Oracle's threat to Google mobile push

The legal war over software rights that Oracle launched against Google could hamper the Internet company's successful push into the smartphone market, industry analysts warned.

Oracle's aggressive move was also a "nuclear deterrent" that would spread much more widely across the mobile devices industry, with long-term implications for many handset makers and carriers, said Mark Driver, an analyst at Gartner. The lawsuit, filed in federal court in San Francisco, accuses Google of patent and copyright infringement over the inclusion of parts of Oracle's Java software in its Android smartphone operating system. Android, which Google makes available free of charge, has been taken up by handset makers including Motorola and HTC, and in the most recent quarter phones carrying the software overtook Apple's iPhone in global sales. Oracle acquired rights to Java, a set of tools that make it easier for software developers to write applications that run on many different operating systems, as part of its purchase of Sun Microsystems earlier this year.

The lawsuit shows that Oracle will seek to make more money from the rights to the widely used Java than Sun did, analysts said.