Six ambitious open source developers are forking Android.

They mean to move the Android stack - sans the litigious Dalvik and Harmony - to a legal JVM in the naïve hope of making Oracle's suit against Google "a bad dream of the past."

If they can pull it off without Oracle summoning its lawyers - probably a false hope - it would put Android on the desktop, any desktop. Gee, a Linux ecosystem on the desktop. Fancy that.

The project is called IcedRobot and it was just unveiled at FOSDEM, the Free and Open Source Developers' European Meeting held every year in Brussels.

There's no public code yet but they've got a cute logo and there's a clutch of pretty overheads at http://www.icedrobot.org/downloads/fosdem11/icedrobot-fosdem-2011-02-05.pdf that describe the "GNUlization of Android" as the "project that both Google and Oracle will love and hate."

They're currently decoupling Dalvik from Android's custom kernel and mean to run it on the GPL2-licensed OpenJDK and Hotspot, the primary Java virtual machine for desktops and servers.

They figure that "if it runs in the JVM like JRuby, Jython or Clojure, there can't be any reasonable claim anymore."

Patent watcher Florian Mueller figures that "by integrating Java code available on GPLv2 terms they hope to be safe from legal attacks on Oracle's part, but this depends on what exactly they do and how the implicit patent license contained in the GPLv2 would apply. The more they modify the OpenJDK code, the less likely they are to be covered by that implicit patent license."

He figures that some of Oracle's patents may be broader than the implicit OpenJDK patent license and that Oracle may also have patents that read on the extensions or modifications the IcedRobot team make separate from the original OpenJDK.

Having dug into the Oracle v Google Java case, Florian has little confidence that Google can mount a credible defense - let alone win - and senses that the IcedRobot developers, besides exposing Google's anti-GPL bias, are equally skeptical of Android escaping a massive rewrite and Google escaping damages. Not, he says, the lack of confidence Google would like the open source community to have.

Anyway, setting aside for the moment the sensation that IcedRobot is rushing in where angels fear to tread, its crew anticipates three projects really: GNUDroid, a Micro Edition; GNUBishop, the Standard Edition; and Daneel, a pure Java interpreter VM for Dalvik, that may include a JIT later on.

GNUDroid would run Davlik as a standalone application on Linux x86, QNX and Mac OSX. It would be the front-end for the Linux desktop.

They imagine GNUBishop being a full OS desktop distribution like Ubuntu or Fedora with browser plug-ins for Firefox, IE, Chrome, Safari and Opera as well as a desktop application framework so applications can be install on the desktop. It would target Mac, Windows and Linux and replace the Dalvik runtime with OpenJDK, relying on Daneel, the bridge between Dalvik and OpenJDK, for its core VM.

Nothing if not complete, the project also imagines a GNU AppBazaar for buying and selling IcedRobot apps that would help fund the project's further development with a tithe of 10% of the proceeds going to the Free Software Foundation (FSF). It also foresees, should it get this far, untargeted ads promoting IcedRobot applications that don't collect information about the user.

Icedrobot.org isn't quite working yet. Stay tuned.

See http://www.jroller.com/neugens/entry/introducing_icedrobot and http://fosspatents.blogspot.com/2011/02/alien-dalvik-and-icedrobot-can-they-run.html.