Stefan Mileschin

It would appear that judge William Alsup's quest to find the paid hacks in the Google and Oracle Java case was focused on Google.

According to Wired, Alsup demanded to know from both sides who they were funding to place blogs and news stories online.

Oracle admitted that it hired Florian Mueller, but not to write blogs. Google did not admit to hiring anyone.

Given that the world and its dog knew about Mueller, it did wonder who Alsup was referring too.

Now it looks like Google has been given three days to fess up the name of the sock-puppet it hired. Which means that the judge knows something that we don't, and Google's lawyers hope they can get away with.

Google's argument was that there were so many that indirectly or directly received money from Google that it would be pointless to list all of those people.

To Alsup that particular statement meant that Google has failed to comply with the August 7 order.

Alsup told Google to do its best. "Oracle managed to do it," he said. "Google can do it too by listing all commenter known by Google to have received payments as consultants, contractors, vendors, or employees."

Judge Alsup wants to clear up this issue of paid commenters, in part because it could have an effect on any appeal.

http://news.techeye.net/software/jav...r-sock-puppets