Oracle lost the patent phase of the trial. Oracle lost the copyright phase of the trial. Google's supporters, including me, are celebrating Google's victory.
There is another victory here for open source that is not so obvious but may be even more important than the two listed above. When Oracle sued Google Oracle not only failed to obtain any money but they lost the majority of the patents that they used in this case. This puts those companies who are contemplating attacking open source with software patents on notice (again) that by doing so they are risking losing their software patents. Lawyers may not have a clue about prior art which does not appear in the patent records but the open source community sure does.
"having two separate dev teams is redundant and a waste of resources, and will stunt growth."
There are advantages to the redundancy. One possibility is that the competition will result in a superior and an inferior product. The superior product will thrive and the inferior product die off.
Another possibility is that the two projects will fill slightly different market niches and thus serve the market better than a single "one size fits all" product.
The resources available are not created by a budgeting process like in a proprietary development. The resources are created by people and organizations volunteering to work on an objective that they like. Only having one project would not necessarily attract the volunteers who are attracted to the second project. In the Open Office - Libre Office fork its is obvious that each group of volunteers is not particularly interested in working on the other project.
Oracle lost the patent phase of the trial. Oracle lost the copyright phase of the trial. Google's supporters, including me, are celebrating Google's victory.
There is another victory here for open source that is not so obvious but may be even more important than the two listed above. When Oracle sued Google Oracle not only failed to obtain any money but they lost the majority of the patents that they used in this case. This puts those companies who are contemplating attacking open source with software patents on notice (again) that by doing so they are risking losing their software patents. Lawyers may not have a clue about prior art which does not appear in the patent records but the open source community sure does.
---------------------------------
Steve Stites