The trial of the year (at least in our world of software) is beginning this week in San Francisco as Oracle will present to a federal jury its claims that Google snatched it’s Java code to create the Android OS. 

Brandon Bailey sets the scene over at the San Jose Mercury News:

Oracle CEO Larry Ellison will tell jurors that acquiring the Java software platform was the primary reason his company made a $7.4 billion deal to buy Sun Microsystems, according to attorneys in a high-stakes lawsuit over Oracle's claims that Google stole some of Java to create the popular Android mobile operating system.

That brought a stern warning Monday from U.S. District Judge William Alsup, even before the judge seated a 12-member jury, and before attorneys made opening statements in a trial that could have broad impact in the software industry.

Over at Bloomberg News, Karen Gullo describes Google’s defense:

Google, based in Mountain View, California, denies infringing Oracle’s patents, saying the Oracle-owned technology it’s accused of taking, called application programming interfaces, or APIs, isn’t covered by copyright, and that its use of parts of the Java platform was fair and legal.

“Computer programming languages are not copyrightable, and neither are Oracle’s APIs,” Google attorney Robert Van Nest said in a court filing. “Oracle accuses Google of infringement for doing what the Oracle API specifications describe. That is a classic attempt to improperly assert copyright over an idea rather than expression.”

The San Jose Mercury has more on the case’s legal implications, in regards to the software aspect we care about:

The case also raises a key legal question about whether copyright law applies to widely used programming tools -- known as application programming interfaces, or APIs. Experts say the outcome could have a broad impact across the tech industry.

The judge recently characterized the dispute as "the World Series of IP cases," because of its potential significance to intellectual property law.

Who would have predicted that our beloved Java would be the center of a billion dollar lawsuit?

In other Java-related news (because April—for some reason—is raining java down on us), Java is either the most popular programming language or the second most popular, depending on which study you want to believe: O’Reilly’s study, which counts book sales as an indicator of popularity, or TIOBE Software’s study, which uses search engines to derive its results.

From: ReadWriteWeb

All that said, let's look at the numbers. According to O'Reilly's figures, Java is the top dog in unit sales and in overall dollar sales. In total, Java book sales were up by more than 13%, selling more than 250,000 units in 2011. Java's market share comes in at 14.45% of the overall programming book market.

From eWeek:

Is Java’s run as the most popular programming language around over? Not likely, but according to the TIOBE Programming Community Index, Java no longer holds the top spot as the most popular programming language. The C language does.

Java has held its place atop the TIOBE index for the last 10 years—except for a couple of dips—but has been in decline lately and finally succumbed to C. However, the folks at TIOBE do not expect the shift to be permanent.