What it means is that anyone (from Oracle's perspective; and as Gosling makes clear, when Oracle was doing due diligence in buying Sun, the lawyers' eyes lit up when they heard about the patents) who writes a new JVM has to pay a royalty. How far Larry Ellison's demonstrated grandiosity takes it nobody knows at this point.

>>The reason, in case you've not delved into FOSS licenses, is that any application using a component licensed under the GPL main license must itself be licensed under the main GPL license. Otherwise you pay for a commercial license, in this case to finance Larry Ellison's next boat.
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>Not all the details of the lawsuit are yet known, but it appears that Oracle is suing based on Google's implementation of a JVM for its Android OS.
>Google extended the JVM to include additional functions/capabilities outside of the "normal" java JVM. This was the same thing that Sun sued M$ over years ago when M$ developed a specific JVM for Windows (it had features that were not part of the standard java that made it specific to Windows). So the intent is to keep the java the same for all platforms (at least this is Oracle's main point in the press...).