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Ellison Doesn't Know If Java Is Free
New submitter Emacs.Cmode sends this excerpt from CNet:
"Among the highlights emanating from U.S. District Court in San Francisco courtroom 8 today was Oracle CEO Larry Ellison's response to a question regarding the status of the Java programming language, which his company acquired when it bought Sun Microsystems in 2010. Asked by Google's lead attorney, Robert Van Nest, if the Java language is free, Ellison was slow to respond. Judge William Alsup pushed Ellison to answer with a yes or no. As ZDNet reporter Rachel King observed in the courtroom, Ellison resisted and huffed, 'I don't know.'"
Groklaw has a good write-up about what happened during day one of the trial and a briefer summary of what happened on day two.
That's probably the best answer he could have given under the circumstances, though I can understand why he was loathe to give it.
With all the legal complications surrounding it, I would be hard pressed to say with certainty one way or the other. As a concept, I would sy its free. As an actual product, I would have to review everything in it before I could say that it is.
"Have you ever thought about just turning off the TV, sitting down with your kids, and hitting them?"
What, precisely, does it mean if you say a programming language is free?
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
Just another rich out of touch moron who doesn't know anything about his company...
I don't think this lawsuit is going to be good for anyone but Apple.
Google might get a huge kick in the junk over Dalvik, Oracle might get a huge kick in the junk over whether or not Java is even an open platform or not, and the only ones who look to gain are Apple and maybe Microsoft.
Non impediti ratione cogitationus.
They pay them billions of dollars to look pretty and play golf. Ellison's the prettiest. And he smells like pie. If they really wanted to know anything about Java, they should have asked an Oracle employee who makes a immeasurably miniscule fraction of Ellison's salary.
Actually, Ellison's annual salary is 1$, no joke. He is paid in stock to avoid income taxes.
A language is nothing but a listing of words and how they are used. It is a cataloging of facts.
Facts, as such, are not copyrightable. You can't copyright the listings in a phone book, and neither can you copyright the contents of a header file. Because there is no creative content, and as far as the US is concerned, "sweat of the brow" does not give you copyright.
This is why Oracle is not going after IBM for Iced Tea, because Oracle they know they have nothing and are afraid of what the Nazgul might do in retaliation.
--
BMO
And I'll be god damned if we're not going to make that money back! The world owes us big time!
http://news.cnet.com/8301-1001_3-10315648-92.html
I've received stock in lieu of a salary increase. Trust me, you still pay quite a bit in income tax...any income from the sale of stock is taxable income.
Actually, Ellison's annual salary is 1$, no joke. He is paid in stock to avoid income taxes.
Does he have to pay tax when he cashes in the stock?
If so, how does he come out ahead?
(And if no, why isn't he covered with tar and feathers.)
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
He has enough real money coming from other sources. He doesn't have to sell the stock he gets from the company.
Capital gains tax is 15%. Thus all the controversy with Warren Buffet/Mitt Romney/et al paying a lower tax rate than their secretaries.
A witty saying proves you are wittier than the next guy.
http://skife.org/java/jcp/2010/12/07/the-tck-trap.html
For one thing, you don't have to sell stock to use it. You can borrow against its value and, if you have enough, can essentially do so indefinitely.
It's also taxed at capital gains rates if it's sold, which are much lower than standard income tax rates (15% maximum under US law currently for investments held for at least a year). Capital gains can also be offset by tax losses, which can carry forward forever, or through structured sales.
It's actually because Larry couldn't understand the word "free" in the context of an Oracle product.
What would Stallman testify to?
"You see, when we say 'Free', we mean not just free as in cost, but Free as in Freedom, or as we sometimes say, 'libre software'. This means that software which does not place restrictions on the develope-"
"Yes or no, Mr. Stallman?"
"Well, your honor, to be Free Software means that one follows the guidelines of the Free Software Foundation-"
"Yes or no, Mr. Stallman?"
"To be technically be Free, Java would have to-"
"Yes or no, Mr. Stallman?"
"I'd just like to interject for a mo-"
"The court finds the witness to be guilty... I don't know how, but he is somehow."
Ok, let's go there.
If you sell the stock less than 12 months after exercising the stock option, you pay regular income taxes.
If you sell the stock 12 months after exercising the option, you pay 15%.
http://www.smartmoney.com/personal-finance/taxes/taxes-on-nonqualified-stock-options-9304/
http://www.smartmoney.com/personal-finance/taxes/taxes-on-incentive-stock-options-12196/
A witty saying proves you are wittier than the next guy.
If the core of the lawsuit is over the free parts of Java, are you telling me Ellison was not even prepped enough to answer that question? Who will get fired over that I wonder?
I hate being bipolar; it's awesome!
Let's be fair here, Ellison isn't a rich out of touch moron, he just hasn't caught up on work lately because he's too busy working on his yacht racing. And it's an uphill battle. He even had to pay another team to race against him in a race that he's paying for.
There's no -1 for "I don't get it."
Have you ever in your life posted a comment worth reading?
Court cases are not a giant free for all. Read up on deposition. Google asked this question before the live trial AND it was answered by Elison as bing correct, java is free. He knew the question was coming because Google lawyers told him well inn advance that it would and he submited his answer in writing. Now in court he suddenky doesnt know? How gullible are you?
Elison is a dinosaur who just hates google for not using oracle databases. Google was smart enough to stay away fro, that steaming pile of crap. If only they had been smart enough to stay away from Java. Ms and Apple were.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
You have no idea what you are talking about. Capital gains is obviously a form of income tax. So are dividends, gambling winnings, rental properties, etc. They are not all taxed at the same rate, but that's totally irrelevant.
Everything you put on your 1040 is a form of "income tax". That's why it's official name is "Form 1040, U.S. Individual Income Tax Return". There really isn't even any debate on it, the IRS clearly states capital gains are part of your income tax.
Yeah, Stock Options are regular income if sold less than 12 months after exercise and Long-Term Capital Gains (taxed far lower) if after. However, in the second case, I really don't see how he could avoid some AMT penalty...
In Larry's case, is he paid in Stock Options or in Stock (common or restricted)? 'cos if it's the latter, he still pays the standard income tax on the face value at vesting time and can pay the low rate only on the spread when he sells.
It's not that hard to get the shares turned over to a holding company owned by the CEO that is based in a tax-friendly country. Maybe they closed this one by now, but there are plenty of tricks to move your money^wassets around in such a way that you don't pay taxes anywhere. Moving the assets around costs you money, but if they are worth enough, it's cheaper than paying taxes. If you move ten times as much as the threshold, you hardly pay more in total, making it way cheaper. People like Ellison are moving way more than ten times the threshold...
I was promised a flying car. Where is my flying car?
And when you are already the 6th richest man on the planet you don't need money coming in from other sources, anyway. Salary, stock grants, whatever, none of those are motivation to help Oracle succeed as much as his 25% share of the company...
Actually, he's partially correct. He would have to pay regular income tax on any spread of purchase price (which could be 0 for RSAs) and fair market value on the date he received them. Cap gains (or losses) would be on the difference between that FMV and the price at which he sells them (if/when he ever does).
It's a bit more complicated for ISOs (AMT instead of income) but Ellison most definitely would get NQOs because ISOs are limited to $100K FMV, which would be a joke to him (I'm sure he pays more than that for a week of upkeep on his yacht).
It is about violating patents. Any damages that result of that possible violation should have a monetary value attributed to them, if you want the violator to be liable to pay you damages. You are suddenly looking at the legal definition of "free" in order to assess the damages.
The trick question here is that even if you open the source code up and allow anyone to download and use the compiled product, it could still not be "free". There could be a profit model around the right to put the name of the product on other products using the technology, or the right to redistribute the product, or the right to claim your hardware is compatible with it. These are just examples, there are more business models to make money from open source software that can be labeled "free" in specific cases.
This means that there is no binary answer to the question if Java is free, without a lot of context added to it. Ellison's answer is the only right one in his position, since the question was phrased in such a way that he'd be damned if he answered yes or no.
I was promised a flying car. Where is my flying car?
Yes and no.
My understanding is that if an employer gives you stock outright as part of your compensation, you must pay federal earned income tax on the fair-market value of the stock as of when they gave it to you, which would be 35% for the last dollar earned by someone in the top tax bracket. You also pay federal capital gains tax on any increase in price since then, up to 35% if you held the stock less than a year, likely 15% if you held it more than a year. (It could be 0% if more than a year and your income is less than a certain amount, but if so you probably don't have any stock anyway.)
You might say the 15% is an extraordinary low rate, but then again, if you were just paid a like amount of cash, you could have used it to buy the stock at its fair-market value and achieved the same overall tax rate anyway. The real trick is to (1) have enough spare money that you don't need this income for at least a year, possibly a lot longer depending on market conditions, and to (2) know what stocks will gain so dramatically that your initial investment seems insignificant. If you can do those things on most of your income, the low tax rate is just the icing on the extraordinarily large cake you can easily afford to have and eat, too...
Of course there are some loopholes, but I think they're only practical for "job-creators" like Mitt Romney, not regular folk like you and me. (And for the record, some of my income was considered long-term capital gains, but apparently not nearly as much as Romney's; my tax rate was much higher.)
I suppose the most accurate way to answer is "it depends what you mean by 'Java' and what you mean by 'free'", but that makes it sound like you're being a weasel.
Ellison's the prettiest. And he smells like pie.
Cowpie?
When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
I think Ellison is the co-founder of the company.
I saw a story awhile ago that Facebook increased their line of credit by a few billion to pay the taxes of employees for selling stock. I assume zuckerberg didn't want to pay a billion in taxes. I don't know how that works, you get taxes for making money, the company pays those taxes,which is income from the company, which you end up having to pay taxes on.Of course with over 71,000 pages in the tax code there is probably a loophole to allow this.
Let me explain the eternal september....
Help stamp out iliturcy.
Yeah, bullshit. iOS pushed its own, and gosh, those poor developers, none of them managed to get programming quickly. Oh wait, which app market is compeltely dominating again?
If google had been smarter they would have made Java an option, not mandatory. Some Google Java fanboy made this choice and now the company is in trouble for it. As much as I dislike Oracle for all this, a part of me hopes they win, just to get rid of Java. Why on earth burden a full unix OS with just one language and a slow one at that.
Maybe if Oracle wins, MeeGo gets a new look. Now that is a nice development platform. Code in anything you bloody well want. A man's phone. I user perl on my phone, just because I can! (typing it on a virtual keyboard is seriously masochistic)
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
A link might be helpful...
Excuse me, wtf r u doin?
Blue Ray players license Oracle's JVM. That's reasonable, Oracle/Sun wrote that. Google wrote their own VM from scratch that doesn't work anything like Oracle's JVM. The only thing it has in common is: a bunch of APIs and nine lines of code (added by accident and long since removed). That's it. That's the basis of Oracle's infringement claims.
APIs have long been held to be uncopyrightable. Oracle is trying to change well-established case law, and if they succeed, it's going to raise a shitstorm, not just with Java users, but throughout the industry!
The source code inside Android is different from Java because Google wrote it from scratch. Mr. Jacobs said yesterday that there was copying, but that there was not a lot of it. 9 lines out of 15,000,000. These lines came from a developer that Google hired from Sun late in the development of Android, and it should not have happened.
Didn't Google's lawyer just affirm that an employee of Google did use a small amount of Sun's code and Google knew it was wrong and that it shouldn't have happened?
I just read up on Yakov Smirnoff (sounds like the vodka) and realized what these jokes were about. I'd have thought the right way to describe them would have been something like 'In USA, you break laws, in USSR, laws break you', instead of America and either Russia or Soviet Russia. After all, Soviet Russia is a somewhat nebulous term, and could easily mean either the Soviet Union, or the Russian federation. But what Smirnoff was describing was applicable not only in Moscow, Leningrad, Gorky, Sverdlovsk, but also outside the RSFSR but within the USSR, as in Kharkov, Yalta, Frunze, Alma Ata, Tashkent, and so on. Hence the usage of Russia, as opposed to the USSR, to describe what he was describing, was a tad inaccurate.
It seems the judge has a sense of humour, at one point he apparently advised the jurors thusly:
"He told the remaining candidates to avoid seeking information about the case from sources outside
the courtroom. They should not, he added, look it up on Google."
lol
However, in the second case, I really don't see how he could avoid some AMT penalty
Use the stock as colateral for a gigantic line of credit, only pay off the interest and only pay it with money from the line of credit. From what I can tell you can do this until your dead and never pay a cent in tax (unless the stock inconvienently pays a divedend).
As to TFA, Larry should have taken a leaf from the politician's play book and replied "I don't recall". Documentation can easily demonstrate beyond reasonable doubt that you do 'know' something, but it cannot be proven that you remeber it, all the opposition can do is point out he has a remarkably convienient memory.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
People learned for Apple, for a piece of that giant market. Many people learned Java for the same reason.
If you look at what you have to program in to make an iOS app (Objective C), I am pretty happy with Google's choice.
AnimePapers.org: Anime Wallpapers Handled With Care
As someone with a tax accounting background (but not currently working in that field) I'll do my best to add a little clarity to the issue.
Stock compensation will require an immediate tax payment ONLY if it is without conditions. If, for example, the company granting the stock to you puts a two year period in which you must maintain employment before you can sell the stock then you can avoid immediate payment of taxes and it gives you time to take advantage of some benefits (though it gets pretty hairy from that point trying to claim value reductions or reduced value for the limitation of liquidity).
In response to your other comment about being able to take a like amount of cash and buy the stock at fair-market value to achieve the same tax rate that is not true because you would expose yourself to double taxation (which is the reason most people put a before-tax investment into their 401k). If you received a million dollars in cash you would end up paying your income taxes on that amount and then capital gains taxes on the stock as well.
As a side note, if a company is trying to reduce tax liability themselves they can compensate employees in stock, treat it as an expense akin to cash payouts, and reduce their overall burden. Corporations always win on matters like that.
One of the real brilliant things these billionaires do is, after covering basic taxes, not sell the stock at all. If you don't sell it you avoid tax consequences. Larry Ellison "borrowed" against the value of his stock to buy his giant yacht and doesn't pay a dime in taxes. If he keeps them for his whole life he can pass them to his heirs and the income tax will never have been paid (heirs only pay a tax on appreciation of value since the death of the owner, often a fraction of the true value of the stock).
-Not To Be Taken As Professional Advice, Consult A CPA/Lawyer before making any decisions.-
AnimePapers.org: Anime Wallpapers Handled With Care
After reading Oracle's slides, with Google's emails about them trying to hide the fact that they were circumventing the need to obtain a Java ME license ("scrub some Js", "do not demonstrate to Sun lawyers"), and the talk about the GPL "infecting" software, I think that "do no evil" turned from a motto into a joke. They behave as bad as Microsoft, plus they collect a plethora of personal information about every single individual on the net. They're starting to look like a prototype of evil.
They order two martinis. The guy behind the bar pours them two Budweisers.
"This martini is great," rave Larry and Timmy, "what's your secret?"
"I dunno, the bartender went out to get some cigarettes, I'm just the owner."
Set your phasers on "funky"!
In Soviet Russia, memes hate you!
I user perl on my phone
In Soviet Nokia perl user YOU!
As an owner of a dividend paying stock, you are paying the corporate tax rate before you are paying your dividend, because the dividend is paid out of corporate after-tax profits.
Take the Buffer rule as an example of a lie. Obama pays less than his secretary, Buffet pays much more, in both absolute and relative terms.
Buffet is the biggest shareholder of BH, he pays himself 1% salary of his earnings, that's 40,000,000, on which 35% is paid by his corporation (that's his money, and actually it's 29% and not 35%, he is fighting IRS about that) and then he pays 15% on top, so his real rate is 44.75% (if BH pays 35% tax first).
Now, he only pays himself 1% of his real income, so 99% stays in the company, it's deferred from POV of taxation, he ain't touching that now. But if he wanted to take that money out, he'd pay the normal income taxes on it.
Of-course when asked recently about it, he said he is going to DONATE all his money after death, but that means his 'rule' wouldn't apply to him anyway, it's all propaganda (as shown by the 29% vs 35% corporate tax fight with the IRS).
Of-course that rule is more applicable to Obama, who is paying 20.5% income tax, not 15% on top of 35% (well, 29). Of-course Obama's salary is paid out of income taxes collected from productive people (or it's printed money, so it's collected from everybody who holds dollars and other USD denominated assets via inflation). In reality Obama isn't putting anything into economy except for his book sales. Also government employees do not pay income taxes, it's an accounting trick, gov't can't collect income taxes from itself, it can only shuffle money around that it steals from actual working people.
In any case this rule will decrease the amount of available investments, because the new 30% tax will simply prevent people from paying themselves the dividends, because it will increase the tax load on the investor from 44.75% to 54.5%, that's actually a 19.5% raise in dividend tax.
So people would rather leave their money in whatever bonds, not take it out as income, but where do people think INVESTMENT CAPITAL comes from? There will be less investment capital available for people to try and get it to start new companies, it's going to prevent quite a number of businesses and jobs from appearing!
You can't handle the truth.
A Google engineer, Tim Lindholm, said in a February 2006 e- mail that the company was in negotiations for a Java license. Google didn’t agree to the terms of a type of license that allows companies to use Java code and write new code on top of it which “you have to give back to the open-source community,” Jacobs said.
“You can’t keep it for yourself,” the Oracle lawyer said. “They broke the basic rules of the Java programming community.”
So I don't get why the open source crowd is all pro Google on this.
If google had been smarter they would have made Java an option, not mandatory.
To be fair, there is the NDK, which allows C/C++, and I've heard rumbling about Mono-esque C# implementations.
Never having used them, though, I couldn't say how complete they are. I imagine there is some Java glue involved for UI, etc.
I vote based on politicians' actions, unless contrary to my preconceptions. Often wrong, never uncertain. #iamthe99%
Google has never denied that that code was there. It was testing code, not code that shipped as part of Android. Once they found out, when Oracle told them it was there, they removed it. That's how the system is supposed to work, apart from the lawsuit and judges part.
They have agreed to it, and have included it in the 'facts already agreed' lists for this case. Get it out of the way quickly, give it all the importance it deserves. PAP,HTSH.
Prediction for end of Universe #42: Fencepost error in Quantum_bogosort.cpp
Kudos to Microsoft!
Never mind that in its initial versions it was a horrible rip-off of Java.
"Among the highlights emanating from U.S. District Court in San Francisco courtroom 8 today was Oracle CEO Larry Ellison's response to a question regarding the status of the Java programming language, which his company acquired when it bought Sun Microsystems in 2010. Asked by Google's lead attorney, Robert Van Nest, if the Java language is free, Ellison was slow to respond. Judge William Alsup pushed Ellison to answer with a yes or no. As ZDNet reporter Rachel King observed in the courtroom, Ellison resisted and huffed, 'I don't know.'"
I find it incredible that Larry Ellison wasn't prepared for a question like that. It is one of the crucial questions around Java 0 in some ways (.ie. usage) it is free, in other ways (.ie. language spec, the trademarked name) it is not. For all the love or hate towards this person, Ellison is a very sharp individual, so it is really baffling that he wasn't prepared for this question at all.
Time will tell if this was a fatal blunder or not.
You're confusing patents with copyrights. Only ideas can be patented (not specific implementations), and only specific implementations can be copyrighted (not ideas).
The idea of Git cannot be copyrighted because it's an idea. In contrast, implementations of Git can indeed be copyrighted. What's more, any given implementation of Git will have its own copyright, and those multiple copyrights held by various Git implementations can be all different to each other.
Note that there is an important exclusion in respect of Git APIs: they cannot be copyrighted as that would prevent interoperability between differently licensed implementation of Git. This is the practical reason why APIs have been excluded from copyright protection for some 5-6 decades, and it applies to Java as much as to everything else.
So that's why you are dramatically wrong. The fact that ideas can require much creativity is undeniable, but ideas cannot be copyrighted.
I believe you have this mixed up. Capital gains are taxed at 15%. Earned income tax for top earners is ~36.5%. Obama WANTS to implement the Buffet rule which would raise this top bracket to 39%. Also Obama has not let the Bush tax cuts expire, as they are still in place.
Yep. This was big a few years ago when people were still flipping houses. People were forced to begrudgingly stay in their house for longer than 12 months (the horror!) to avoid paying the penalty tax.
I still love
Q: What's the difference between Larry Ellison and God?
A: God doesn't think he's Larry Ellison!
You find calculations on your news shows? I don't watch Fox, I am not in USA, then again, I don't watch CNN nor MSNBC nor whatever else you've got going there.
You can't handle the truth.
9 lines out of 15 million is well below any reasonable threshold of incidental copying that might occur simply because one only intended to copy a general idea and not the literal code.
Ideas cannot be copyrighted.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
Larry Ellison "borrowed" against the value of his stock to buy his giant yacht and doesn't pay a dime in taxes.
This is one thing that has always puzzled me: if Ellison is "borrowing" the money (against hist stock portfolio) presumably at some point he needs to pay the "loan" back....Is it just how double ledger accounting is done that people are okay with having an outstanding loan on their books to Ellison (which in the intricacies of the double ledger counts as an asset for the entity giving the loan -- In which case the "loan" never really needs to be payed back?).
-- The Genesis project? What's that?
Let's not forget that Oracle pays dividends. Depending on your jurisdiction, dividends are anywhere from tax-free up to a certain amount or are taxed at an extremely preferential rate. The reasoning is that the corp has already paid corporate income tax on the cash being doled out.
"I promise to tell the truth, and nothing but the truth" "as best I recollect" "as best I can" "to the best of my ability"
For humans, "Reality is self-induced hallucination." "Give me the uncorrupted and unbiased forensic facts, mam."
Believable humans never tell the truth, but typical politicians and clergy always lie.
So, what is justice to do, hopefully remain blind.
Unaccountable leaders are masters, and unrepresented people are slaves. How do US and EU fare?
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Yet another reason why java sucks. Would you use a bandsaw if you could only use certain speed, blades and positions after paying the manufacturer extra? Oh... and we aren't exactly certain what speeds, blades and positions require fees. You won't know until after you've made and sold a product cut by the bandsaw. Just say no to Java...
APIs are uncopyrightable, and if you develop a clean-room solution, then you can prove that what you have created was not a derivative work.
Google demonstrably did not make a clean-room copy. Therefore they are going to need to use some other method to show that their product is not a derivative work. There are ways to do this, for example, when GNU was copying Unix, they would sometimes use a different algorithm than the one used by AT&T.
But in this case, it looks like it might be hard for Google to show their product is not a derivative work.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
"Free" is such a vague term subject to loose interpretation. However, I would say that anything that is under a license is not free because it does have restrictions, including some monetary ones.
You lost me. I get paid in part like this - stock units that vest after so much time has passed provided I still work there. The stock units don't all make it to my brokerage account at vesting time; some disappear to pay the taxes just like when I'm paid in cash. Matching income and withholdings show up on my W2. Maybe there's something trickier (/more sleazy) I or my employer could be doing, but I don't think what you're saying is always true. Ehh, maybe I will consult a CPA next time as you suggest, just to see...
How is that double taxation? The initial investment and the gains are different money. Each dollar is only taxed once, right?
Brilliant, maybe; also disgraceful. There's little point in blaming Larry Ellison for trying this - he is what he is, and that's certainly not someone who will change his behavior in response to my opinion of him - but I wish we didn't allow it. I'd like to see Congress make a real effort to stop "coddling the super-rich", to use Warren Buffett's phrase. In this case, why do heirs not inherit his "cost basis"?
Replying to undo incorrect moderation
Oracle would like to enforce a copyright claim on a programming language. Sun v. Microsoft was a trademark dispute.
Oracle is not claiming that Google has used the Java trademarks. This phase of the trial will only examine whether Google has violated Oracle's copyrights, and there will be no examination of trademarks in any phase.
Neither party seems to want to directly examine the question of whether programming languages or APIs can be copyrighted, which I find confusing. Oracle's stance on this issue is obvious, but Google's arguments are a little more interesting:
Google expects the following 3 findings to be reached:
1) there was no copyright infringement; the language is free and the APIs are necessary to use it.
2) Sun approved its use.
3) Android is a fair use of the Java APIs.
I take from this that Google is arguing that programming languages may be copyrighted, but that Java was released under an open source license which Google is complying with. Point #2 seems very difficult to dispute; even Mr. One Rich Asshole has been very complimentary of Google's efforts with Java/Android.
With regard to the linux kernel, which has zero to do with this lawsuit, Google has operated with respect to the law and the GPL; they have released the source for every binary they've distributed, and they are actively trying to merge their code with the upstream project. RMS is an idealist, and many F/OSS advocates support him in principle; you could call him the conscience of computing. However, it is recognized by all but the fanatically religious that pure ideologies function only in an ideal world, which we are not fortunate enough to live in.
Today, we recognize that Oracle is a threat to free computing. Tomorrow we may take up the issue of free data with Google -- I sincerely doubt that meaningful digital privacy is possible, in practice if not in theory.
Those who advocate genocide deserve every protection afforded by law, and none afforded by common human decency.
In fact, none of the patents were invalidated by the Copyright Office (which, as the name suggests, is concerned with copyrights rather than patents.)
Several were, however, invalidated by the Patent and Trademark Office.
APIs are uncopyrightable
I agree, but Oracle doesn't.
Google demonstrably did not make a clean-room copy.
And your evidence for this bold claim is? Dalvik doesn't work anything like the JVM (it doesn't even use the same bytecode), and the libraries that Google used were based on Apache Harmony, not the JDK. Oracle only found nine lines of code in common between Java and Android, and those nine lines have long since been removed.
You're not an engineer, you're a code monkey. Big difference.
I'll ask you as one of a few old(ish) regulars saying that the Oracle slideshow is bad.
Why exactly is Java itself a "trap"? I thought it was just a language like any other language. And I thought Sun was a nice company that tried to give some things back to the community. So was Sun really concocting a lethal secret trap or did Oracle just notice a devastating re-application of the I.P. when used in evil hands?
"Blah blah blah infringe blah blah steal" etc, daily fare, but Trap?! I'm at least two steps above Newbie and I've never seen that theory.
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
Trying for both a +1 Funny and +1 Underrated, here goes!
I just realized that Corporations are "People" that can buy other "People".
So does Oracle Beat its concubine wife Sun?
Topic Change Alert:
This is in some ways some of the most exciting times for law, (even if some of it is abused horribly), simply because you just didn't cases like some of the modern ones Back In The Day when Law Was Law.
Beautiful Quote: Judge Alsup: "...no Googling the case, although I probably shouldn't use that term here."
Elliptical Translation: "No using the service by the Defendant to gain unprecendented access to information to the case about the Defendant."
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
Nah, this is a world class lawsuit, it's one of those lawyer tricks, try to get a sneak shot in so fast the other side doesn't realize they torpedoed their case on day 1.
"'Don't Know" means that of course Oracle wants every last dollar, but in Legal Speak saying "yes it is a valuable/priceless property" leads to strange backfires 7 weeks of presentations later.
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
Right, can we please assume that at this level they stop being stupid?
I posted this opinion above too, it felt like a "sneak shot slam" question, "torpedo your case on day 1" because of course we know that Oracle has been the aggressor but a facile answer on day 1 like "Of course this is valuable property" leads to strange disasters 7 weeks later and 19 threads of interlocked Legal Logic.
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
Nice try, full credit, but to play ... uh ... something-advocate to you, let's try a counter theory.
We've seen a real shift in law towards Corporatism/AggressionWins/ whatever.
So arguments that should be thrown out under "Old School" law theory are suddenly (last 7 years ish?) winning actual big ticket cases. So Oracle bought Sun with the sole purpose of the lawsuit. They went for the aggressive approach, because if it landed they would have secured a gorgeous payday and smaller paydays for a decade. *There is no penalty yet for over-reaching*. So why not go for a "X Billion Dollar" lawsuit if there's no downside at all? "Oh well, that didn't work. Next Time Gadget, Next Time!"
So then for once we got a smart judge who wasn't in East Texas (I think! - Too lazy, sorry!), so this case might actually be tried under "legit law". So then the correct thing happened, Oracle's crap patents got smashed. Oracle's got like 2-3 real doozy tricks left or they wouldn't still be in the case, but I'll say they didn't go for a 7th level 12 ply SuperTheory like yours - they swung for the easy home run and missed. On another judge it might have worked.
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
Yep, and I bet this was the prepped answer, "say nothing". As posted above, don't sinkhole your case on day 1 with a grand slam question.
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
Here, I believe, is where Java was first called a trap.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
And your evidence for this bold claim is?
The article. And your own paragraph. If they'd done a clean room implementation, they wouldn't have found nine lines in common. Also, they wouldn't have used Sun's documentation, which Google admitted to doing. It's going to be hard for Google to show that their product isn't a derivative work.
The only way out I can see for Google, if they get lucky, is that Sun released Java under the terms of the GPL. That would mean, that even if Dalvik and their implementation of Java is a derivative work, they will still be able to use it under the terms of the GPL.
I say, if they get lucky, because Sun didn't release all of Java under GPL. If Google used some of the parts that weren't under the GPL, then it won't matter.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
You're confused. This nine lines is not a smoking gun suggesting further investigation--this nine lines is all that's left of Oracle's copyright claims after discovery and pre-trial motion practice. Nine lines (contributed by the same person who originally wrote them for Sun) out of tens of thousands, and some vague allegations about the APIs is all they have to go to trial with. And you've already admitted that you don't believe API's are copyrightable, so I don't see how you can possibly imagine Oracle is going to win.
I think you are confused about what a derivative work is. An API cannot be copyrighted, but if Google made their implementation based on Oracle's implementation, then it is a derivative work. One way to prove that your implementation is not a derivative work is by doing a clean-room implementation. There are other ways to prove your implementation is not a derivative work, but I don't think Google used any standard way.
Google is going to have a hard time showing they did a clean-room implementation. They were looking directly at Oracle's code when they wrote their version of Java. I don't see how Google can show they didn't derive their work from Oracle's copyrighted work. Most likely they will not be able to.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
The point is, Google could have done it without infringing Oracle's copyright. They could have followed methods that we know will keep them safe in court. But they didn't. They made a huge oversight, and it could hurt them badly.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
This story is about a day old...so if you are interested I hope it still gets to you.
:)
Without knowing your situation it is hard to say as two primary employee stock option plans exist, NSO and ISO plans. Under an NSO, if given an option to purchase stock at a fixed price you, for all intents and purposes, own the stock but are able to delay paying taxes until you want to actually purchase even if an ascertainable market value exists that would reflect the value of your options. Suppose that options to purchase the stock are exercised at a price of $2.00 a share. If, at the time of exercise, the fair market value of your company stock is $3.50 per share, then $1.50 per share (the difference between the fair market value of the stock and the exercise price) would be treated as compensation income. If the stock is held for more than one year and subsequently sold for $5.00 per share, the additional $1.50 per share of appreciation can qualify for capital gain treatment. Depending on the options available to you this may be preferable than an immediate liquidation to cover tax costs as those shares could be held longer and receive capital gain treatment which it doesn't sound like yours currently are. So many situations exist it would take me hours to cover them all but it is a starting point to think about.
It is double taxation in this sense:
Situation 1: Make $100, all put into 401k, able to buy $100 in stock. Later, stock is sold and taxes paid - 1 instance of taxation.
Situation 2: Make $100, paid out to you via your check with 10% Income Tax. Able to buy $90 in stock. Later, stock is sold and taxes paid - 2 instances of taxation.
To answer your last question, I can't explain why the tax law is like it is in regards to heirs cost basis upon inheritance, just the potential savings it entails. On a side note to that though, you'll find that good financial planners warn about variable annuities as opposed to an investment like previously mentioned because that specific type of investment burns the heirs by making them pay ordinary income tax rates on the gain. Makes it a little crazier thinking that one financial instrument gets treated so differently than another.
AnimePapers.org: Anime Wallpapers Handled With Care
So, how does Larry pay back the borrowed money on a $1 salary without paying taxes? By selling the yatch to someone else to pay back the loan and selling some stock (paying capital gains) to pay the depreciation (if any)?!
Larry should be the name for all hypothetical finacial questions from now on...
120 characters ought to be enough for anyone
They could have, but it would have been seen as a silly, pointless expense, since Sun was actively supporting, blessing, and cheering for Apache's Project Harmony--which is what the Android libraries are actually based on! Google wrote their own VM from scratch (and Oracle isn't accusing them of copyright infringement there), but they didn't write the libraries!
This also addresses your other comment where you suggest that Google will have a hard time proving they didn't copy from Oracle's implementation. In fact, it should be easy for Google to show that their code is derived from Apache's code, not Oracle's, because it is.
If Oracle should be suing anyone, it's Apache--but of course, there's no hope of "beeel-yuns!" to be found there. Plus, they'd find it pretty hard to get past claims of estoppel.
Sure, let Google try that. As far as I can tell, the best defense Google might have is relying on the fact that Java was released under the GPL.
Maybe you haven't seen Oracle's collection of evidence here. They have a lot of evidence that Google derived their work from Sun, including the pieces of code, including an engineer testifying that he was staring at documents taken from the Sun website while he did it. Whether they also derived from Apache's implementation is irrelevant, because they certainly derived sufficiently from Sun.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
If something takes obvious inspiration from a previous, similar thing, but then does it better in every way, I wouldn't really call it a "ripoff".
Granted, I've never seen C# v1, so I can't really comment on that, but some of our projects here are stuck on C# v2, and while I do miss some of the nifty features of v3.5 and v4, I'd still much rather be writing code in C# v2 than in Java. Microsoft may have made some pretty terrible products in their time, but C# is actually one of the prettiest languages I've worked in. While Java is... not.
Fuck, make a crack about Ellison and everyone goes apeshit on the Soviet Russia joke. Relax assholes, its a fucking crack, not a subject for philosophical debate. Chuckle or grumble to yourself about it and move on.
This sig is not paradoxical or ironic.
I like to think then every time I type out a Soviet Russia gag on Slash , about 10,000 neckbeards get all indignant and invoke the Eternal September, look up wiki links, type up snarky comments, etc. And all the while the cheese on their nachos gets cold.
This sig is not paradoxical or ironic.
Yakov reads up on YOU!
This sig is not paradoxical or ironic.
Dude, it doesn't matter if Oracle has film and eyewitnesses to show Google cutting-and-pasting from Oracle's source code, because the only copyright claims they have are for the API! And as you yourself said, APIs are not copyrightable. Pre-trial motions have already resulted in the following two jury instructions:
1. The Java programming language is open and free for anyone to use.
2. The names of the Java language API files, packages, classes, and methods are not protected by copyright law.
The judge has already seen the evidence Oracle has, and has ruled that no code was copied (except for those frequently-mentioned six lines of code, which Google has already admitted to copying).
It doesn't matter how huge a pile of evidence Oracle may have. The only thing they're allowed to try to claim is the APIs. And I'm pretty sure that not being protected by copyright law trumps even the hugest pile of evidence.
Dude, it doesn't matter if Oracle has film and eyewitnesses to show Google cutting-and-pasting from Oracle's source code, because the only copyright claims they have are for the API!
Wait, why do you think this? Certainly Oracle owns the copyright on their implementation of Java. And certainly they own the copyright for their documentation. And other random parts of java.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Why do I think that? Because the case has been going on for a year and a half now, and I've been following it that whole time. The public trial has just started, but the case was originally filed in August of 2010. Between now and then, Oracle and Google have been fighting the whole time, with dueling motions and dueling experts. In fact, their experts were so much at odds that the court felt compelled to appoint its own, so we're going to see three experts testify during the trial. And further, both sides challenged the court's expert before trial and got parts of his testimony stricken.
Indirect copying is simply harder to prove than direct copying. Not impossible, of course, but to even bring a case, you have to meet certain hurdles, which Oracle wasn't able to get over. Their evidence didn't meet the required minimum standard, and the judge disallowed it, except for the few lines that Google admitted were copied, and some vague claims that the API's might be protectable. Oh, and the documentation, which, after further review, I realize you were right about. More on that below.
Remember, this case is primarily about patents. Oracle knows that Google took great pains to avoid copying their code, for the most part, and only threw in a few vague copyright claims in the some of it would stick. The meat of the trial won't come till the copyright part is done. Of course, a year and a half ago, Oracle had more patents than they do now. Google got the PTO to review the patents, and most of them have not survived that review, so Oracle has been trying to switch their focus to the copyright claims, but they've had limited success with that.
Now, as I said above, you're right about the documentation copyright claims still being alive. I mostly ignored those, because they don't affect Android directly, and my interest is in what's going to happen to Android. Oracle wants a slice of the Android pie, at a minimum, and would prefer if Android were dropped in favor of JavaME. Winning on the documentation claims won't help with those goals. Oracle can get some back payments, but only to cover developers--they're not going to get paid per-phone--and Google can simply pull the documentation and replace it, so Oracle's won't get the on-going license fees they're hoping for, nor any leverage to force Google to switch to JavaME. But a win here would at least help Oracle save face, and help justify the suit to their stockholders.
OK, we'll see how it goes.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."