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Does Google Pin Copyright Violations On the ASF?
An anonymous reader writes "Florian Mueller claims to have produced new evidence that he believes supports Oracle's case against Google on the copyright side of the lawsuit. Oracle originally presented one example to the court, and that file was found to have been part of older Android distributions, with an Apache license header. Mueller has just published six more files of that kind and believes the Apache Software Foundation will disown those just like the first one because those were never part of the Apache Harmony code base. Furthermore, various source files from the Sun Java Wireless Toolkit were found in the Android codebase, containing a total of 38 copyright notices that mark them as proprietary and confidential, but Google apparently published their source code regardless."
Using the apache software license is not the same as attributing code to the apache software foundation, you know just like people is not giving their copiright to Berkeley or MIT or the GNU project... Seriously, this is the second story from this troll in a couple of days... This is not even flamebait, if so at least I could enjoy the show, instead: why post it?
From the referenced ASF blog:
Recent reports on various blogs have attributed to the ASF a number of the source files identified by Oracle as ones that they believe infringe on their copyrights. The code in question has an header that mentions Apache, and perhaps that is the source of the confusion. The code itself is using a license that is named after our foundation, is in fact the license that we ourselves use. Many others use it too, as the license was explicitly designed to allow such uses. Even though the code in question has an Apache license, it is not part of Harmony. PolicyNodeImpl.java is simply not a Harmony class.
That's all. No "blaming" involved on Google's part. No "disowning" on ASF's part. Just one annoying blogger trying for ad impressions.
In Florian's paper, he points these out as Sun PROPRIETARY / CONFIDENTIAL. However, it looks like several of the sources come from Sun's mmademo, linked here. In this rendition of the document, each source file's license is a permissive one by Sun (i.e., not proprietary / confidential).
The ones from microedition seem to be mentioned elsewhere under GPL.
Some sources seem to come from here, where some of the files (e.g., Control.java) have the proprietary markings, but these are interfaces. Control, for example, is an empty interface. Not sure if that affects anything.
I'm not qualified to make any sense out of this, but it seems like several of the sources Florian mentions are actually GPL'd sources with incorrect headers. There are a few trivial ones that (in the source I found) seem to be correctly marked proprietary. As much as I admire Florian's ability to grep, I think he's just found an error in some headers, not actual violations.
Since Slashdotters have more than once tried to dismiss this guy as some troll or just some blogger, perhaps you should do a little research. Florian Muller is the founder of the NoSoftwarePatents campaign, fighting the EU's directive on the patentability of computer-related inventions, which they eventually rejected. He's received several awards for his intellectual property activism and is considered one of the most influential in the field.
But yeah, because this is a potentially negative Google submission, people around here are going to attack the messenger and try to dismiss him outright, because they're biased toward pro-Linux companies like Google. This site's comment section is becoming a real trash heap.