Oracle has filed a law suit against Google alleging that Android mobile technology infringes its Java related copyrights and patents on Thursday

"In developing Android, Google knowingly, directly and repeatedly infringed Oracle's Java-related intellectual property. This lawsuit seeks appropriate remedies for their infringement," said Oracle spokeswoman Karen Tillman in a company statement.

Google has claimed that it does not use Java in Android but a Java compatible technology called Dalvik. The company has described the lawsuit as baseless and says it will fight it. The use of Android based devices has risen significantly. It nor has a market share of 17.2% from just 1.8% a year ago.

The open source Android platform has been adopted by a number of manufacturers and devices are now available across the world. Some experts say that litigations might scare some of the manufacturers away from the platform.

In the fight between Oracle and Google there appears to a third party that might gain from the situation, Microsoft.

If Android remains tied up in lawsuit, the Windows Mobile 7 platform could make inroads into the telephone market where the company is struggling recently. The market share of Windows Mobile has dropped to just to 5%. Analysts say that some manufactures might pick Windows Phone 7 when it is launched later this year.

Meanwhile, Oracle will see a serious damage to its reputation with the supporters of the open source standards. The open source community could be on the target of Oracle and unlike big corporations most cannot pay for large bills for litigation.

After the acquisition of Sun Microsystem in January, Oracle owns most of the software present in the open source including MySQL and OpenOffice. These software directly compete with paid Microsoft products and fear of lawsuit could make more people leave open source products and switch to Microsoft offerings.

Google and Oracle, pits two of Silicon Valley's most successful companies are competing against each other in a number of fields. Oracle with the acquisition of Java programming language entered mobile telephone markets where Google is present in a big way with its Android platform.

Google, led by former Sun chief technology officer Eric Schmidt has worked its way up in the enterprise computing market. The two companies are termed rivals and continue to fight for dominance in a host of different areas as Microsoft silently gains from the rivalry.