Does the grant in the Java Language Specification help?
As suggested by Bruce Perens,[3] Oracle’s position may be weakened by this grant in the Java Language Specification:[4] However, because there is an emphasis in all these clauses about subsetting or supersetting, which Android does, this may not apply. Further, this grant does not include the right to sublicense. That is incompatible with any free software licence and means that only meeting all of the six onerous requirements would actually grant a patent license. Sun Microsystems, Inc. (SUN) hereby grants to you a fully paid, nonexclusive, nontransferable, perpetual, worldwide limited license (without the right to sublicense) under SUN’s intellectual property rights that are essential to practice this specification. This license allows and is limited to the creation and distribution of clean room implementations of this specification that: (i) include a complete implementation of the current version of this specification without subsetting or supersetting; (ii) implement all the inte
