In the ongoing trial in the Google-Oracle Java lawsuit at the U. S. District Court in San Francisco, Google's executive chairman and former CEO Eric Schmidt took the stand on Tuesday, and strongly defended Android by refuting Oracle's allegations that Google had illegally lifted parts of Sun Microsystems Java platform for use on its popular mobile operating system.

Schmidt is among one of the bigwig tech industry names to testify in the last-week-commenced trial in the lawsuit which Oracle filed against Google after acquiring Sun in 2010. Accusing Google of patent and copyright infringement, Oracle claimed that the company had illegally used Java programming language for developing its Android software.

Schmidt - who was Google's chief technology officer when Sun was developing Java - said on Tuesday that, so far as his understanding of the situation and his experiences and interactions were concerned, Google had done something which was "permissible" and its development of the Android software was "legally correct."

While Oracle, represented by lawyer David Boies, has been trying hard to prove that Google was fully aware that it needed a license to use Java, but still did not acquire the license and illegally mimicked the Sun code while building the application program interfaces (API) for Android, Schmidt said that Google did not need a license for creating its own version of Java.

Noting that "an interface is a specification. a name," Schmidt said: "There's a collection of those names that forms the standard that Java uses. We, Google, implemented those interfaces in our own way."