Opposition Mounts To Oracle's Attempt To Copyright Java APIs 187
An anonymous reader writes with a bit from Groklaw: "The remarkable outpouring of support for Google in the Oracle v. Google appeal continues, with a group of well-known innovators, start-ups, and those who fund them — innovators like Ray Ozzie, Tim O'Reilly, Mitch Kapor, Dan Bricklin, and Esther Dyson — standing with [Thursday's] group of leading computer scientists in telling the court that Oracle's attempt to copyright its Java APIs would be damaging to innovation." As usual, Groklaw gives a cogent, readable introduction to the issue.
Link? (Score:5, Insightful)
Where is the link?
Re:Link? (Score:5, Funny)
Slashdot readers needing a link so they can read the article? I see why you posted anonymous.
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But if we have no link, how are we to know which server we shall melt away?
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Re: Anyhow, my conspiracy theory is that maybe /. has reached a tippiong point where whatever corporation currently owns /. doesn't get enough click-referral revenue, so they've stopped bothering to link to the articles?
aha!!! I am inclined to agree with you. Though Timothy's history of bizarre posting behavior may mean it's just the same old same old, you may have hit upon the real truth with your conspiracy theory! I breathe along with you. [look up the meaning of conspiracy...]
Here's the link (Score:5, Informative)
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Where is the link?
Well, maybe no link is better than the typical Slashdot behavior, i.e., linking to the blog of that infamous paid Oracle shill... :)
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http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20130531131600482 [groklaw.net]
WTF?!? (Score:4, Insightful)
So Oracle think they can just jump in and claim ownership of APIs that are in the Java specification -- most of which were added to the spec via the JSR process? They have no chance here.
Re:WTF?!? (Score:5, Insightful)
On the contrary, they were really good at making people and distro maintainers move from their MySQL to MariaDB.
Re:WTF?!? (Score:4, Insightful)
A Java fork would be great.
Get control away from shitbags like Oracle over to some kind of foundation. Get rid of the fucking Ask toolbar spyware, improve the platform more quickly, etc.
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Wouldn't that basically be Dalvik? Just work on adding the missing libraries.
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But it compiles Java code and has a big chunk of the Java standard library. I'd call that Java, I don't care what type of VM its running on.
Re:WTF?!? (Score:4, Informative)
Java is already "forked". The OpenJDK project is since Java 7 the reference implementation for Java and is licensed under the GPL.
Nothing prevents you to write a custom installer without the Ask toolbar or whatever. Every Linux distribution ships OpenJDK in the main repositories.
Re: WTF?!? (Score:2)
Re:WTF?!? (Score:4, Insightful)
A Java fork would be great.
Get control away from shitbags like Oracle over to some kind of foundation. Get rid of the fucking Ask toolbar spyware, improve the platform more quickly, etc.
A fork wouldn't help since Oracle is asserting copyright on the API, not the code.
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Named for his 2 daughters, who were named by their mothers.
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Re:WTF?!? (Score:5, Insightful)
both money and control, The Oracle Way (Score:5, Interesting)
perhaps you haven't heard. Oracle grinds the last drop out of the turnip and takes the shoes for resale on the way out of the conference room. there is a reason that Larry Ellison can spend 3 months a year racing sailboats and flaunt FAA noise rules flying back home after quiet hours night after night. it's called money, honey, and they excel in it.
considering it takes Oracle longer to patch an exploit in Java than it does for Apple to patch an exploit, if indeed they acknowledge one, perhaps it would not be a bad thing to let ol Larry take 120 percent of nothing, and standardize on another universal API across the web.
Re:both money and control, The Oracle Way (Score:4, Insightful)
considering it takes Oracle longer to patch an exploit in Java than it does for Apple to patch an exploit, if indeed they acknowledge one, perhaps it would not be a bad thing to let ol Larry take 120 percent of nothing, and standardize on another universal API across the web.
This is the correct answer.
Re:both money and control, The Oracle Way (Score:5, Informative)
No, it isn't. Jonathan Schwartz has made it clear repeatedly, in court even, that Sun would never have brought this lawsuit. And he did welcome Android's use of the Java programming language when it was announced.
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Sun might not have brought the lawsuit for business reasons, but they set up the process and the licenses in a way that they could bring such lawsuits. Relying on the goodwill of a company not to sue you is foolish, because sooner or later they are going to come under new management and the new management may well decide you that it is in their best interest to sue you.
People should have abandoned Java as soon as Sun reneged on their promise to make it an open, non-proprietary standard through a standards p
Re:both money and control, The Oracle Way (Score:4, Insightful)
And they don't *want* MySQL to succeed: they want it *dead* in the industrial space, so people will use Oracle's much more prifitable databases. They bought Sun to get the commercial database customer list, to shoot that incompatible Sun architectural oddness through the head, and to shut MySQL down.
This is EXACTLY why Oracle have, I dunno, *doubled* the number of devs and QA working on MySQL! It's all a ruse! Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain!
Oracle do a lot of things. Things that waste tonnes of money--e.g. paying hundreds of staff to develop a product you're planning to discontinue--are generally not among them.
Re:both money and control, The Oracle Way (Score:5, Funny)
There's a difference between Larry Ellison and God:
God doesn't think he's Larry Ellison.
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This may be a move to if not monitize, maintian some kind of ownership over the java brand? I mean, perhaps its a misguided attempt to exert ownership over the technology in the face of offerings like OpenJDK? I'm just trying to understand what Oracle's motivation is.
it's two folding sides of a dollar bill.
first: it's cash money. they were getting(well, sun was/ oracle is) getting cash money from all(well, most) sold mobile smartphones through J2ME licensing. android phone manufacturers aren't paying that for the android phones they sell, so as even cheapo phones are moving to android.. to be honest there's not too many manufacturers selling j2me capable phones nowadays apart from Nokia(in the bottom end). they all(se, samsung etc) moved to android pretty much for the w
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AFAIK, replicated APIs were in java.lang.* - classes like Array and Exception which are basically baked in the specification of language. Even if you aren't going to touch Java the platform, you will need those if you use Java the language (you're aware of distinction, right?)
PS: So, are you saying that something like Wine is infringing, or that Google is not infringing?
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If they had used Perl and C++, they would be clear of the legal crap.
But make the barrier to entry higher. Maybe that would be a good thing, but it doesn't really go with the idea that Android is open. Plus, by using Java, they weren't limiting development to Linux/VS owners only.
Yes I know Perl can run on Windows, but realistically, how many will be doing so?
Hey Timothy, wake up! How about the link? (Score:5, Informative)
Hey Timothy, wake up! How about the link?
Here it is in case you can't find it:
http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20130531131600482 [groklaw.net]
"Innovators, Entrepreneurs and Funds File Amicus in Support of Google in Oracle v. Google Appeal ~pj"
The End (Score:5, Insightful)
However unlikely it is that Oracle wins this, if this were to pass it would be the end of the software industry as we know it.
I really hope that somehow there is some kind of backlash against Oracle when this ends. Well I can dream at least.
Re:The End (Score:5, Insightful)
However unlikely it is that Oracle wins this, if this were to pass it would be the end of the software industry as we know it.
I really hope that somehow there is some kind of backlash against Oracle when this ends. Well I can dream at least.
Oracle has practically every corporation in the world by the balls (i.e. all their corporate data is locked up in Oracle databases and business logic in Oracle applications). They could start killing babies and it wouldn't affect their bottom line.
Re:The End (Score:5, Informative)
I was there in the days when "you won't get fired for buying IBM", and IBM VPs would get flown in to talk to your boss' boss' boss' to tell them that their 14th level underling was considering buying a non-IBM peripheral, and that while IBM encouraged fair competition, the presence of a non-IBM peripheral 'might' delay support response until it was proved that the peripheral had nothing to do with the problem, and "your company might have to be shut down while the problem was worked out." It was extortion, pure and simple. And it worked until they lost the anti-trust suit (which started in 1969, lasted 13 years!)
See where IBM is now. It could happen to Oracle. Customers don't like any vendor having them by the balls, even when they are nice about it, and Oracle has never, in my experience, been nice. But those are cool boats! :D
"Where IBM is now???!?!" (Score:3)
What do you mean.. worth 230 billion dollars vs. Oracles 160? Having 10x the EPS of Oracle? 19th on the Forbes 100 (vs Oracles 89th) ?
I would think Oracle would LOVE to be where IBM is now.
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But IBM did nearly go bankrupt, and it is not at all the same company that it was then, either economically or socially.
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And it worked until they lost the anti-trust suit (which started in 1969, lasted 13 years!)
IBM didn't lose. The government dropped the case in 1982.
http://www.hagley.lib.de.us/library/collections/manuscripts/findingaids/ibmantitrustpart2.ACC1980.htm#bioghist [lib.de.us]
Re:The End (Score:5, Funny)
"They could start killing babies and it wouldn't affect their bottom line."
Of course it would affect the bottom line. Do you think they'd be killing babies for free?
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(Technically there are some open source web frameworks that support Postgres involved but I would consider that more of infrastructure rather than application space.)
Some of these applications process Millions or even Billions of dollars in transactions. They aren't going to be replaced by an unsupported product that the vendor will point to and say "
Re:The End (Score:5, Interesting)
However unlikely it is that Oracle wins this, if this were to pass it would be the end of the software industry as we know it.
I really hope that somehow there is some kind of backlash against Oracle when this ends. Well I can dream at least.
I do not agree with you. I think Oracle should win this. It's going to get far worse before it gets better. I'd much rather sooner than later. For instance: If there were ice everywhere and I were an Eskimo, would you try to sell me the ice? No? Then why do folks think it's OK to sell me, a PC owner, infinitely reproducible bits? It's because they have a fundamental misunderstanding of information and work. A mechanic is not granted a limited (70 year beyond their death) monopoly over the work they perform. They have an infinite monopoly to leverage before you do your work, after the work is done and paid for, then you have no monopoly. You don't get to charge each time I start up the car. You shouldn't get to charge for each copy of the bits, you can only do so because laws that support the economically untenable practice of Artificial Scarcity. The work has already been done. You want more money, do more work. Make an estimate / proposal, agree on a price, do the work. Do not seek rent for those who use the work afterwards, get assurance your work will be paid for up front... Like every other labor industry already does. Then you can put an end piracy, by abolishing patent and copyright laws.
Make no mistake. This will happen. It is starting to happen that those who "Publish" content are not necessary. We can all pay the workers directly now. Publishers add no value to the work. They will become publicists / advertizers / marketers of your ability to do work, instead of resellers of artificially scarce bits. This is the first Internet Generation generation -- growing up with fully connected in the Age of Information. The business models will have to adjust. You speak of the end of the software industry as you know it. Indeed. The way it works now is down right retarding, and ridiculously out of touch with reality. Oracle should win because it will point out how stupid Copyright and Patents actually are.
Further: No Scientist can condone the practice of operating under unproven hypotheses. There is no proof that Copyright, or "the software industry as we know it" is actually benefical for society as a whole. No one did any test. They all assumed it was so because the English had a patent and copyright law, so do we. That's bad science, and if you are a scientist, yes even a computer scientist, then you should feel it in the pit of your stomach: That dread that you are running your life and the entire economy of the world based on an unproven, untested, untenable hypothesis.
For Shame.
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There is proof in Oracle's behavior. ... or if we want to be literal highly probably odds that the sole reason for this is to ban Android and extort money from people and raise the cost of apps and phones and kill free apps on all but IPhones. Why else would Oracle do this and wow would they have a tight squeeze on the new mobile markets balls by this!
Copyrights are by their nature monopolies. Similar to patents but covers expressions rather than actual devices.
It can also be reasonably argued that this wil
Re:The End (Score:5, Insightful)
Back in the real world, how much would you think the asking price of the first copy of Photoshop or Lord of the Rings should be? And if your answer to that is to put it on Kickstarter, I'm going to laugh. If you want custom development it's going to be $50+ a day at minimum wage, many hundred dollars a day if you want it to actually work (if that's not a requirement you can put it on rent-a-coder too) and nobody's going to "take one for the team". And you've got no guarantee you'll get what you wanted unless you have an iron-clad contract listing exact deliveries with no cure, no pay conditions - and you still have to fight the developer over it. Hell, if any of those methods worked open source would already have taken over since you could hire people to work on it for you today, without changing the law.
People in general don't want that risk, plain and simply. I don't want to fund an author that is looking to write a book or even pay chapter by chapter if I feel there's a risk he'll just leave me hanging in the middle. I'd like him to write it, then I can choose to buy it or not. That is your analogy fail, I want to walk the proverbial isles of the app store the same way I walk in the grocery store, I want to see the finished product on offer and either pay or pass it up. That's how "every other labor industry does" but in your world everything in the store should then be free, because all the work is already done. Real world goods have overhead too, it's not like the price of a pound of beef is literally all cost attached to that pound, there were probably lots of fixed cost that'd be paid if that cow was there or not. But that overhead was spread across all pounds of beef the way a developer spreads his overhead (that is, actually writing it) across all the copies.
Or the TL;DR version: I think $1 for Angry Birds was a bloody good deal and don't see it happening without copyright to organize the "pooling".
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Angry birds was about the worst example you could use. There's a biblical amount of prior art. Angry Birds was in no way original, and had no copyright of their concept because they weren't original. They ripped off countless "slingshot" flash games that came before them... YEARS before them.
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Your DEADBEEF in the grocery analogy itself does not bear up. On account of precisely what VortexC was talking about--being able to sell any number of copies with no corresponding increase in production costs. Good luck in doing this with a cow.
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Back in the real world, how much would you think the asking price of the first copy of Photoshop or Lord of the Rings should be?
I dunno, what's the asking price for the first copy of GIMP? Pick a feature GIMP doesn't have that Photoshop does, that you want - how much do you reckon it'd cost to get a contractor (or the maintainers) to add it? How would that compare to, say, five seats of Photoshop?
Software developer is iterative. Yeah, paying for every feature of a feature-bloated piece of software like Photoshop would be cost-prohibitive. But if you start with a basic package, and everyone who wants a new feature rolls it back in, s
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$50 a day? How does that work?
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Photoshop was a low-end rip-off of other software developed and published mostly with government funds or to address specific in-house needs. Most of the libraries to build Photoshop were developed by others and effectively available for free. The original Photoshop also wasn't a very complicated program, and because there were several widely used existing versions from other vendors, the risk was nearly nil. So I'd say the first copy of Photoshop should have been nearly free.
In fact, that's true for a lot
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The current/next generation has been conditioned to keep buying the same thing over, and over, and over again. I can only semi-fault them. We were brought up on the same thing, but at least we
Re:The End (Score:5, Informative)
It was Sun that did that, then perhaps IBM. Certainly not Oracle.
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I'm sorry, but a "successor in interest" is not responsible for, nor the cause of the actions of, the succeeded.
*sigh* (Score:5, Interesting)
As a Java developer let me just say - God I hate Oracle... Can't we just turn Java over to the Apache project now? They would be far better stewards of the technology. Christ *anybody* would probably be a better steward of it than Oracle.
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As a Java developer let me just say - God I hate Oracle... Can't we just turn Java over to the Apache project now? They would be far better stewards of the technology. Christ *anybody* would probably be a better steward of it than Oracle.
Everyone keeps misspelling that. Correct spelling is now:
As a Java developer let me just say - God I hate Orcacle... Can't we just turn Java over to the Apache project now? They would be far better stewards of the technology. Christ *anybody* would probably be a better steward of it than Oracle.
Re:*sigh* (Score:5, Funny)
Typical Java approach. 3 lines of code for a two letter patch that changes nothing useful and doesn't match the documentation,.
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No, it's Oracle as in someone who huffs natural gas all day and then says whatever comes into their head.
Re:*sigh* (Score:5, Insightful)
The best thing you can do is to start moving towards languages with truly open specs and APIs, like C has. Go may fit the bill, but I'm not sure. The other thing is to do absolutely everything you can at home and at work, to stop *any* money going to Oracle and companies like them. Move towards open-source, or products from companies that play more nicely with others. If these companies don't get punished in the profit department, they don't take notice. There are enough senior people here and on other forums that a *severe* dent could be made in Oracle.
Re:*sigh* (Score:5, Insightful)
And end software patents. And a pony.
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Tasty sizzling ponyburgers, that's why.
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See? Nobody cares about the patents.
Bronies (Score:2)
Why should we end a pony?
One word: bronies [knowyourmeme.com].
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The best thing you can do is to start moving towards languages with truly open specs and APIs, like C has. Go may fit the bill, but I'm not sure. The other thing is to do absolutely everything you can at home and at work, to stop *any* money going to Oracle and companies like them. Move towards open-source, or products from companies that play more nicely with others. If these companies don't get punished in the profit department, they don't take notice. There are enough senior people here and on other forums that a *severe* dent could be made in Oracle.
No that is not the best solution because lawyers quote other cases like the laws of God of correct interpretation.
This means you can't use wine, reactOS, and maybe Linux itself as SCO can now claim they own the exact string of characters that spell out cat, dir, ls, sed, awk, shell, sh, etc. I believe MS bought rights to either C or C++ some years ago so they could claim printf is an intellectual property of Microsoft and you need a license to run it.
Severe dent in Oracle?? In the real world your bosses bos
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I'm not talking about punishing Oracle if they win. They should be punished regardless, even for just bringing the case to the courts. As I said, there are many senior people here. Douchebag marketing only goes so far.
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Re:*sigh* (Score:4, Interesting)
Personally, I don't care about the court decisions. There is often a difference between legal and ethical. If people start avoiding companies that only respect one of the two then perhaps things will be a little nicer.
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C and open source is a great solution,
absolutely, stood the test of time in a way no other language has.
right up until you have to make an identical GUI work across a Microsoft and *nix platform.
there you just show your lack of google-fu. There's Qt [digia.com] which is awesome, or even GTK [gtk.org], or a host of others.
Nowadays you need a GUI that works on Macs too, and mobile.
That said, the whole concept of a thick GUI is dying, the state-of-the-art is currently HTML-based GUIs, and they are as identical as you can get (if y
Intentionally unimplemented JS APIs (Score:2)
the state-of-the-art is currently HTML-based GUIs, and they are as identical as you can get
Which means you switch the client side from Java to JS. So how do you make sure that the JS APIs that you rely on are available on all users' devices? Apple refuses to implement WebGL on iOS, and Microsoft refuses to implement WebGL anywhere, for what they call security reasons. And good luck finding one offline storage solution that works across web platforms: some support only IndexedDB, while others support only WebSQL (a thin wrapper around SQLite). Even access to user-selected files didn't work on iOS
Java on Mathworld (Score:2)
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"Moving away" is a viable answer - we've been doing that ever since Java appeared and people said "we need to move away from the legacy crap and rewrite it all in new, cool java".
Today, you just have to recognise that Java *is* the legacy crap, and we need to move those systems away and onto something else. I would hope that something else would be better (ie not just easier for the developers, but something fast and efficient) but I've been around long enough to know there's little chance that'll happen.
St
Offline use (Score:2)
time for you to re-skill and get those clunky java GUIs replaces with HTML5 ones, then replace the back end with a REST-based API written in [something else]
And have it stop working the moment the user's device leaves the building and loses the Wi-Fi connection. Some people expect to get things done while riding transit, you know.
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You may or may not like Java, but the JVM is an awesome platform.
IMHO the best strategy right now for people with Java legacy code is to adopt one of the new JVM languages: Scala, Clojure, JRuby, Groovy being the most prominent choices. You can use a great modern language, but keep all the advantages of the JVM (excellent garbage collection, excellent JIT compiler, huge open source library ecosystem, portability etc.)
C/C++ is cool for systems programming or for stuff where you have genuine realtime requirem
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The only real benefit of all the things you've described for RAD development is the large support library, and even then, devs are complaining that there are too many libraries and frameworks that they cannot understand which ones to use when.,
The other things are irrelevant to app development- GC, you don't need GC to write apps, VB6 showed that, and frankly, its a lesser solution to object lifetimes than RAII (note that: object lifetimes- GC is terrible when it comes to deleting objects when you want them
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you forget that most of what you mention already happens. Think MS cared that you learned VB6/Silverlight/Linq2Sql/ASP.NET/etc and now those things are obsolete and your boss is clamouring for a cheap replacement strategy, whilst the geeks are clamouring to work on the next technology that looks good on their CV? Java's just another one of those.
Your career training is a short-term thing in our industry, always was.
I do agree, copyrighting Java will have a knock-on effect that will be detrimental to geeks e
No innovators needed... (Score:5, Informative)
(Why do APIs not have copyright protection? Because copyright does not protect facts, ideas, systems, or methods of operation. If a file contains just the API itself, it is not protected. If it contains comments, preferably in poetic form, the file cannot be copied, but still the API can be extracted. And making use of the API description is most definitely not protected by copyright law).
Re:No innovators needed... (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:No innovators needed... (Score:4, Informative)
If you were familiar with the case you would know that one of Oracle's main arguments in its appeal is that APIs are currently protected by copyright and Alsup's ruling (against making APIs copyrightable) has upset the status quo. Yes, IMO Oracle's lawyers should be severely sanctioned for tying up the courts with such utter rubbish, but they haven't been (yet) so this is what the fight is about.
Given this context, these Amici Curiae briefs make perfect sense. Oracle is lying through its teeth about what the current state of affairs is in order to swindle the court and make a quick buck. It was almost essential for people to refute Oracle's BS&F lies in order to keep the legal battle grounded in reality.
The law firm BS&F has been filing bogus lawsuits like this for ten years now. They started by getting paid $20 million for the Microsoft funded SCO attacks against FOSS. They will continue to clog the courts with their BS & FUD until it is no longer economically profitable for them to do so. I think they should be fined $20 million (or more) for their cumulative egregious behavior over the past 10 years and that money should be used to compensate those who have been injured by their shenanigans. You need to catch them in the act and punish them right away or they will never learn.
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This is literally a rerun of SCO v Linux (the real target of SCO v IBM). The BS&F game plan is to establish new law by precedent, in this case that API's can be copyrighted, which was the only tool they had left to snatch Linux ownership after failing to find any actual copying. Oracle v Google is exactly the same legal team and exactly the same legal arguments, and again they found so little actual copying that only API organisation is left to argue over.
The court correctly noticed that existing preced
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AFAIK those tool names could potentially be trademark protected (potentially because there's zero chance they would be approved in real life), they cannot be copyrighted even in principle for a whole pile of reasons. Even if they could, interoperability would override that, the same way it does for APIs. ...but there's a simpler answer. POSIX specifies all those utilities and one of the few things SCO v the world did decide is that SCO don't own or control the POSIX standard. They're listed at http://pubs.o [opengroup.org]
BS&FUD (Score:3)
The law firm BS&F [...] will continue to clog the courts with their BS & FUD
It surprised me that Google Search thinks you're the first to expand the F in BS&F's name this way. Google bs&f bs&fud (sco OR oracle) failed to turn up anything. Congratulations on coming up with something that isn't an old meme.
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The law is predicated on the results being desirable: monopolies are illegal unless they fit the terms of the (U.S.) copyright act, authorized by the constitution. If the result is a catastrophy, the law is unconstitutional.
That is what is important to the courts.
--dave
Be careful where you tread (Score:4, Interesting)
If Java API's are copyrightable, does this mean that Oracle has a copyright interest in every program ever written that uses those APIs? Does every Java programmer need to add a comment "Copyright Oracle" to every file that uses a Java API?
The software industry as a whole has been very cavalier about APIs. It is not hard to find examples of big vendors like Microsoft, IBM, or DEC claiming copyright ownership of APIs taken from elsewhere. In return, rarely, if ever, do they become involved in litigation claiming ownership. Some vendors (e.g., The Open Group) consider use of APIs (including implementation) to be covered by "fair use".
Oracle wants to tread in waters that the industry as a whole has deliberately avoided in the past.
I am not a Java developer, and give the way that Oracle has turned the language into toxic waste, I doubt I will ever become one.
Re:Be careful where you tread (Score:4, Informative)
No it doesn't.
However, if you were Google or IceTea you couldn't make a clean room implementation as the words and phrases to make a program source compatible is owned by Oracle.
By extension you must now pay Oracle $999 for JavaSE or whatever the fuck Oracle wants to charge as no competition is allowed to exist.
Microsoft would also use this to end SAMBA (A.D compatibility for Linux and MacOSX), Wine, and ReactOS. After all MS would own the exact words and strings of characters of each API call and can quote this case as an example.
Sco can rise from the grave too and claim they own sh, sed, awk, ed, vi, cat, and all of unix because it looks the same and has the same characters as Unixware etc cleanroom implementation or not.
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If Java API's are copyrightable, does this mean that Oracle has a copyright interest in every program ever written that uses those APIs? Does every Java programmer need to add a comment "Copyright Oracle" to every file that uses a Java API?
That's what Oracle claims, but even that conclusion is very dubious (if we ignore the premise, which is not dubious but plain wrong). I think Microsoft tried to create a Java-like language, or an incompatible Java implementation years ago. So if Microsoft wrote an API for that implementation, that could be a work derived from Oracle's API and might infringe Oracle's copyright. However, if Google purchased or legally downloaded the documentation with Java APIs from Oracle's website, didn't make any copies an
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They would be a derivative work, so arguably, yes. IMO, if Oracle somehow magically wins this case, Google's next move should be to buy Novell and counter-sue Oracle for violating their UNIX API copyright for the past 31 years, at which point, it's buh-bye, Oracle.
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They would be a derivative work, so arguably, yes.
No, it wouldn't be a derivative work. The API is the abstract definition how a library is supposed to work. It is not the library itself. A library implementing the API doesn't include the API. An application including the library doesn't include the API.
Compare Tetris v. Xio (Score:2)
The API is the abstract definition how a library is supposed to work.
Oracle's argument is that the abstract definition itself is original enough to be considered a work of authorship. This argument worked for The Tetris Company when it successfully sued Xio Software for copyright infringement a year ago for having reimplemented the game of falling puzzle pieces made of four squares.
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Actually, it does. A compiler cannot know how to work with an object without first reading a header file, class file, etc. that defines its interface. If (and only if) the interface definition itself is protected by copyright, then the act of including a header file or class file is, by definition, combining that interface definition with the new application's code, which makes it a derivative work in precisely the same way that a mix tape is a
I thought that scheme had been shot down. (Score:3)
Appeal, appeal en banc, and appeal to SCOTUS (Score:2)
Who believed Java would remain open? (Score:2)
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The users of Java are the developers of Java programs. The end users use Java in the same sense as someone taking a taxi uses a car. You don't care where the gas pedal is in the taxi you're taking, as long as the taxi driver is able to correctly use it. But the taxi driver certainly cares.
Re:Groklaw's Gas Pedal analogy (Score:5, Funny)
Analogies are like scabs. If you pick at them, they bleed.
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Can you provide any proof of that statement?
Re:Still ? (Score:5, Informative)
Already decided in court? Yes. Settled? Far from it.
This is about Oracle trying to appeal the former decision.
Re:Oracle is stupid... (Score:5, Insightful)
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I completely agree with this sentiment. I'm in favor of anything that will make fewer people use Java. Oracle has proved time and again that they can't even the lowest of bars for security, and the language itself has simply fallen behind other similar languages developers should use instead.
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I know everyone love to shit all over Oracle, but you cannot lay all the problems with Java at their feet and to try and do so makes you look rather, well, for lack of a better word, foolish. The problems existed long before Oracle acquired Sun.
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Actually I would have to say it went off the rails at 1.4. Prior to this it was a language that fulfilled a laudable goal. After that it was just down hill and that course has not changed. It is the classic too many ornaments on the tree condition.
Java as a language for the web is utterly laughable as evidenced by the massively bloated applications that are Tomcat and Glassfish, Weblogic and the rest.
But the ultimate insult is the world wide web. Stateless, anonymous and ultimately hideous to try and ac
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I agree with you. Last tuesday these jerks just tossed my garbage can on its side after emptying it.