Once it got the figure Google immediately started the legal wheels turning to try to get the estimate made by Oracle’s expert thrown out as “speculative and arbitrary,” full of “fundamental and disqualifying” legal errors before the case gets to trial on October 31 (Halloween, how perfect).

Google doesn’t want a whiff of his sealed “opening damages report” or his testimony getting anywhere near a jury because his conclusions “would prejudice Google.”

The five-page letter saying so that Google’s lawyers wrote to the presiding judge Monday is redacted so key numbers are blacked out but there’s enough substance left to see that Oracle wants a hefty chunk of Google’s mobile ad revenues plus compensation for fragmenting Java.

Apparently the estimate recalls that Microsoft paid Sun $900 million “to cover the risk of fragmentation to Java” when the two settled Sun’s antitrust charges years ago, suggesting what league everybody’s batting in.

The all-important royalty base that Boston University School of Management economics professor Iain Cockburn used has been censored but not the 50% royalty rate he applies against it.

There’s also the little matter of willful infringement and treble damages so 50% times three equals 150% and, yes, that can happen.

The letter confirms rumors that Google might have cut a deal with Sun before Oracle came on the scene but rejected the terms offered. The lawyers say that deal “would have included far more than the patents-in-suit.” The sum Sun wanted has been blacked out but it couldn’t have been more than Google’s staring at right now. It may come to rue the day it didn’t bite the bullet then.

We owe discovery of the letter to Florian Mueller who’s been tracking this suit as well as the 43 other suits currently lodged against Android like a hound dog after a fox.

It’s the first time in the 10-month-old case that the industry has gotten even a glimpse into Oracle’s demands and Florian figures that – worst case – the infringement damages alone would “exceed any money Google has made with Android so far” and could amount to “even more going forward.”

Besides if Google loses it may have to change the Dalvik virtual machine that’s at the bottom of the whole argument – Oracle doesn’t have to grant it a license – and that could impact all existing Dalvik-based applications. A defeat is also likely to impact Android’s “free” business model. Google might have to start charging significant per-copy licensing fees unless, as Florian hazards, it turns the thing into a loss leader.

Anyway, Google got what it asked the judge for – a Daubert hearing to sort out how Cockburn arrived at what Google calls his “unreliable, misleading” conclusions that it finds so “inappropriate for presentation to the jury.” The hearing to determine if he followed the right rules is set for July 21. Oracle will be heard from before then. Hopefully they’ll go light on the sealing wax.

Florian’s analysis of where he thinks Google’s case is weak and contradictory and where he thinks Oracle may not be a shoo-in is at http://fosspatents.blogspot.com/2011/06/oracle-wants-huge-cut-of-googles-mobile.html. The telltale letter is at Public Version of Google Filing Re. Oracle Damages. And Cockburn’s 27-page CV is at http://people.bu.edu/cockburn/CockburnCV.pdf.

MPEG LA, which is forming a patent pool – and being investigated by the Justice Department for it – has maintained that “VP8 is not patent-free.”

The newborn CCL effort has so far got 17 founding members that have “agreed to license patents they may have that are essential to WebM technologies to other members of the CCL” for free.

They are identified as AMD, Cisco, Google, HiSilicon Technologies (for itself and its parent Huawei), LG, Logitech, Matroska, Mips, Mozilla, Opera, Pantech, Quanta, Samsung, STMicroelectronics and its 50-50 joint venture ST-Ericsson, TI, Verisilicon Holdings and the Xiph.org Foundation.

However, patent watcher Florian Mueller says the 17, some of which aren’t even major patent holders, are “unlikely to collectively own all the patents essential to WebM/VP8,” and that the effort “fails to address the number one issue WebM’s critics point to: the risk of infringement assertions by entities that don’t have any strategic interest in VP8.”

He couldn’t help but notice that Google buddy and Android licensee Motorola Mobility’s subsidiary General Instrument Corporation, which does own codec patents, isn’t part of the initiative, at least not yet.

See www.webm-ccl.org.

It is the first time Microsoft has ever complained to the EC about anybody.

Historically the complaints have been made against Microsoft and its chief lawyer Brad Smith took note of that fact saying, “Having spent more than a decade wearing the shoe on the other foot with the European Commission, the filing of a formal antitrust complaint is not something we take lightly.”

However, one of the complaints that got the EC to open a formal antitrust investigation of Google last year was made by a small Microsoft online shopping site property in Germany that charged Google with skewing its search results.

Google has subsequently claimed that Microsoft was behind the whole ruckus. Of course, Google had complained to the EC about Microsoft’s web browser.

Microsoft’s own complaint apparently claims Google prevents Bing, Microsoft’s search engine, from crawling and indexing YouTube, which Google owns, and says Google – how’s this for ironic – is withholding technical information that would let Window Phone 7 software fully display video content from YouTube.

The metadata is supposedly available only to Android and Apple phones under a deal Google CEO Eric Schmidt cut when he was still on Apple’s board. Apple of course does not own a search engine.

Microsoft has also complained about Google’s advertising contracts prohibiting advertisers and agencies from using third-party software to compare results and move their own data from Google’s AdWords to Microsoft’s adCenter.

Smith blogged that “This makes it much more costly for Google’s advertisers to run portions of their campaigns with any competitor, and thus less likely that they will do so. That is a significant problem because most advertisers figure that they have to advertise first with Google. If it’s too expensive to port their advertising campaign data to competing advertising platforms, many won’t do it. Competing search engines are left with less relevant ads, and less revenue. And while this restraint isn’t visible to consumers, its effects are nonetheless felt across the web. Advertising revenue is the economic propellant fueling the billions of dollars needed for ongoing search investments. By reducing competitors’ ability to attract advertising revenue, this restriction strikes at the heart of a competitive market.”

Smith said Microsoft has given the EC a “considerable body of expert analysis” on search engine algorithms to support its case that “Google has engaged in a broadening pattern of walling off access to content and data that competitors need to provide search results to consumers and to attract advertisers.”

Google controls 95% of the search market in Europe and 65%-75% of it in the US.

EC spokeswoman Amelia Torres described the EC’s investigation of Google, which began in November, as still being at the “preliminary stage.” It could be years at this.

See http://blogs.technet.com/b/microsoft_on_the_issues/archive/2011/03/30/adding-our-voice-to-concerns-about-search-in-europe.aspx.

Westerman Hattori Daniels & Adrian partner Scott Daniels, a patent attorney who discovered the ex parte request and blogged about it, observed that “It is quite possible that Google will soon request re-examination of the remaining three Oracle America [Sun] patents. Google might request that the trial judge, Judge William H. Alsup, stay the case pending completion of the re-examination proceedings, but such a stay might not be granted since Google and Oracle America are direct competitors and since re-examination could not resolve the copyright allegations.”

But Google is also trying to defang the copyrights charges.

Patent watcher Florian Mueller blogged that Wednesday Google asked Judge Alsup if it could file a motion for summary judgment to get the copyright allegations thrown out of court.

Mueller, who figures Google’s not going to make much headway invalidating the Java patents, says Google wants the copyright charges swept away so it’s not ultimately standing there in the dock guilty of both patent and copyright infringement.

Copyright infringement would play to willfulness and willfulness can increase the damages.

Mueller figures Google might be able to squelch some the patents’ claims depending on what prior art it can put on the table but that’s not to say these are the only patents Oracle’s got. It might even have patents that read on other parts of Google’s business, who knows. Nor does he think that Oracle’s copyright case is particularly weak.

Google has argued in the copyright part of the case that because Oracle has only identified 12 files that it alleges were copied, “less than 1% of Android,” “their use is de minimis and is not actionable.”

Mueller is appalled at such an argument and says it “baffles all description” that Google would “suggest the creator of a large program should get away with a certain amount of unauthorized copying from someone else’s work.”

In his opinion, “if Google’s attempt to undermine the rule of law in connection with copyright succeeded in any way that would be bad news for authors – not only programmers but also writers, composers and other creative people.”

They mean to move the Android stack – sans the litigious Dalvik and Harmony – to a legal JVM in the naïve hope of making Oracle’s suit against Google “a bad dream of the past.”

If they can pull it off without Oracle summoning its lawyers – probably a false hope – it would put Android on the desktop, any desktop. Gee, a Linux ecosystem on the desktop. Fancy that.

The project is called IcedRobot and it was just unveiled at FOSDEM, the Free and Open Source Developers’ European Meeting held every year in Brussels.

There’s no public code yet but they’ve got a cute logo and there’s a clutch of pretty overheads at http://www.icedrobot.org/downloads/fosdem11/icedrobot-fosdem-2011-02-05.pdf that describe the “GNUlization of Android” as the “project that both Google and Oracle will love and hate.”

They’re currently decoupling Dalvik from Android’s custom kernel and mean to run it on the GPL2-licensed OpenJDK and Hotspot, the primary Java virtual machine for desktops and servers.

They figure that “if it runs in the JVM like JRuby, Jython or Clojure, there can’t be any reasonable claim anymore.”

Patent watcher Florian Mueller figures that “by integrating Java code available on GPLv2 terms they hope to be safe from legal attacks on Oracle’s part, but this depends on what exactly they do and how the implicit patent license contained in the GPLv2 would apply. The more they modify the OpenJDK code, the less likely they are to be covered by that implicit patent license.”

He figures that some of Oracle’s patents may be broader than the implicit OpenJDK patent license and that Oracle may also have patents that read on the extensions or modifications the IcedRobot team make separate from the original OpenJDK.

Having dug into the Oracle v Google Java case, Florian has little confidence that Google can mount a credible defense – let alone win – and senses that the IcedRobot developers, besides exposing Google’s anti-GPL bias, are equally skeptical of Android escaping a massive rewrite and Google escaping damages. Not, he says, the lack of confidence Google would like the open source community to have.

Anyway, setting aside for the moment the sensation that IcedRobot is rushing in where angels fear to tread, its crew anticipates three projects really: GNUDroid, a Micro Edition; GNUBishop, the Standard Edition; and Daneel, a pure Java interpreter VM for Dalvik, that may include a JIT later on.

GNUDroid would run Davlik as a standalone application on Linux x86, QNX and Mac OSX. It would be the front-end for the Linux desktop.

They imagine GNUBishop being a full OS desktop distribution like Ubuntu or Fedora with browser plug-ins for Firefox, IE, Chrome, Safari and Opera as well as a desktop application framework so applications can be install on the desktop. It would target Mac, Windows and Linux and replace the Dalvik runtime with OpenJDK, relying on Daneel, the bridge between Dalvik and OpenJDK, for its core VM.

Nothing if not complete, the project also imagines a GNU AppBazaar for buying and selling IcedRobot apps that would help fund the project’s further development with a tithe of 10% of the proceeds going to the Free Software Foundation (FSF). It also foresees, should it get this far, untargeted ads promoting IcedRobot applications that don’t collect information about the user.

Icedrobot.org isn’t quite working yet. Stay tuned.

See http://www.jroller.com/neugens/entry/introducing_icedrobot and http://fosspatents.blogspot.com/2011/02/alien-dalvik-and-icedrobot-can-they-run.html.

CEO Eric Schmidt, who twittered “day-to-day adult supervision no longer needed!,” will cede his title to Google co-founder and president of products Larry Page on April 4, the company said in a surprise announcement Thursday. “Larry is ready to lead,” he said.

Page will handle product development and technology strategy. Google’s other founder Sergey Brin, now president of technology, will simply have the title “co-founder” and focus on strategic projects. (Remind me, wasn’t it Sergey who wanted Google out of China if China didn’t stop censoring? Ah, youth.)

Schmidt will remain executive chairman, focused, he said, “externally, on the deals, partnerships, customers and broader business relationships, government outreach and technology thought leadership that are increasingly important given Google’s global reach; and internally as an advisor to Larry and Sergey.” Heavy on government apparently, an Eric passion. Presumably he feels slick with regulators.

Eric said it’s an effort to streamline the company’s clumsy three-way management structure and speed up decision making.

In a statement he said “the triumvirate approach has real benefits in terms of shared wisdom, and we will continue to discuss the big decisions among the three of us. But we have also agreed to clarify our individual roles so there’s clear responsibility and accountability at the top of the company.”

There was immediate speculation that the shift is connected to Facebook now being the world’s most visited web site.

Although many people would be glad to see the back of him, Eric suggested he will stick around.

The shakeup announcement came within minutes of Google posting handsome fourth-quarter earnings of $8.75 a share versus estimates of $8.09 on revenues of $6.4 billion, up 26%.

Whip lashed, Google’s stock initially didn’t know which way to go. Last we looked it was trading at $637 after-hours, up over the day’s high of $634 and down from a 52-week high of close to $643.

Well, at least the data generated by the government’s use of Gmail and calendaring will be segregate from everybody else’s cloud-borne data on servers located in the continental US. Other apps will eventually be segregated too.

In this Google’s aping Microsoft’s BPOS Federal (BPOS-F), its Business Productivity Online Suite for the government.

Google’s billing the widgetry as Google Apps for Government and saying that pushing government large and small into its cloud will save taxpayer dollars that otherwise go to pay licensing fees and maintenance. Like Google Apps for the rest of us it costs $50 a seat per year.

Google has won over Lawrence Berkeley National Labs and has pilots running the government-grade Apps at maybe dozen other agencies.

It’s been pitching its e-mail to the General Services Administration (GSA), the influential 15,000-seat agency that oversees government procurement, up against Microsoft, and the GSA has just certified Gmail and Google Apps word processing as secure enough for generic federal use, stuff that may be sensitive but not classified.

Microsoft is bidding its $120-a-seat-per-year web-based Exchange widgetry and expects to get the same minimal Federal Information Security Management Act (FISMA) certification for its BPOS-F, which naturally includes Exchange Online.

Ninety percent of the federal government already uses Exchange for e-mail according to the Wall Street Journal. The GSA uses IBM’s Lotus Notes.

Ironically, Google flubbed its June 30 deadline to lift the City of Angels’ e-mail into the cloud, a closely watched five-year marquee project that it’s getting paid $7.25 million to pull off, its largest government contract so far.

Some 20,000 of LA’s 34,000 workers will have to shift for themselves for a while longer on the town’s decrepit Novell Groupwise platform and Google will have to shrug off the embarrassment.

Google beat out Microsoft for the contract last October but has encountered an LAPD roadblock in how the cops’ want their data secured, if not segregated, requirements that were supposedly clear from the beginning. Other agencies have had performance complaints.

Until Google resolves the issues, the city is going to be paying for both systems at a potential added cost of $147,000 a quarter according to the LA Times – or it would be if Google and CSC, its integrator, hadn’t just agreed to absorb the difference at least until November, when the system is now supposed to be completely installed. Additional cost overruns are reportedly still being negotiated.

Google is downplaying the fact that it may have bit off more than it can chew. It would have preferred to do a bunch of smaller municipal installations first but fate decreed otherwise.

The Times quoted a council member as saying, “Google comes in with this sweetheart deal that was supposed to be state-of-the-art – supposed to make wonders – and obviously they haven’t performed.” The city council is supposed to review Google’s contract performance next week. The deal is supposed to save the city $5.5 million.

Google says on its web site that it took guidance from the cities of Los Angeles and Orlando in coming up with Google Apps for Government. It claims “most agencies we have worked with have found that Google Apps provides at least equivalent, if not better, security than they have today. This means government customers can move to the cloud with confidence.”

It reckons Washington spends $76 billion a year on IT, and state and local governments spend $56 billion.

He said Google expects the OS to be “widely adopted across the netbook sector” and “reach millions of users on day one.”

Reuters said Microsoft last Thursday compared Chrome to the early days of the PC when applications had to be written to specific boxes because netbook vendors are going tinker with the open source Chrome code.

Pichai denied the allegation claiming similarities in the base core would allow applications to run on all Chrome machines. He also told Reuters that “Chrome OS is one of the few future operating systems for which there are already millions of applications that work.”

Interfaces are also expected to vary.

Penetration of the Chrome browser on which the operating system is based hit 7.05% worldwide in May according to Net Applications. It was down a half-a-percent in the US to 4.51% from 4.97% in April. Google has claimed 70 million people are using the browser.

As a result Google is going to support some of the Java tools VMware got with its acquisition of SpringSource, enough so users can move relatively painlessly between Google’s cloud, any VMware-based clouds like, say, its VMForce cloud combine with Salesforce, and Amazon’s EC2. It will also make certain adjustments in the Google Web Toolkit to oblige the effort.

See, Google is cultivating its yen for the enterprise and claims that its App Engine, its platform for web applications, is now ready to support customers’ internal apps so it announced a version called App Engine for Business that big companies are supposed to use as infrastructure.

Its shiny new alliance with VMware plays to this card – supposedly removing fears of lock-in – and Google is kicking in a 99.9% (Three9s) SLA, SSL security and MySQL, a shift away from the vaunted Google BigTable that many users find way too proprietary as well as hard to use.

App Engine for Business is currently in preview and will cost $8 per user per application a month. General availability is slated for later this year,

Then where there are clouds there has to be storage and in that respect Google’s cloud, which isn’t all that much of a cloud yet, is starting to look a lot like Amazon.

Its newfangled beta Google Cloud Storage, which integrates with its App Engine, is initially free and when it goes GA should be priced to compete with S3 with base storage set at 17 cents a gigabyte a month, uploads at 10 cents a gigabyte, downloads at 15 cents a gigabyte in the Americas and EMEA and 30 cents in Asia-Pac with requests a penny a 1,000 (Put, Post, List) or 10,000 (Get, Head).

The latest fray started when Google got up at the Google I/O developers conference – like it was widely expected to do – and open sourced VP8, the video codec it got when it acquired On2 Technologies, the video compression house, in February for about $125 million.

VP8 will try to displace H.264, the proprietary codec that Apple and Microsoft are invested in.

VP8 is now part of a thing called the WebM project, which also includes the open source Ogg Vorbis audio format, and a container format based on a subset of the open source Matroska multimedia container.

Needless to say, WebM is royalty-free and already has the support of the majority of the browser community: the Mozilla Foundation’s open source Firefox browser, which Google still supports financially, Opera, Google’s own Chrome and at the last minute Microsoft’s upcoming Internet Explorer 9, due in, oh, say, 2011.

Well, at least it will allow playback if users install the codec themselves and Ars Technica thinks that’s to avoid any patent problems like IBM and Linux. Microsoft is sticking with H.264 otherwise.

What Microsoft’s gonna do about VP8′s implicit challenge to Silverlight may turn out to be a horse of another color.

Given its high-profile falling out with Apple Abode’s also promising to support VP8 in its proprietary and ubiquitous Flash, which would bring the widgetry to IE and Safari users despite what Microsoft and Apple might do. Otherwise, Flash is widely regarded as a dead man walking.

Google also means to create WebM plug-ins for QuickTime and DirectShow and has set Android support for the so-called Gingerbread release planned for Q4

H.264 lives at MPEG LA, a licensing operation in Denver that collects royalties for the patent pools it represents. Both Microsoft and Apple have IP in H.264, but H.264 (which is on its way to becoming H.265) is free for browsers to use for the next five years. After that the royalty picture is supposed to change.

It is widely considered likely that VP8 may infringe on H.264 patents and, if not H.264, then somebody else’s.

In a recent widely disseminated e-mail exchange Apple CEO Steve Jobs reminded Free Software Foundation Europe executive Hugo Roy that “All video codecs are covered by patents. A patent pool is being assembled to go after Theora and other ‘open source’ codecs now. Unfortunately, just because something is open source, it doesn’t mean or guarantee that it doesn’t infringe on other patents. An open standard is different from being royalty-free or open source.”

Google offers no indemnification for using its widgetry (doing so would be like painting a great big bull’s-eye on its back) so Apple (and perhaps the Hollywood set since VP8 doesn’t support DRM) could bide its time and pick off one of the weaker sisters like it’s evidently trying to do by suing HTC for Android patent infringement.

Naturally Google is taking the position that it doesn’t infringe apparently because earlier versions of the thing were never called to account. It may not even know whether it does or not.

There’s a side-by-side comparison of H.264 and VP8 at www.streamingmedia.com/Articles/Editorial/Featured-Articles/First-Look-H.264-and-VP8-Compared-67266.aspx which concludes that H.264 “offers better quality, but the difference wouldn’t be noticeable in most applications.”

Google claims that “VP8′s efficient bandwidth usage will mean lower serving costs for content publishers and high-quality video for end users. The codec’s relative simplicity makes it easy to integrate into existing environments and requires less manual tuning to produce high-quality results. These existing attributes and the rapid innovation we expect through the open development process make VP8 well suited for the unique requirements of video on the web.”

A developer preview of WebM and VP8 including APIs, source code, specs and encoding tools is available at www.webmproject.org.

Google admits the widgetry is incomplete and hogs processor resources but it expects better visual quality and optimized performance in a pending official release. GPU acceleration may bee off in the distance; ARM, AMD, Nvidia, Broadcom and Qualcomm are supporting WebM.

The current VP8 spec is final.

Digital video expert Jason Garrett-Glaser, however, calls the spec “imprecise, unclear and overly short,” “a pile of copy-pasted C code” that’s nowhere ready for prime time. He also told tgdaily it copies a lot from H.264, “way too much for anyone sane to be comfortable with it no matter whose word is behind the claim of being patent-free.”

For its part Google is already lacing YouTube videos larger than 720p with VP8 and YouTube is supposed to represent 40% of the video on the Internet. It’s still using Flash too.

VP8 is governed by a new Google-made BSD-style license so it can be used in both proprietary and open source software. It does not require that code changes be open sourced. It grants patent rights that terminate if patent litigation is filed against VP8 or its children. The license hasn’t been submitted to OSI.