So two small companies are about to get caught up in a copyright/patent infringement lawsuit.

You may have heard of the companies: Google and Oracle.

Now, lawsuits like this don’t just come out of the blue. They’re expensive and cause a lot of distraction for both the plaintiff and defendant, so you can bet that Oracle has had many “behind the scenes” conversations with Google about its alleged Java IP infringement.

You can also bet, that Oracle has very good reasons to sue the pants of Google. Not only is the search giant using Java-derived technologies without a proper license, but there’s more to it:

Oracle also noted the interlocking history between Google and Java in its complaint, noting that “Google has been aware of Sun’s patent portfolio, including the patents at issue, since the middle of this decade, when Google hired certain former Sun Java engineers.” Google CEO Eric Schmidt led the team that developed Java at Sun prior to becoming CEO of Novell, and later Google in 2001. Urs Hölzle, senior vice president of operations and a Google Fellow, also played a significant role in Java’s development in the 1990s, and apparently other Sun engineers have joined Google in the intervening years.

Would you like some loathing to go with that bitterness?

You can read the complaint here.