Polese has had a long career in Silicon Valley as the CEO of SpikeSource, the co-founder of Marimba, and the original product manager of Java at Sun Microsystems.

Today, VMforce was officially unveiled by its parent organizations VMware and SalesForce. The companies came together to produce this love-child and are now proudly sharing it with the world. The new organization, VMforce is disruptive to the core premise and architecture, bringing a new generation mix of services and software to the enterprise.

We took time to talk to leaders at SalesForce and VMware to absorb the news and start to dig in. In this post, we'll share what we know and insert speculation in the force in the market this product may exert.

Of all the technologies powering the social Web, few are as under-appreciated as the espresso machine.

We go gaga over great mashups, we drool over high-powered hardware, and we lust for private beta invitations to Google's latest whatever-the-hell-it-is. But none of these would be possible without machines to blast steam through finely ground coffee beans, and baristas with the skill to pull a perfect espresso shot.

Leading virtualization company VMware announced today that it's acquiring SpringSource for $326 million in cash, plus another $58 million worth of stock and options. SpringSource will retain its executives and become a division within VMware.

SpringSource is used in many top companies to manage the full lifecycle for Java applications in the enterprise, on the Web, and in enterprise integration. The purchase merges VMware's focus on infrastructure with SpringSource's expertise when it comes to enterprise application and rich Web development. For VMware, it's the beginning of a complete platform as a service offering for Java.