Stefano Mazzocchi takes an interesting look at how Google is able to skirt around Sun’s various licensing traps for different Java platforms:

[...] Google announced the release of their Android platform, which would be able to run Java applications on a mobile phone but it would also be released under the Apache License v2.

This raised more than one eyebrowse, and sure did make me raise mine: how did Google manage to get Sun to license off a platform that could very well kill their own?

Turns out, they didn’t: their move was even smarter than Sun’s.

Today Google released the Android code and I took a serious look at its internals… and found the solution for the licensing problem. It’s called Dalvik and it’s the new name of Sun’s worst nightmares. [...]

I’ll spoil it for you: Dalvik is the name of Google’s Java-compatible custom virtual machine that runs the applications for GPhones. Stefano’s post is definitely worth reading if you’re interested in the licensing aspect of Android.