As mentioned in this blog posted by James http://nighthacks.com/roller/jag/entry/quite_the_firestorm, i kind of agree with him when he says that we need patents as defensive weapons, but what i don't understand is how can we limit ourselves from not using these weapons for offence. Oracle is and always have been the organization which thinks on metric system. The way we all open source developers think is that software should be moving towards a free and open environment: but can we really reach there without having organizations like Oracle, Microsoft? who will pay the bills? Although Google has a unique and interesting way of getting the money from open source software while also driving the innovation, small companies which depend on these open source languages and standards need more support from the community. Events like these are definitely not helping.
Finally i would say filing these kind of lawsuits, oracle is hurting the language it payed for !
P.S. - Sorry for the brevity, i expect my IDE to auto-correct my syntax errors :-).
