Without boring you to tears with nuggets of tech industry history, I'll try to condense the issue as much as possible:

Back in the early 90's, Sun Microsystems had a team of nerds working on a new programming language that came to be known as "Java." You see and use it today on the web. Back then, there was no web, but Sun was working on this language for awhile before there was a web. One of the technical leaders working on this project for a new programming language/environment was James Gosling, who is a very well known and highly respected software guy of a long and highly productive career. To say that Gosling is a smart guy is a vast understatement. To say that Gosling is also a nice guy is abundantly true. We'll get back to Gosling in a little bit.

Anyway, Sun's idea for Java starts taking off in the mid-90's. At first, there wasn't a huge interest in Java on the desktop, but as mobile devices started to proliferate, it became very clear that the conventional C/C++ complier tools being used on the desktop weren't going to really cut it on mobile devices - PDA's, phones, cameras, etc. Java suddenly had a market that really needed it. We examined using Java at cisco in various applications and ended up not being able to use it due to our high performance requirements, but when we first examined it around, oh, 1996, we were ethused with what we saw. It was a whole lot cleaner than C++, which is a festering dung heap of a language.

Back to the story:

Sun didn't make a whole lot of money off Java. They were a hardware company first and foremost, doing software on the side. After the dot-com crash, and the increase in Intel CPU power in PeeCee's, Sun's workstation market was gutted. Sun's troubles were evident all the way back in 2003 or so, but finally came to a head in the last part of the 00's. Through it all, Sun was a pretty good community player in the Silicon Valley "sharing of ideas" ethos through the 70's, 80's and 90's. Java got designed into a lot of applications and Sun's licensing for this was very reasonable and cheap. Sun never really knew how to make money on Java, but they were happy to see it used. As the industry needed a rapid development language for distributed computing, Java became a very widely accepted choice of language and development environment. Sun had various patents they took out on bits of Java, but they rarely enforced them with lawyers and lawsuits. They were much more of a "Hey, why not get a legit license and help contribute to the effort?" sort of company. Lawsuits were not in Sun's blood.

Sun craters in the late 2007 to 2008 timeframe. It becomes increasingly obvious that they're not making enough money to survive. There was one large software company who absolutely needed Sun's big multi-CPU servers to keep shipping their large database systems, and that was Oracle. Oracle had always been a software-only company and they charged plenty of money for their database software.

Oracle, by the way, was never known as a bunch of nice guys in Silicon Valley. Matter of fact, they're widely regarded as jerks and other nouns I won't use here on NAT. Culture flows from the top on down, and Larry Ellison isn't a terribly nice guy. Rich? Yes. Nice? No. Ellison is perhaps one of the most infamous bodily orifices in the Valley.

Oracle needed Sun's big SMP servers. So in 2009, Oracle buys Sun. Gosling (remember him? The guy who was one of the leading lights of Java?) decided that he'd rather work elsewhere in 2010, and very diplomatically says on his blog that anything he could say that would be accurate as to why he was leaving would stir up controversy, so he'd rather stay quiet. As an experienced guy in the ways of the Valley, I knew exactly what Gosling meant, but I won't put words into his mouth here.

Gosling then finds a new home at Google, specifically on the Android Project. Android had been using Java as one of the programming languages in their efforts going all the way back to the beginning (in 2007 or so) and Android implements several features of Java that Sun patented, but never much enforced. Oracle, when they bought Sun, also bought Sun's patent library, and now Oracle is enforcing the patents - some of which were the result of ideas of Gosling. Oracle's lawsuits in part accuse Gosling and other Java engineers of stealing the ideas when they left Oracle and went to Google.

Since Oracle is suing Google using language that says that Google "willingly" and "knowingly" violated the patents in question, damages are trebled if Oracle prevails in court. Oracle has not yet named an amount, but with Oracle being Oracle, you can bet it won't be chump change.

If Moto is looking for another software base than Google's Android, it is because of the possibilty of having to deal with Oracle's claims for damages and attending possible tripled rewards.