Judge to Oracle: A High Schooler Could Write rangeCheck

mikejuk writes with an update on the Oracle vs Google Trial. From the article: "One month into the Oracle v Google trial, Judge William Alsup has revealed that he has, and still does, write code. Will this affect the outcome? I think so! After trying to establish that the nine lines in rangeCheck that were copied saved Google time in getting Android to market the lawyer making the case is interrupted by the judge which indicates he at least does understand how straightforward it would be to program rangeCheck from scratch: 'rangeCheck! All it does is make sure the numbers you're inputting are within a range, and gives them some sort of exceptional treatment. That witness, when he said a high school student could do it — ' And the lawyer reveals he doesn't: 'I'm not an expert on Java — this is my second case on Java, but I'm not an expert, and I probably couldn't program that in six months.' Perhaps every judge should be a coding judge — it must make the law seem a lot simpler..." From yesterday; the Oracle lawyer was attempting to argue that Google profited by stealing rangeCheck since it allowed them to get to market faster than they would have had they wrote it from scratch. Groklaw, continuing its detailed coverage as always, has the motions filed today.

Comments

A high schooler?

[PowerRangers]

I was programming when I was 7 years old. How stupid are Americans?

Re:A high schooler?

[Anonymous Coward]

Apparently, you are stupid enough to take a Judge's dismissive comment to the plantiffs as an absolutely specific assessment on the population's programming skills. Perhaps you are the moron here?

Re:A high schooler?

[snowsmann]

I am an American. I could have written this when I was 8 or 9 when I started playing with QBasic and all that shit. Not all Americans are stupid. Just the vast vast majority.

Re:A high schooler?

[Galestar]

Pretty much this. Half the people on slashdot could have written it when they were in Elementary School.

Re:A high schooler?

[ByOhTek]

So was I, and I'm an American. Also, how old are you?

Can you say everyone, or even the majority, of those in your country started programming at seven? What about in older age groups? ... No? How stupid are people in your country?

If you don't need to, or aren't interested in it, not being able to program isn't a bad thing. There are reasons for the whole 'justice is blind [and ignorant]" in the US. In some cases, it certainly will bite us, but in others, it also helps because it prevents bias from preconceptions (which can be very wrong).

Re:A high schooler?

[Soilworker]

For those interested: (from http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3940683)

From OpenJDK:
private static void rangeCheck(int arrayLen, int fromIndex, int toIndex) {
                if (fromIndex > toIndex)

                        throw new IllegalArgumentException("fromIndex(" + fromIndex +
                                              ") > toIndex(" + toIndex+")");

                if (fromIndex arrayLen)
                        throw new ArrayIndexOutOfBoundsException(toIndex);

        }
From Google:
private static void rangeCheck(int arrayLen, int fromIndex, int toIndex) {
                if (fromIndex > toIndex)
                        throw new IllegalArgumentException("fromIndex(" + fromIndex +
                                              ") > toIndex(" + toIndex+")");

                if (fromIndex arrayLen)
                        throw new ArrayIndexOutOfBoundsException(toIndex);

        }
}

Re:A high schooler?

[tpstigers]

Here's a news flash for you: complete idiots can (and do) program. The ability to code is a piss poor measurement of intelligence.

Re:A high schooler?

[LocalH]

Wow, fuck you dude. Just fuck you.

Re:A high schooler?

[FTWinston]

Thanks, but slashcode ate your <

Re:A high schooler?

[zero.kalvin]

Has nothing to do with age. I had my first PC when I was 16. First computer course in school was at 17 ( no programming just basic stuff ). I officially started coding during my second year of university, I was 19! But if I ever knew it existed when I was younger and had access to a PC I would have coded at that age. Some people simply don't have access or don't know!

Re:A high schooler?

[Oracle of Naples]

It is an exact 1:1 copy. Google is screwed.

Re:A high schooler?

[MightyMartian]

Fore chrissakes, anyone who has been writing any degree of code for more than a few years has implemented a range check function, and whatever the language C, C++, Java, C#, BASIC, 80x86 assembler, they all basically look the same. If this is truly what Oracle's case boils down to, then they literally have nothing, and this comes out looking no different than what SCO's claims against Linux ended up being. It's fucking ludicrous. To claim that somehow a nine line range check function gave Google some vast market edge to my mind breaks credibility. I'm guessing this is pointing pretty heavily towards Oracle being handed their balls on a platter over this.

Re:A high schooler?

[chill]

And you wrote that comment without once referring to PHP. Bravo!

Re:A high schooler?

[Soilworker]

Yea :(

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3940683

Re:A high schooler?

[MightyMartian]

It's a range check function. They all look largely the same.

Re:A high schooler?

[Anonymous Coward]

Hello. By posting this, you have violated the copyrights of my company. Because of this, and the profits you will no doubt receive from this theft, we demand reparations of the sum of $1,250,000.51.

Please await your court summons in the mail.

Please have a pleasant day!

Re:A high schooler?

[Barbara, not Barbie]

It is an exact 1:1 copy. Google is screwed.

Of course it's an exact 1:1 copy - the guy who wrote it gave it to both Sun AND Android. And if you've been following the trial, Sun never registered a copyright on that specific function.

Oracle is *SO* screwed.

Re:A high schooler?

[Anonymous Coward]

There were no personal computers around when I was a kid. I was in high school before the first personal computers not to mention access to mainframe computers were given to me. So this judge says "high school" and you go half cocked acting like computers have been around since the stone age. Get a real life and think outside the box every once in a while.

Re:A high schooler?

[Anonymous Coward]

I probably couldn't have written this in 5 seconds, but 7-10 minutes would be reasonable, including all design, compiling, plus all unit testing causing the two exceptions to throw and a sample that doesn't throw either exception.

It's pretty obvious they copied it (variable names are exactly the same). Now the question is whether or not, as a matter of law, this small piece of code should fall under copyright. The method is so simple, and has such a limited scope that there aren't really any other ways to write this.

Re:A high schooler?

[bistromath007]

No. Not even a little.

If the judge's statement is even a half-truth, the code in question checks a number, and passes it somewhere if it's a good number.

That is what all goddamn code does. A dumb American high schooler could accomplish that in about twenty minutes if you refused to let them leave until they did, because if you aren't doing that, you haven't written a program! A seven year old could probably do it faster; they haven't "learned" yet that they're dumb.

The lawyer is a disingenuous jackass who assumed that the judge, like him, would see a piece of code and assume it's an arcane fucking ritual without even trying to parse it. He deserves derision.

Re:A high schooler?

[cronot]

This. As PJ points out on Groklaw, although the judge alledgedly does code, he still seems to be having a hard time deciding whether APIs can be copyrighted. I wonder if he "does coding" on Basic... :-P

Re:A high schooler?

[Oracle of Naples]

You don't need to register copyright. That is only for patents. Since the guy was working for Sun, all his work belongs to Sun/Oracle (unless otherwise stated in contract).

Re:A high schooler?

[Anonymous Coward]

You idiot! You just caused $2.6bn of harm to Oracle!

Re:A high schooler?

[garyebickford]

Nowadays the recommended method of coding is to use variable names and function names that are self-descriptive. Given that, it seems to me that the code is pretty much the natural way anyone might write it. Google did say that they copied it, but really, how else might one write it? It's definitely the level of a first year programming course. The only interesting bits are (IIRC) the use of a ToIndex that is one more than the length, to eliminate a bit of arithmetic in the loop. So were they inclined to dissemble, Google could have claimed that it's just a coincidence.

Re:A high schooler?

[Anonymous Coward]

Not being able to write code doesn't mean you're stupid.

However, equating them means you're ignorant and arrogant.

Re:A high schooler?

[c00rdb]

Apparently smart enough to have 90% of the world's leading software companies.

Re:A high schooler?

[Anonymous Coward]

Even if true, the question becomes, "how much did those nine lines unjustly benefit Google?" Based on the judge's commentary, it seems he is leaning toward "not much." I tend to agree: the function is not some absurdly complex bit of logic that would have required millions of dollars in R&D to produce, and any infringement is simply the result of a lazy coder who copied/pasted instead of spending fifteen minutes writing the function out him/herself.

Oracle may have a valid case on its merits, but their valuation of damages is insane. They should have taken Google's settlement offer, because this judge is going to destroy their position.

Re:A high schooler?

[snowsmann]

No equating...just pointing out a correlation. Most of America is stupid. Most of America can't code. You assumed I implied causation.

Re:A high schooler?

[Lunix Nutcase]

You haven't had to register copyrights in the US for decades. Ever heard of the Berne Convention?

Re:A high schooler?

[vlm]

Slashcode ate that all up. F you /. my reply looks like shite also because of that and I can't be bothered to figure out how to post code without it being de-htmlized. Fix that, right after you fix UTF-8 mkay? I checked the link, in psuedocode its:

fromIndex has to be from 0 to toIndex
toIndex has to be from fromIndex to arrayLength

Anybody else see a bug? I donno their array implementation, but it looks like they are zero indexed arrays while also allowing a "array's length" equal to the to index value. Classic noob array out of bounds mistake staring at me.

Lets make up moron array
index 0 is first value
index 1 is second value
index 2 is third value

array length is 3, don't believe me, count the lines. I see 3 lines so thats a 3 long array.
Set fromIndex to 1 and toIndex to 3.
Does it pass fromIndex GT toIndex? Yes, indeed 1 GT 3 is false so no exception.
Does it pass fromIndex LT 0? Yes indeed 1 LT 0 is false so no exception is thrown.
Does it pass toIndex GT arrayLen? Yes indeed 3 GT 3 is false so no exception is thrown
I'm imagining the next step, something somewhere accesses index 3, runtime says WTF are you doing we're only defined up to 2 here, kaboom.

Now I don't do java so I donno if GT LT are actually impled GTE LTE in java, or there is some extra code or purpose of this such that array(toIndex) will never be accessed, or there is some extra error code detection that handles out of bounds array access.

I just thought it was pretty funny looking when looked at completely out of context.
Like when you see something like lparen x LT 2 vbar vbar x GT 10 rparen and you just know thats a bug because its obviously supposed to be AND not OR and they were probably trying to check an interval.

Re:A high schooler?

[betterunixthanunix]

The issue of whether or not an API can be copyrighted has nothing to do with whether or not the judge is a programmer. APIs can be complex, and a lot of design may go into an API (what patterns to expose to programmers, etc.). Some programmers would not even object to APIs being copyrightable; many people use proprietary languages that are implemented by a single vendor, and would not even be affected by such a ruling (unless they also use Java).

Re:A high schooler?

[Anonymous Coward]

So, they're claiming they have a patent on range checking?

Re:A high schooler?

[Anonymous Coward]

"A highscooler could code that" does not imply "anyone younger than a highschooler cannot code that"

Re:A high schooler?

[c00rdb]

Is it just me or does pretty much every story on here turn into America bashing lately? Seriously its getting old. Yeah there are problems, just like every single country. We don't need to turn every article into exaggerating that its the worst country in the world.

Re:A high schooler?

[Anonymous Coward]

COPYRIGHT belongs to the author.

SAME PERSON WROTE BOTH and shared them with SUN and Android.

Sun didn't move the copyright from the author.

Re:A high schooler?

[h4rr4r]

How would it not be?
There is nothing creative there. If you had a 100 people do it you would probably get lots of exact copies.

This guy was working at google when he wrote both by the way. Can you now steal your own copyright?

Re:A high schooler?

[meerling]

I started programming when I was in high school. It was the first time in my life I had access to a computer. About a half dozen of us worked together to figure out how to program the computers, since there were no classes for it and nobody at the school had any idea how use them either. If you are wondering why I didin't just google it, Google.com didn't exist. For that matter, neither did the internet, and aarpanet wasn't available to civilians, much less curious teenagers.

You either forget that access to computers as a fairly ubiquitous thing is very very new. If you want to look at anyone 30+ there is a distinct possibility that they didn't have the opportunity to play with computers until they were adults. There are still plenty of school districts that don't have computers available for the students to use, much less an actual class. And even if they do have computers available for the students, it may be less than would be required for a single class, much less the entire student body.

I think you should re-evaluate your question. You've had an opportunity that many people don't, and that in no way makes them stupid. Though your ignorance of those circumstances, or your out of hand dismissal of that reality, in way shows signs of intellect on your part. Though I can say it shows a distinct lack of critical thinking skills and manners.

Re:A high schooler?

[Anonymous Coward]

Let's weigh the merits of this case. Say we have a developer who gets paid $40/hr, and Oracle is suing for $2.6bn...

rangeCheck(40,0,2600000000);

Re:A high schooler?

[Aryden]

Employing more Indian/Phillipino/Mexican/Chinese coders than Americans.

Re:A high schooler?

[Registered Coward v2]

I am an American. I could have written this when I was 8 or 9 when I started playing with QBasic and all that shit. Not all Americans are stupid. Just the vast vast majority.

Many of whom would realize there is no such thing as a vast vast (or even vast) majority. A programmer should realize majority is a binary state, either a 1 (it is) or 0 (it is not).

Re:A high schooler?

[AngryDeuce]

If slide to unlock is patentable, I damn sure bet range checking will be...

Re:A high schooler?

[meerling]

Drat, my keyboard is dropping stuff, the battery is low. And yeah, rangecheck is nothing special, we were doing those same things back in the 80s. We wrote them ourselves in less than 10 minutes since they were simply on requirement our programs were required to do when we got our daily assignments. Also, the smaller any chunk of code is, the more it tends to resemble any other small chunk of code that does the same task. (It's like asking a group of people to write a sonnet, each will be very different. Then asking those same people to write a list of vowels, most of them will look exactly alike.)

Re:A high schooler?

[h4rr4r]

Calm down Grandpa, go take a nap. We all know you had to fight the dinosaurs to get to the mainframe and make punch cards out of leaves of now long extinct flora. These days though this really is the sort of thing a little kids has access too, not everyone on earth can always remember what life was like at such a primitive time.

Re:A high schooler?

[CrimsonAvenger]

Google did say that they copied it, but really, how else might one write it?

Espically when you consider that the programmer who "copied it" for Google is the programmer who originally wrote it for Sun....

Re:A high schooler?

[drerwk]

I think he picked out his /. user name at the same time.

Re:A high schooler?

[denobug]

You cannot copyright logic or match. Range check is pretty much what it is. The function/method exist before Java was first created. If someone don't know how to write code similar to this (at least in a simpler function) they shouldn't be holding a programming job.

Re:A high schooler?

[Volante3192]

Because that sort of code is so complex...

Maybe if we're talking about Carmack's Magic Number*, yes, you'd have something
( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fast_inverse_square_root#Overview_of_the_code )

But this?
I could do this in pseudo code in seconds and something that would actually compile and run in 10 minutes, tops. (I'm way rusty on language specifics these days...)

*Ok, it's not personally Carmack's magic number, but he's who you'd most likely associate it with

Re:A high schooler?

[WaywardGeek]

Oracle's lawyers are being brilliant at what most lawyers do well: make insanely stupid arguments in order to run their clock as long as possible. It's not about justice. It's about that new yacht Oracle's head lawyer is saving up for. Those nine lines of code might be worth only $20, but the lawyers are making a killing.

Re:A high schooler?

[daniel78]

Google pretty much admitted it was copied - claiming it was accidental (the same guy wrote it for Oracle and later, Google). It has since been replaced. The jury - completely reasonably - found that it infringed. This is no longer in debate

The question is whether it is worth anything.

Google says no. Oracle's own expert witnesses said no. The judge - who has apparently revealed he is a programmer - says no. Oracle are arguing it's worth millions.

Someone is desperate here, and its not Google

Re:A high schooler?

[grumpy_old_grandpa]

Where you ticked off by his ageism or racism?

Either way; when the troll or flame bait is that obvious, isn't better to just ignore it and let it be filtered away? It's not like your contribution adds anything to the discussion.

Re:A high schooler?

[Chemisor]

Wouldn't these miss the case of negative indices? rangeCheck(5,-3,2) will not throw. Now, a C++ programmer would use unsigned types, as everyone ought to do unless the variable can be negative, but this is Java, so I guess you're screwed ;)

Re:A high schooler?

[Anonymous Coward]

If slide to unlock is patentable, I damn sure bet range checking will be...

Patents & copyright are completely different things.

Re:A high schooler?

[Volante3192]

What's logical and what's legal per the law ain't ever exactly been similar.

Re:A high schooler?

[Anonymous Coward]

You must register copyrights if you wish to sue for punitive damages (eg: damages that are in excess of your loss because the intent of the damages is to send a message to anybody else who infringes on your copyright). If you have not registered your copyright, then you are only allowed to sue for compensatory damages (eg: the damages that have affected you directly).

In this case, Oracle has apparently not registered the copyright yet (there is nothing stopping them from doing so now or in the future and suing again), so they can only sue Google for compensatory damages, which in this case, as the judge pointed out, is over a rangeCheck function that literally every programmer that has ever done any non-negligible work has done. That means that the losses Oracle suffered as a result of Google's alleged infringement (9 obvious lines of an obvious function, to me, is not infringement) are likely zero or not worth suing over (being next to zero).

The only complications are that those 9 lines were written for Sun, and then for Google, by the same person. That is the only infringement theory available, because in the US you have to use clean-room reverse engineering; you cannot just hire somebody to reimplement something they did for your competitor (unless you're Microsoft and you are reimplementing the NTFS filesystem and the WinNT kernel as "brand new" and "original" technology). So, once Oracle registers the copyright, Google will need to hire somebody to clean-room reverse engineer the rangeCheck function, which should consist of the guy who originally wrote it staring at his code on one side of a wall and talking to another engineer (who has never seen the rangeCheck function code) writing code on another computer about the purpose of the function, possible tests and results for the function, and basically describing the function in every way except going through the algorithm explicitly.

So, once Oracle registers for the copyright, Google will do this (it would take, literally, more time to setup the clean room than to actually implement the function appropriately), and the Dalvik code, including the rangeCheck function will be available to anybody and everybody under whatever license Android is under (read: free to use and modify by anybody in the world). In other words, Oracle is damned if they do sue, and damned if they don't sue. They are losing, and will lose, this fight completely, but they will have shot themselves in the foot because now companies are afraid to use Oracle's Java over patent and copyright concerns (because Oracle is an asshole company run by an asshole). It's a good day to be IBM, Google, and Microsoft because your platforms are looking more legally bulletproof by the minute.

Re:A high schooler?

[dan828]

Having lived in a lot of places in the world, I can assure you that Americans are no stupider than people anywhere else.

Re:A high schooler?

[amicusNYCL]

Nowadays the recommended method of coding is to use variable names and function names that are self-descriptive. Given that, it seems to me that the code is pretty much the natural way anyone might write it.

It seems like someone would copy something like this because it's so simple enough that you would end up writing the same thing, so instead of spending the minute to do that you might as well just copy it and move on. Sort of like how Javascript lacks an Array.indexOf method to find a certain item in the array. I could spend the minute or two to write and test that loop myself, or I could spend 30 seconds looking it up on Google and using what I find there. Either way it's going to be the same thing, a loop that runs through the array looking for the item. The rangeCheck function is just a pair of if statements that compare one number with 2 others. As G.W. Bush would say, this isn't rocket surgery.

Re:A high schooler?

[Anonymous Coward]

Perhaps you are the moron here?

You, for biting the bait? :-)

Re:A high schooler?

[ewanm89]

well, they'll certainly be very similar, they would probably end up the same if you instructed them to follow certain code conventions on variable names and the like.

Re:A high schooler?

[spyked]

Not really. Mechanisms are patentable, algorithms aren't.

In this case slide to unlock is a mechanism with a clear description and such, while range checking is (as far as I can see) something too abstract to become a patent.

Re:A high schooler?

[Anonymous Coward]

Most of America is stupid.

That's an argument over a measuring stick, and could take a lifetimes to make.

Re:A high schooler?

[Lisias]

To tell you the true, this gives us a clear hint about Oracle's future.

SCO did exactly the same thing in the past - but, honestly, I think SCO's lawyers did a better job.

Re:A high schooler?

[Lisias]

IMHO, Oracle's lawyers were plain stupid in this issue.

HOW IN HELL they didn't run a background check on the judge? Books are public information!

Common! Know your enemy! the more basic rule in any conflict management!

I would mark carefully the names involved in this process. This is lawyer that I would *never* hire.

Re:A high schooler?

[B1oodAnge1]

You're wrong. You can have degrees of majority. For example you can have a 1% majority, which is a smaller majority than a 42% or a 69% majority. Using a synonym of 'large' in describing a majority is perfectly valid.

Re:A high schooler?

[andymadigan]

Where exactly is the spark of creativity that is required for a copyright in this snippet of code?

Re:A high schooler?

[Anonymous Coward]

If this is truly what Oracle's case boils down to

The part that boiled away is that Google killed Sun's Java income from phones and such by cloning Java and giving it away for free (the trial presents evidence of J2ME licensees not renewing due to Android). But killing a decent company like Sun by copying their software isn't illegal.

Google being the lessor of two evils isn't saying much when the other one is Oracle.

Re:A high schooler?

[Anonymous Coward]

It's used like for(; index < hi; index++), same as with for(; index < array.length; index++). Other use is nRemaining = lo - hi; to decide if array is small enough for simpler sort algorithm. With inclusive range you'd have to write <= hi and lo - hi + 1 all around the place

Re:A high schooler?

[snowsmann]

No need to be so pedantic. Regardless of the binary-ness of the situation, there is still always an analog component. For something to become binary there needs to be a threshold, a majority has it's threshold set to 50%. If one then passes the threshold, but barely, then one could say that there is "barely a majority". This concept can be extended to vast majority (i.e. ~75%) and what I meant with vast vast majority is that some percentage (well over 50%) of Americans fall into that category. Probably asymptotically approaching 100% given the way the World populace is headed...

Btw, not all programmers are computer science/information theory types. There are those of us who are real electrical engineers who realize that a transistor has infinite states and it is only a simplification that we see it as binary; greatly reducing the complexity of computer style circuit design.

Re:A high schooler?

[bistromath007]

It's an exact 1:1 copy of something so retardedly basic one could easily accidentally handcraft. It's practically just providing a canonical example of exception handling.

I mean... seriously. This is what Oracle is wasting everyone's time with. And they're allowed to. FTGE.

Re:A high schooler?

[LocalH]

The racism (although I hesitate to call it racism as it's not targeted to my ethnicity, but my national heritage).

No, it didn't add anything to the discussion, but /. shows I got +3 on that post (not counting my bonus) , strangely. Not that I need it ;)

Re:A high schooler?

[sl4shd0rk]

the guy who wrote it gave it to both Sun AND Android.

Um.. not sure who your "guy" is. Noser is the alleged contracting company who allegedly worked with the rangeCheck code, even after getting explicit specs. this is the crux of the argument;

"Bornstein stated that he removed some elements of Java from Android last year after Oracle filed their case in court. He explained that the Java elements came from a Swiss contractor called Noser Engineering AG, who helped them built Android. He also stated that the contracter was given instructions as to what they can and cannot use for Android. Bornstein also stated that the only thing they copied from Java are those available for public use and do not require any license from Oracle. He also admitted that he is being paid $400 per hour by Google for his time in court."

Re:A high schooler?

[Guspaz]

bool rangeCheck(int value, int lowerBound, int upperBound)
{
    return value >= lowerBound && value <= upperBound;
}

So, Oracle is suggesting that Google would rather copy something like this to save time than spend the thirty seconds to type it out themselve? OK, sure, the Java one is 9 lines long, not one line long, because it has some exception handling, but seriously...

Re:A high schooler?

[Anonymous Coward]

Indeed. It also helps to consider a textual equivalent. The 9 lines of code in question are basically:

If the number is outside of the range, throw an error.

Copying that sentence verbatim from some other source into your new technical document wouldn't be copyright infringement. The amount of material is too small, the creativity involved is negligible, and the economic harm to the original writer is nil.

Re:A high schooler?

[forand]

If the parent to your reply is correct that "the guy who wrote it gave it to both Sun AND Android" then Sun did need to register that it owns the copyright and could somehow limit the rights of the author to distribute the code.

Re:A high schooler?

[Anonymous Coward]

If "the guy who wrote it gave it to both Sun AND Android", who owns it depends on what rights were transferred. Yet another chance for the attorneys to argue here...

Re:A high schooler?

[Nethemas the Great]

No, the code posted above was eaten by filters. The actual code in question may be found here. You can see clearly that there is a check to verify that "fromIndex" is greater than or equal to zero, that "toIndex" is greater than or equal to "fromIndex" and that "toIndex" is less than "arrayLength". In sum, a basic range check function easily recreated by any geeky child and something that would have taken Google engineers an equal amount of time write as it would to copy/paste.

Re:A high schooler?

[colinrichardday]

Not really. Mechanisms are patentable, algorithms aren't.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karmarkar's_algorithm#Patent_controversy

Re:A high schooler?

[Nethemas the Great]

I'm glad someone did...

Re:A high schooler?

[Junta]

how else might one write it?

Different indentation maybe?

Re:A high schooler?

[Ihmhi]

And the other half coulda banged out the code in binary using a toy xylaphone in pre-school.

Re:A high schooler?

[KlomDark]

Back in my day, young one, keyboards didn't run on batteries...

Re:A high schooler?

[Anonymous Coward]

Gotta love all these "smart" posters biting on a FP troll.

Re:A high schooler?

[Anonymous Coward]

I know right.

Why I bet that half of the population of America is below average even.
 

Re:A high schooler?

[Mike Buddha]

You sir, are incorrect. By copying this software that would have taken a lawyer 6 months to write, they were able to gain an unfair 32 seconds on the rightful coder Oracle.

Re:A high schooler?

[Sulphur]

IMHO, Oracle's lawyers were plain stupid in this issue.

HOW IN HELL they didn't run a background check on the judge? Books are public information!

Common! Know your enemy! the more basic rule in any conflict management!

I would mark carefully the names involved in this process. This is lawyer that I would *never* hire.

He checked out Range Checking for Dummies.

Re:A high schooler?

[MightyMartian]

J2ME is a pretty feature-limited version of Java. It certainly was never going to be suitable on the mid to high end smartphones. Pretty much every smartphone out there now is perfectly capable of running the full-blown JRE out of the box. In other words, with or without Dalvek, mobile Java editions are a fading proposition.

Re:A high schooler?

[jbengt]

SCO had the same lawyer.

Re:A high schooler?

[Barbara, not Barbie]

The code that did the actual speed-up (TimSort) wasn't written by a sun employee - it was ported - by the original author - from python.

Also, rangecheck isn't eligible for copyright on its own - it's purely functional, no originality, no "advancing the state of the art" - even the JUDGE could (and did) write it. Yo can't copyright something that is purely functional, no matter how much "sweat of the brow" may have been involved. Don't argue with me - take it up with the Supremes, because that's their take on it post-Feiss.

Re:A high schooler?

[Barbara, not Barbie]

You *cannot* register a copyright for something that is purely functional, a "scene a faire", or otherwise not creative. The rangecheck function is not eligible for copyright, any more than the linux headers were when RMS tried to make some stupid anti-android fud to try to promote the GPLv3.

Re:A high schooler?

[betterunixthanunix]

Little kids may not have access to computers that they can run their own programs on...

Re:A high schooler?

[Barbara, not Barbie]

Noser didn't write rangecheck - they decompiled the class file (a fact that both sides now stipulate). However, rangecheck isn't even eligible for copyright protection - it is neither creative nor original, being purely functional. The judge in this case "gets it."

Re:A high schooler?

[Barbara, not Barbie]

There's not much to argue - rangecheck isn't eligible for copyright by anyone. It's purely functional, there's really only one way to do it, it lacks the element of creativity necessary for copyright protection, and Oracle is grasping at straws. The judge made this quite clear when he told them that they were making a mistake not just accepting an offer of statutory damages and dropping it.

Re:A high schooler?

[Eponymous Hero]

60% of the time they're below average all the time

Re:A high schooler?

[jbengt]

You don't need to register copyright. But you do need to register before you sue, or you can't win things like "infringer's profits".
Also, IIRC, the range check code was contributed to Java with Sun receiving an irrevocable license to use it and the contributor retaining his copyright. (It's possible, though, that that could be wrong; I read it on the internet and am too lazy/busy to look it up again at work)

Re:A high schooler?

[secret_squirrel_99]

To tell you the true, this gives us a clear hint about Oracle's future.

SCO did exactly the same thing in the past - but, honestly, I think SCO's lawyers did a better job.

In what way? Oracle is the 2nd biggest software house on the planet, the clear leader in several verticals and makes and/or sells literally hundreds of products. Which of these things in even a remote way, describes SCO?

Re:A high schooler?

[spyked]

Yep, and here's something even funnier (this time on purpose): http://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/transcriptions/EWD04xx/EWD475.html

I mean I'm not saying people always make good decisions.

Re:A high schooler?

[BenoitRen]

Sort of like how Javascript lacks an Array.indexOf method to find a certain item in the array.

Array indexOf method

Re:A high schooler?

[Anonymous Coward]

dictionary.reference.com/browse/ethnicity
noun, plural ethnicities. 1. ethnic traits, background, allegiance, or association. 2. an ethnic group

Are you associated with America?
Do you have allegiance to America?
Is your background most recently in America?

If yes to any of the above then your ethnicity is American.
If yes to any of the above but you believe your ethnicity to be other than American then you're doing it wrong, or digging too deep into history to claim your ethnicity.

As for "race", see here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Race_%28human_classification%29#Modern_debate

Today, all humans are classified as belonging to the species Homo sapiens and sub-species Homo sapiens sapiens. However, this is not the first species of homininae: the first species of genus Homo, Homo habilis, are theorized to have evolved in East Africa at least 2 million years ago

If you're using "homo sapiens" as your race and American as your ethnicity then you're doing it right. Alternatively you can argue we are all Africans. Any other use is wrong. There is no black or white race. Only a person seeking to justify positive or negative treatment of another based on skin color (ie:a bigot) argues otherwise.

Re:A high schooler?

[Anonymous Coward]

No smarter either, which is a huge problem when living in a technological society.

Re:A high schooler?

[secret_squirrel_99]

It is an exact 1:1 copy. Google is screwed.

Oracle still needs to show damages, they have none, or that Google created by virtue of this copying, a commercial advantage. Again there is none. End result, they copied a trivial function rather than spending 5 minutes writing it. Its a non-issue.

Re:A high schooler?

[Anonymous Coward]

..are no more stupid...

there fixed that for you.

Re:A high schooler?

[Anonymous Coward]

Larry Ellison doesn't need to save up for yachts.

Re:A high schooler?

[jbengt]

I do not believe that that is related to range check. I believe Noser had to do with the test files that were unnecessarily included in the distribution of Android and are no longer present.

Re:A high schooler?

[alonsoac]

There are all kinds of majorities defined for things like voting for laws in parlament. Some types of laws require bigger majority, one could say a vast majority, to be approved. A programmer should be aware of these real-world situations and code appropiately.

Re:A high schooler?

[jbengt]

Mod parent up

Re:A high schooler?

[Anonymous Coward]

GP isn't talking about Larry. He is talking about Larry's lawyers, whom Larry is paying (in GP's case it is by the hour).

Re:A high schooler?

[alonsoac]

so is this in the public domain now? Will I get sued for using it or should I forget I even saw it and come up with a really original way to do a range check to be safe?

Re:A high schooler?

[alonsoac]

you should have been out learning how to function in a social world.

Re:A high schooler?

[Anonymous Coward]

As I am reading this, I just remembered I reviewed someone's code today that included a range check.
Fortunately it wasn't the same as it wasn't the same programming language.
I'd guessing by my co-worker's salary, it was worth about $9, plus $2 for me to review it.

Re:A high schooler?

[h4rr4r]

Why not?
Not like they need kernel access, just user space programs, and only needs to be installed in their own user stuff.

If the parent bought a device that requires signing of code, then I am sure they can afford the $99/ year. I always hear on slashdot that it is such a low price it will never hinder anyone.

Re:A high schooler?

[Darinbob]

Which is exactly why Boies says he couldn't program it in 6 months. He needs more billable hours than that! Only chumps like poor high schoolers would write it more quickly.

Re:A high schooler?

[uncqual]

Oracle being handed their balls on a platter over this.

I have the feeling that the judge may even order them run though a meat grinder before returning them to Oracle on said platter.

Re:A high schooler?

[GofG]

Never hire?

Oracle's lawyer is David Boies, who is widely reputed to be the best lawyer around today. He did Microsoft vs United States, he did Justice Department vs IBM, he did Bush vs Gore (!!!!!!!!!!!!).

Re:A high schooler?

[TubeSteak]

Pretty much every smartphone out there now is perfectly capable of running the full-blown JRE out of the box. In other words, with or without Dalvek, mobile Java editions are a fading proposition.

You might be surprised to learn that the vast majority of mobile phones in the USA and the world are not smart phones.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feature_phone

Mobile java is going to be around for a looong time, mostly because 70% of global cell phone purchasers can't afford smart phones.

Re:A high schooler?

[colinrichardday]

I believe a negative index would throw an out of bounds exception

java.lang.ArrayIndexOutOfBoundsException

Re:A high schooler?

[ljgshkg]

Not being able to write code doesn't mean you're stupid. But if you really can't write a range checking code within a day, even if you have no programming background, it's pretty bad xd

Re:A high schooler?

[Grishnakh]

Exactly. If Americans aren't any smarter on average than Zimbabweans or Bolivians or Paraguayans or Somalians or Burmans, then they're going to have a hard time trying to maintain a technological society and an economy so much stronger than those countries. And with the way things seem to be going in America these days, it looks like they're not going to succeed in that for much longer.

Re:A high schooler?

[boxxertrumps]

Seven? Talk about a late start!

What did they teach you in kindergarten, long division? *snicker*

Re:A high schooler?

[Darinbob]

They copied the API so I presume the parameter names are listed right there in the API and they just used that. The exception names are of course spelled out in the API as well. So you really only have two ways to write this function, differing only in which conditional you check first. Even the line breaks seem to be based upon standard coding rules of a max 60 to 80 chars per line.

Re:A high schooler?

[Anonymous Coward]

RTFA.
He learned to code during the trial.

Re:A high schooler?

[Anonymous Coward]

the Java one is 9 lines long ... because it was written in Java

FTFY

I could write it with exceptions in 5 lines in Python including the definition of RangeError.

class RangeError (Exception): pass
def rangeCheck(value, lowerBound, upperBound):
    if value<lowerBound: raise RangeError("Too Low")
    elif value>upperBound: raise RangeError("Too High")
    return True

Re:A high schooler?

[DragonWriter]

If the judge's statement is even a half-truth, the code in question checks a number, and passes it somewhere if it's a good number.

It does both more (checks more numbers) and less (doesn't deal with actually passing the numbers anywhere) than that: it actually checks two numbers against an array, and throws an exception if either of the numbers is a bad number. Passing the numbers somewhere else is the responsibility of the calling code.

Re:A high schooler?

[Anonymous Coward]

Luckily it ate it from both code snippets so no damage done :)

Re:A high schooler?

[jedidiah]

Except this sort of thing doesn't require being able to code.

It doesn't even require being aware of the existence of computers.

That's one of the fun things about computing. A lot of it is pure math and some of it isn't even that.

Re:A high schooler?

[Anonymous Coward]

A seven year old could probably do it faster; they haven't "learned" yet that they're dumb.

High schoolers are educated stupid. It will be impossible for your educated stupid brain to know that 4 different corner harmonic 24 hour Days rotate simultaneously within a single 4 quadrant rotation of a squared equator and cubed Earth.

Man invented his God in man's character - Stupid Oneism and Singularity in Universe of Opposites. God BELIEF succumbs to The Cubic Law of Nature.

Re:A high schooler?

[amicusNYCL]

Yes, I'm aware that it has been added to more recent versions of Javascript. Assume for a moment you wanted to support IE8 though.

Re:A high schooler?

[Hognoxious]

He knows. I know. Everybody knows.

The point is that if Orible lose, Larry's armada will sally forth and sink the shyster's new toy.

Re:A high schooler?

[nahdude812]

Implemented in JavaScript 1.6

IE 5.5 through IE 8 use JavaScript 1.5.

So you can only depend on it if you are willing to shut out close to 20% of your target market (that's why we do something like if (typeof Array.prototype.indexOf == 'undefined') { Array.prototype.indexOf = function(needle) { ... } })

Re:A high schooler?

[Anonymous Coward]

It doesn't even do "checks a number, and passes it somewhere if it's a good number."
It does a couple of checks, and while doing so, throws an appropriate exception if any of those checks fail. If none of the checks fail, it simply returns.

Re:A high schooler?

[betterunixthanunix]

If the parent bought a device that requires signing of code, then I am sure they can afford the $99/ year. I always hear on slashdot that it is such a low price it will never hinder anyone.

First of all, I do not know who you hear that from -- that price could be more than someone is willing to pay just to give their kids a chance to write some programs.

More importantly, a young child may never express a desire to program if their computer is designed to stop them from doing so. A lot of people, myself included, broke into programming by experimenting with our computers. Yet a locked-down computer that tries to extract fees from people who want to program is something will discourage kids who are not absolutely determined to learn -- which is going to be quite a few kids. A parent may not spend the money to let their child write programs if their kid does not even ask.

When I think back to my early days of learning to program, here is what I remember: downloading GCC only any computer I could get my hands on, and using it to compile C programs (I did not actually own my first computer until I was 13). Most of the people whose computers I was using did not seem to mind -- they were mystified by programming but did not want to discourage my curiosity. I wonder how much longer such a thing will be possible, with the current trends in computing. Will an 11 year old in 2015 or 2020 be able to sit down and write programs on whatever computer he can find, or will he only be able to find app stores and locked down computers? Will school computers allow students to write their own programs, or will that only be allowed on computers dedicated to programming classes?

I am sure that there will always be hackers in the world, kids who learn to program outside of the assigned curriculum and whose parents do not try to discourage their curiosity. What I fear is that the number will shrink, that it will only be wealthy kids who can be hackers (particularly if they must buy a second computer in order to write programs -- like they must with an iPad), and that they will be surrounded by restrictions and demands for money. It is easy for an adult, especially one who works in a technical job, to forget that kids have no income, that they cannot just buy a high end workstation, and that they must often make due with whatever the adults around them are willing to give them (or throw away). Many adults will not stop to think that the children they care for will be restricted by the "easy to learn" computer they bought, or that those restrictions might be detrimental.

Re:A high schooler?

[Teancum]

You don't need to register copyright, but if you do go through the motions of copyright registration you can (in America) claim statutory damages. Depending on the situation, statutory damages can be more than actual damages and also can count per infringement. If you are having a hard time proving actual loss of sales or trying to come up with a number representing how much the copyright infringement has damaged your ability to earn money from the copyrighted work, you can seek statutory damages instead which sets a minimum amount where all you need to prove is that copyright infringement happened in the first place.

At the very least such damages can help pay for a competent lawyer and certainly can cause somebody doing willful infringement to pause and take notice about the situation. As an insurance policy, I'd even suggest that open source projects consider every once in awhile to "pass the hat" to collect the fees and take the extra step of formally registering copyright with the Library of Congress (especially for a 1.0 version release or other major updates) if only to discourage anybody stupid enough to engage in willful copyright infringement. It also shows that you are being serious about copyright enforcement if you go through that step and it also makes the government as a part of your archival process as well by storing as a "backup" repository and date stamping your code base if somebody wants to be real stupid and file a software patent claim against your project. For $50 (or whatever the fee is at the moment) it is a cheap form of legal insurance.

Re:A high schooler?

[Hognoxious]

Sort of like wml. Before it could fix bayonets and form a defensive square Moore's cavalry had ridden right over it.

Re:A high schooler?

[MightyMartian]

So what you're saying is that he probably feels pretty ashamed making the outrageously retarded argument he's making, or possibly that he was hit by a brick and is now actually retarded.

Re:A high schooler?

[Anonymous Coward]

You hear expressions like a 'small minority' or a 'tiny minority' all the time. Given that a minority is the complement of a majority why can't it too have degrees?

Speaking of minorities, are you perhaps a nigger? Your limited intelligence would appear to suggest you are.

Re:A high schooler?

[Homr Zodyssey]

Most modern IDEs have some sort of code-formatter that would end up making it the same. Also, having similar coding standards would make you end up with the same indentation.

Re:A high schooler?

[hey!]

J2ME is a pretty feature-limited version of Java

Well, having spent a number of years watching J2ME, I'd say the problem wasn't that J2ME was feature limited. I had things I could do even in MIDP that were quite useful, to say nothing of the Personal Basis Profile.

As an early app developer, we had two concerns with J2ME: how to get our app in our users' hands, not getting tied to a particular carrier (and thus losing access to corporate customers who used different carriers) or even handset. You got your J2ME SDK from the handset vendor and the handset vendors were the mobile carriers' slaves. The same phone would have different capabilities on different carriers because they deleted features the carriers didn't want (for price positioning or because the features conflicted with the carriers' laughable ambitions to become content companies).

When Apple came along with the iPhone, they did three important things. First, they didn't take any crap from the carrier (AT&T), they defined the product themselves. Second, they made it possible to run an app on any iOS device (originally just the iPhone, but later the iPod Touch too). Third, they had a simple mechanism for getting your app into the customer's hands. That made it possible to create a successful product for iOS in a way it had never been possible in J2ME.

I believe the fact that it Apple made it easy to sell apps for iOS is what is responsible for the success of attracting developers to the platform early on. It wasn't some kind of Apple UI secret sauce, although touch screens standard was a big advance. J2ME could have been an entrenched mobile standard years before the iPhone came out, if Sun had only taken steps to create a market (not necessarily an app store) for developers to target.

Then Android came along, and it was everything I'd ever hoped for: well thought out, robust, open source, feature-rich, vendor independent, even *app store* independent. But by then I was out of the business.

Re:A high schooler?

[Anonymous Coward]

Not even then (as long as they have internet access).

If all you want is learn a bit of programming, all the sites like ideone, jsfiddle, repl.it, tryruby/tryhaskell/... will let you do that if you have a browser. There also was some basic IDEs in the appstore, IIRC.

And on desktop with recent Windows by default you have Powershell, .Net Framework is preinstalled and comes with csc/vbc/jsc (C#/Visual Basic/JScript compilers), Mac OS X has AppleScript (and Python as optional component on the disc), Linux usually has a bunch of interpreters and often gcc out of the box. And of course all of them also have browsers, so you only need ability to save and open .html files to write JS.

TL;DR: if you're willing to learn programming, all the tools are at arn's length, just as it was since home computers of yore.

Re:A high schooler?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, you actually DO have to register Copyright. You can prohibit someone from publishing the same content without a registration- but you're VERY limited in what damages you can ask for when you do that (And we won't get into having to PROVE that you do actually own the Copyright on an un-registered work...). The most you can ever get under those circumstances is statutory... Nothing like the claimed amount- the statutory damages won't get Oracle more than a minuscule fraction of the costs they've incurred up to this point.

Next time... Do a little research on the IP laws...you're wrong in several ways.

Re:A high schooler?

[Teancum]

If you register copyright after it becomes an issue, you can't sue over previous copyright infringement in terms of seeking statutory damages, but you can use a copyright registration for prohibiting further copyright infringement and raising the specter of seeking statutory damages over future infringement. Often that is enough to convince somebody to stop messing with you, if that is your goal.

If you perform the registration earlier, it documents that you have been serious about enforcing copyright on a particular work. It also makes the task of seeking damages much, much easier as you don't even need to worry about how much actual damage has been caused due to copyright infringement... in other words you don't need to give a judge some sort of list of how much you lost in sales due to the copyright infringement. All you have to show is that the infringement happened in the first place so you are on the hook for damages as spelled out under the law as passed by Congress. This is the law that the MPAA is using to go after folks who copy movies as illegal torrents as all they have to prove is that you copied their content.... how much money you made or how much money they lost is irrelevant.

This law does tend to help ordinary folks though, as the statutory damages for most people are substantially higher than anything you can typically prove as "actual" damages, such as how much money you might have lost if your applet on the iPad store was copied by somebody else and they took credit for your work. You might only prove a couple thousand dollars worth of actual damages, but with copyright registration you can claim a substantially larger amount of money from the statutory damages.

It bites for Oracle though, because they are choosing to dismiss the statutory damages and are going for actual damages on the grounds that they think they will get more money from Google by using the computation for actual damages instead... with the risk of "winning" and potentially still getting nothing if the judge looks through and sees that no actual damage happened other than minor copyright infringement.

Re:A high schooler?

[the_B0fh]

Please. Boies was the lead lawyer in the Microsoft monopoly trial - against Microsoft. He was one of the best trial lawyers to break up illegal monopolies then.

Lawyers argue for the side that is paying for them. Just like everyone else - you do the work you're paid to do.

Re:A high schooler?

[Teancum]

Anybody can register a copyright on anything. All it takes is just filing a $50 fee to the Library of Congress along with whatever you want to register. They don't even really look at what you have sent them other than to try and catalog what you've sent to them and your content (computer software, novel, painting, whatever you are trying to register) simply goes into the heap of other stuff being registered and makes the library get a bit larger with its collection.

As for if a court would recognize that copyright registration, that is something else completely different. The rangecheck function may be eligible for copyright nor not (that is a legal question), and for trivial stuff you are generally correct that it would be a dismissed claim. In other words, if you were trying to sue somebody for copyright infringement over a function like rangecheck, an intelligent judge would throw the case out as soon as you filed the case and perhaps even seek barratry charges against you for filing the lawsuit.

Re:A high schooler?

[Hognoxious]

If you're using "homo sapiens" as your race and American as your ethnicity then you're doing it right.

No he isn't. Homo sapiens is a species.

Race is a subset of the species, i.e. the equivalent of "breed" in domestic animals.

Re:A high schooler?

[MaskedSlacker]

For example you can have a 1% majority

I think that word does not mean what you think it means.

Re:A high schooler?

[Anpheus]

On the contrary, they could be negatively affected if all those proprietary languages which are locking them in cannot be re-implemented under the force of law. Those proprietary languages right now have to stay competitive knowing that high prices would encourage an alternative to enter the market. To put it another way, if Microsoft doubled the price of Windows, they might retain enough users to make more money, but they'd also risk a flight to WINE, and I guarantee you a lot of those potential customers, particularly large businesses, would look at moving away from a dependency on Win32/Windows. Now imagine if Microsoft didn't have to worry about the competitive pressure of WINE, and no one else could legally duplicate Win32?

Now, of course, Microsoft has other competitive pressures, and their price choice is probably not dominated by the potential for competition, but for niche programming languages and environments, I would guess they are. My friend, an economics major, was faced with the potential of having to spend $500 for a single user license for some very niche regression analysis software that had a particular API and programming language. If they can get away with charging college students and academics $500, they must not be overly concerned with competition. A ruling on the copyrightability of APIs in favor of Oracle would make it so they wouldn't have to worry about any competitors claiming "compatibility" with their software.

Re:A high schooler?

[cvtan]

But 70% of American drivers are above average!

Re:A high schooler?

[Teancum]

It gets worse. The judge even reminded the Oracle lawyers that if they sought actual damages instead of statutory damages, that the amount he may award them might end up being $0 instead of the hoped for millions or even billions that Oracle wants even if infringement is found as a finding. Oracle chose to go for actual damages, giving the judge an easy out to find infringement but still award $0. It could even backfire for Oracle if infringement doesn't happen as they could even be liable for legal fees and other damages.

Re:A high schooler?

[Teancum]

Because of the complexity of the case and the amount of time being spent on discussing programming concepts, the judge decided to take some personal time and learn how to program. In other words, he learned how to code while he was adjudicating the case.

I am impressed by somebody in a position like his taking that effort, and it shows not only the intelligence of the judge but that he was trying to apply the principles he was learning about in the course of the trial. I don't think there is any indication that the judge had studied or knew much about coding prior to the trial, but it does show that he is trying to make extra effort to understand the issues involved.

I admired the extra effort that Judge Jackson did with the DOJ v. Microsoft case where he went out of his way to explicitly try to remove Internet Explorer from his computer and noted how difficult Microsoft had made the task. I could name a few other examples but it is a rare judge to make that kind of effort.

Re:A high schooler?

[Anonymous Coward]

Wow, way to show your ignorance of copyright.........better go do some research before you look even dumber by your lack of knowledge.

Re:A high schooler?

[Anonymous Coward]

A copyright is not a patent.

Re:A high schooler?

[heathen_01]

Java developers can't be trusted to indent properly, your code will be formatted post check in.

Re:A high schooler?

[Anonymous Coward]

He checked out Range Checking for Judges.

Re:A high schooler?

[h4rr4r]

I also believed that, but the i$THING folks here tell me that there exists no such danger.

I was actually making a satirical remark about this exact topic. Sorry it was unclear.

Re:A high schooler?

[betterunixthanunix]

Hint:

Re:A high schooler?

[betterunixthanunix]

On the contrary, they could be negatively affected if all those proprietary languages which are locking them in cannot be re-implemented under the force of law.

That is the risk one assumes with a proprietary language, regardless of whether or not APIs can be copyrighted. People who use proprietary languages do not generally view this as being a problem, or at least they consider the risk to be acceptable.

Re:A high schooler?

[rhook]

I implemented range check functions in about half the programs I wrote in my first programming class. It is quite trivial to do so.

Re:A high schooler?

[the_B0fh]

No fragmentation? A friend was just bitching about his Word With Friends. Apparently some of the buttons are simply not accessible because the UI was created on one phone, and whatever that phone is, had a bigger screen resolution than his phone, so some buttons disappear off screen.

Re:A high schooler?

[rhook]

Oracle's lawyers are most likely salaried employees, they do not get paid by the hour.

Re:A high schooler?

[Anonymous Coward]

You are confusing a copyright claim with patent claim. Copyright doesn't cover the usefulness of the code, that is for a patent. Google's revenue would only be attributable to Oracle if Google was trying to sell that copied code in a picture frame, a book, or maybe sing it in a song or something. In this case the words are meaningless and have no part of what google is selling/giving away.

Re:A high schooler?

[Anonymous Coward]

Technically, it's NOT patentable (in re Bilski nuked that from orbit...). And this is Copyright we're talking about right at the moment...and...it's NOT Copyrightable. Purely functional content isn't Copyrightable.

Re:A high schooler?

[steelfood]

Yes, but in most other places, they're not particularly proud of that quality. Most of those people seek to better themselves by become better educated, more spiritual, etc. (not say the net outcome is necessarily positive).

Here, people like to assert their own superiority even when there is none. They feel that somehow, because they are themselves, it automatically means they are superior to everyone else. It's not just that mentality though. As a consequence of this thinking, it automatically implies that everyone else should be more like them.

Re:A high schooler?

[MightyMartian]

I recall implementing a range check in my Pascal class in high school. I mean, we're talking bare bones, first year programming here. The idea that somehow you could claim any kind of copyright over such a function is so ludicrous that I almost pity the lawyer, who must realize just how wildly idiotic the claim is. I guess his compensation is that it is his inept client actually making the claim, but still, this is a very basic concept that goes right back to sanity checks on input, and I'd have a hard time holding my head up after having made that kind of an argument for a client.

Re:A high schooler?

[Barbara, not Barbie]

The stupids are out in force today. (yes, I mean you).

Unless you register the copyright, you can only ask for actual damages, not statutory damages.

Oracle didn't present any evidence that they registered copyright to rangecheck and/or timsort. All they presented was a registration for the collective work, as a compilation - and a blank dvd with the "source."

Realizing how much trouble they're in, and that even if the judge decides that they're allowed statutory damages, their damages are now limited to $750 to $30,000.

While it can be adjusted upward to as much as $150,000 if the infringement was willful, Oracle hasn't presented any proof that it was willful, and Google has presented proof that it was a 3rd party contractor - the people at Noser - who decompiled rangecheck, contrary to Google's orders, so in the case of accidental infringement, the damages can be as low as $200.

And that's dependent on the judge first finding that there's no fair use argument, and that the particular elements are in fact eligible for copyright - which in the case of rangecheck is not the case (purely functional elements with no creativity are not eligible for copyright).

So that leaves timsort - which was written by Tim Peters for Python, then ported to Java by Joshua Bloch while he was a Google employee.

http://www.java-frameworks.com/java/openjdk/java/util/TimSort.java.html

Notice who has the copyright? Hint - it's not Oracle.

Now notice the license? GPLv2.

/*
* Copyright 2009 Google Inc. All Rights Reserved.
* DO NOT ALTER OR REMOVE COPYRIGHT NOTICES OR THIS FILE HEADER.
*
* This code is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it
* under the terms of the GNU General Public License version 2 only, as
* published by the Free Software Foundation. Oracle designates this
* particular file as subject to the "Classpath" exception as provided
* by Oracle in the LICENSE file that accompanied this code.
*
* This code is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT
* ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or
* FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License
* version 2 for more details (a copy is included in the LICENSE file that
* accompanied this code).
*
* You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License version
* 2 along with this work; if not, write to the Free Software Foundation,
* Inc., 51 Franklin St, Fifth Floor, Boston, MA 02110-1301 USA.
*
* Please contact Oracle, 500 Oracle Parkway, Redwood Shores, CA 94065 USA
* or visit www.oracle.com if you need additional information or have any
* questions.
*/

package java.util;

/**
* A stable, adaptive, iterative mergesort that requires far fewer than
* n lg(n) comparisons when running on partially sorted arrays, while
* offering performance comparable to a traditional mergesort when run
* on random arrays. Like all proper mergesorts, this sort is stable and
* runs O(n log n) time (worst case). In the worst case, this sort requires
* temporary storage space for n/2 object references; in the best case,
* it requires only a small constant amount of space.
*
* This implementation was adapted from Tim Peters's list sort for
* Python, which is described in detail here:
*
* http://svn.python.org/projects/python/trunk/Objects/listsort.txt
*
* Tim's C code may be found here:
*
* http://svn.python.org/projects/python/trunk/Objects/listobject.c
*
* The underlying techniques are described in this paper (and may have
* even earlier origins):
*
* "Optimistic Sorting and Information Theoretic Complexity"
* Peter McIlroy
* SODA (Fourth Annual ACM-SIAM Symposium on Discrete Algorithms),
* pp 467-474, Austin, Tex

Re:A high schooler?

[MightyMartian]

What's even worse is that the judge warned Oracle's lawyers a few days ago that they were on a perilous course over all of this. Oracle has to have known for some time that this was going to end in humiliation. I just can't figure out why Ellison doesn't just instruct Oracle's lawyers to ask for some moronically low settlement just to prevent the inevitable punishment. There's a point at which you have to look at the top guy's motives and ask "Does this really have anything to do with the company's interests any more?"

Re:A high schooler?

[lennier]

A programmer should realize majority is a binary state, either a 1 (it is) or 0 (it is not).

A politician would realise that you don't even need a majority, just a plurality.

Re:A high schooler?

[lennier]

For example you can have a 1% majority

I think that word does not mean what you think it means.

Sure it does, if you have more than 100 competing choices.

Re:A high schooler?

[icebraining]

Those numbers are outdated (Sep 1, 2011); smartphones surpassed feature phones in the US this year: http://pewinternet.org/Reports/2012/Smartphone-Update-2012/Findings.aspx

In any case, current numbers are not nearly as important as future growth, and the feature phone sales have actually declined while smartphones are growing like crazy.

Re:A high schooler?

[Barbara, not Barbie]

You're completely wrong - you cannot get statutory damages if you haven't registered the work. All you can get is provable damages. And Oracle has not presented any proof that any consumer purchased any android device because of rangecheck or timsort (which the judge has been ragging them on), never mind that the judge also said that rangecheck was trivial (it's also purely functional, so not eligible for copyright), and timsort has an "interesting" copyright notice

*
* Copyright 2009 Google Inc. All Rights Reserved.
* DO NOT ALTER OR REMOVE COPYRIGHT NOTICES OR THIS FILE HEADER.
*
* This code is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it
* under the terms of the GNU General Public License version 2 only, as
* published by the Free Software Foundation. Oracle designates this
* particular file as subject to the "Classpath" exception as provided
* by Oracle in the LICENSE file that accompanied this code.
*
* This code is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT
* ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or
* FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License
* version 2 for more details (a copy is included in the LICENSE file that
* accompanied this code).
*
* You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License version
* 2 along with this work; if not, write to the Free Software Foundation,
* Inc., 51 Franklin St, Fifth Floor, Boston, MA 02110-1301 USA.
*
* Please contact Oracle, 500 Oracle Parkway, Redwood Shores, CA 94065 USA
* or visit www.oracle.com if you need additional information or have any
* questions.
*/

Timsort was written by Tim Peters for Python, then ported to Java by Joshua Bloch while he was a Google employee. Do you really expect the judge to award monetary damages for infringement?

BTW: Oracle just caved on the issue. They've agreed to let the judge rule, rather than waste time going to the jury, because they know there's not enough money to be had there to even compensate for the time to argue it, and they want to save the time remaining on their clock (the judge is keeping both sides on a tight leash time-wise) for the patents phase of the trial.

Re:A high schooler?

[lennier]

Wait, I meant plurality. Darn. Elections are hard.

Re:A high schooler?

[icebraining]

In the UK and other places, they use majority for plurality and "absolute majority" for majority.

Re:A high schooler?

[Githaron]

Just like everyone else - you do the work you're paid to do.

He is being paid to fight for Oracle. He is not being paid to make stupid arguments that have a high probability of biting them in the ass. He has made things worse for Oracle not better.

Re:A high schooler?

[shutdown -p now]

Let's copy-paste this a couple more times until they are in the red ink!

Re:A high schooler?

[shutdown -p now]

Slashcode ate that all up. F you /. my reply looks like shite also because of that and I can't be bothered to figure out how to post code without it being de-htmlized.

You want <ecode>

Anybody else see a bug? I donno their array implementation, but it looks like they are zero indexed arrays while also allowing a "array's length" equal to the to index value. Classic noob array out of bounds mistake staring at me.

It has been a de facto standard convention in languages with 0-based indexing to use [from; to) ranges, i.e. with exclusive upper bound. Java is not an exception there.

Re:A high schooler?

[DarwinSurvivor]

Why use an elif after raising an exception? Just use if!

Re:A high schooler?

[Pieroxy]

If you had a 100 people do it you would probably get lots of exact copies.

I'm pretty sure you would not.

Re:A high schooler?

[DarwinSurvivor]

Yeah, I guess that rules it out seeing as Java doesn't have any code conventions that developers are expected to adhear to or an easy to use tool to check for them.

Re:A high schooler?

[Anonymous Coward]

Only after having them removed by way of bricking them off...

Re:A high schooler?

[reve_etrange]

That's just poor UI programming. Don't use static layouts.

Re:A high schooler?

[MightyMartian]

Mobile Java is not going to be a growth market. Sure, it will still persist for several years, but as even low end phones begin to gain, processor power and memory, there will be no need for J2ME, as these phones will be able to use the full blown stack anyways. Of course, what's likely to happen is that it will be Dalvik, rather than Java, because Oracle is not only extraordinarily greedy, but also has shown itself just as inept at handling Sun's products as Sun was. This all started because Sun was stupid and shortsighted. If they could have cut a deal with Google, even as we speak, Java would be the major smart device platform.

Re:A high schooler?

[DragonWriter]

This is a half-truth:

You haven't had to register copyrights in the US for decades. Ever heard of the Berne Convention?

Its true that copyright exists upon creation and doesn't require registration, but you do have to register them prior before instituting almost any civil action for infringement of copyright, see 17 USC Sec. 411.

So, registration isn't required to have a copyright, but it is required to sue someone to recover damages for violation of a copyright.

Re:A high schooler?

[PuZZleDucK]

Thats not fragmentation, that's just a damn small screen... ever try opening Gimp/Photoshop on a first gen notebook? It's craptacularly impossible to use, not even a single pane fits in the screen and there are 3+ of them, that does not mean PCs are fragmented. Just as on the PC you could code it to suit all screen sizes... but it's a hell of a lot of work!

Re:A high schooler?

[inode_buddha]

He's also SCO's lawyer. He doesn't actually give a damn about the tech, its about the money. Which is why he made SCO pay millons up front. That way, he gets rich no matter how stupid he has to look in court. Seriously - subscribe to groklaw and you'll be amazed how US law works. Much like constant code refactoring by idiots.

Re:A high schooler?

[Oxford_Comma_Lover]

It's not brilliant to make insanely stupid arguments. Among other things, a judge will eventually lose patience with those arguments, and they will cost the client and the reputation of the attorney. It's brilliant to make insanely creative arguments that sound rational and only slightly creative when you only have really bad arguments to make that you know will lose. There's a difference.

Neither one is exactly happening here. The arguments were probably just very stupid, not insanely stupid.

Re:A high schooler?

[hey!]

Not being able to write code doesn't mean you're stupid.

However, equating them means you're ignorant and arrogant.

Ah, but if I *know* I'm arrogant, I'm not ignorant.

Re:A high schooler?

[Zeroko]

That way you could tell if someone copied it so you could sue them, of course.

Re:A high schooler?

[sootman]

I can't find the reference at the moment and I'm too lazy to search further but once upon a time, Brian Kerningham and Dennis Ritchie were working on UNIX. There was a misunderstanding of who was supposed to write a little routine and they both wrote it--identically, down to the character.

Re:A high schooler?

[Anonymous Coward]

What is quite concerning however, is being a legal representative over something for which you have no knowledge. Those with knowledge of programming see this short 9 line subroutine as a very trivial thing to program. There isn't anything very technical going on. Its all very straightforward. It could be used as an example for students who are just learning to program, as it is very short, simple and straightforward. I don't expect my doctor to be a baseball player, but if he is treating athletes while working for a professional sports team, he should have knowledge of sports related injuries --more so than the average general practitioner. As someone who has a degree in Computer Science, I see businesses who want their IT people to have "business knowledge". They want more than just someone who knows CS. If they can expect more (and really, they demand more), why should we give free rides going the other way? A lawyer dealing with software issues should have some knowledge of computers, programming and software. *I demand*.

Re:A high schooler?

[Xtifr]

Reputed by whom? The best? I strongly beg to differ. He still has a good reputation, but he's also got a fairly long string recently of high-profile failures and mess-ups. He lost badly to MoFo in SCO v Novell, lost in Bush v Gore, managed to barely win against MS when they were doing everything they could to shoot themselves in the foot, looks likely to lose in SCO v IBM and Oracle v Google, and was recently sanctioned in Florida.

He was certainly one of the greatest once-upon-a-time, but he's a little too fond of ambush tactics that don't work well with modern discovery practice, and of trying to find novel legal theories to shape precedent, which doesn't sit well with judges who don't like the idea of "legislating from the bench" (the whole "APIs are copyrightable" thing just has the stench of Boies all over it). His style simply no longer works as well as it once did.

Personally, if money were no object, I'd try to get MoFo or the Nazgul long before I'd consider B&S, unless I thought I was so guilty that only really sleazy, weasely, sideways tactics would give me even half a chance. And even then, I'd have my fingers crossed the whole time, hoping his funky tactics wouldn't actually end up making things worse (as they arguably may have done in SCO v IBM).

Re:A high schooler?

[MrDoh!]

I think you can get a blue pill for that.

Re:A high schooler?

[Pikoro]

Depends, is it a meter stick or a yard stick?

Re:A high schooler?

[Anonymous Coward]

Surely

        if (fromIndex arrayLen) throw new ArrayIndexOutOfBoundsException(toIndex);

Needs to be

        if (toIndex >= arrayLen) throw new ArrayIndexOutOfBoundsException(toIndex);

Anyway, this is TRIVIAL code. If this is all Oracle have I would assess damages at $0.01 or less.

Re:A high schooler?

[Anonymous Coward]

the guy who wrote it gave it to both Sun AND Android

How can Sun/Oracle claim copyright on something it did NOT create, but they simply used?
By other slashdot comments the judge should have laughed and then tossed this case out when it was filed. It shows arrogance on the goon judges or other powers, who allowed this to go to court in the first place.

Not even the Creator of the code can register a copyright because the work, does not meet requirements. If he did get it registered and then was to sue, lawyers would look the copyright over, and show it fails requirements and the registered copyright would be invalid.

This is from reading the comments to this point, from the ones that seem to know more about this.

Re:A high schooler?

[Anonymous Coward]

RTFA again. He learned to code Java during the trial. He did have experience coding in other languages before that.

Re:A high schooler?

[petman]

I think it does. Let's say there are two candidates, A & B. A got 50.5% of the votes. B got 49.5% of the votes. So we say that A has a 1% majority over B.

Re:A high schooler?

[slim]

A 1% majority (at least informally) means that the winner is 1% greater than the loser.

That is, the majority has 100%/2.01 and the minority is 100%/1.99.

51% is a slight majority. 99% is a vast majority.

Re:A high schooler?

[the_B0fh]

And when you're losing the fight, you throw everything against the wall, and hope something sticks.

Re:A high schooler?

[Anonymous Coward]

yep, complete idiots can develop entire programming languages too.

Re:A high schooler?

[Hognoxious]

Do you think one day kids will swap lawyer cards - with stats like number of clients fleeced, amount of bullshit spoken etc (I'm sure we could all add one or two) - like they do now with baseball ones?

Re:A high schooler?

[Anonymous Coward]

Pre-School??? I was writing RangCheck's before I was out of diapers.

P.S. I don't have any bladder problems, and was out of diapers at around the normal age (sheesh).

Re:A high schooler?

[Lisias]

Which of these things in even a remote way, describes SCO?

The FUD.

Re:A high schooler?

[Lisias]

Well., so he probably shouldn't had fired that clever trainee. :-)

Re:A high schooler?

[Lisias]

Damnit. I will bite the bait.

So your follow up is that Oracle is the "2nd biggest software house on planet, the clear leader in several verticals and makes and/or sells literrally hundred of products".

Ok. So do Microsoft and IBM (Microsoft is the first, and IBM is bigger than all to them). And this does not makes the three look the same, does?

Oh, wait! Microsoft funded SCO in order to jeopardize the Open Source products, didn't? Well,. these ones looks the same to me.

Re:A high schooler?

[RockDoctor]

Fore chrissakes,

Hunh ? Sorry, getting sidelined into making up a curse about the "one foreskin of Jesus, Mary, Joseph and the donkey!" That's a fertile field of oaths and epithets that your typo has opened up.

anyone who has been writing any degree of code for more than a few weeks has implemented a range check function,

FTFY

Seriously, anyone who is getting some sort of formal training in programming, should be being taught to validate his input pretty much as soon as they've learned enough of the syntax of their language of choice to be able to handle user input. That would be weeks at most. Maybe a couple of months for someone teaching themselves out of a book.

In the same exercises they should also be being told "You as a programmer, MUST write descriptive, helpful prompts for the user. The user will never READ or OBEY the instructions, but if you don't Write The Friendly M-prompt, that is your fault ; if they don't Read The Friendly M-prompt, that is their fault."

The depressing fact that users don't read manuals in no way obviates the programmers (development team more widely) from the duty to write the fucking things.

(Sorry ; wrote a Work Instruction last night ; handed it over ; discussed it ; answered questions. Back on shift, it's not been followed. SIGH.)

Re:A high schooler?

[ShooterNeo]

Infinite states? Doesn't the universe have a finite resolution?

Also, doesn't quantum uncertainty and noise mean that regardless of the large number of states the transistor is capable of, only a far smaller number of states are actually distinguishable or matter in a working system.

Re:A high schooler?

[shmlco]

"You might be surprised to learn that the vast majority of mobile phones in the USA and the world are not smart phones."

Ah, no. Smartphones are now more common than "dumb" phones. To quote CNN, "For the first time, more than half of all American mobile customers own a smartphone, according to a report released Wednesday by Nielsen. That's up from 38% a year ago."

Someone at some point in time probably made the argument that the majority of people were not going to be able to afford expensive mobile phones as well. Or that most people wouldn't have $10,000 "personal" computers sitting at home. Or that there would never be a market for $400 pocket calculators.

Thing is, those devices got cheaper. Smartphones will get cheaper. Soon that's all that will be made.

Re:A high schooler?

[Anonymous Coward]

yes, ask John Fogerty

5 Seconds

[Githaron]

From yesterday; the Oracle lawyer was attempting to argue that Google profited by stealing rangeCheck since it allowed them to get to market faster than they would have had they wrote it from scratch.

Because 5 seconds make all the difference.

Re:5 Seconds

[SailorOrion]

Well, if you are flying at orbital speeds because you have the nose up there, it's about 40km of difference...

Re:5 Seconds

[ByOhTek]

5 seconds? I'd say 5-10 minutes. Searching for that algorithm probably would take a lot longer than coding it...

Re:5 Seconds

[Soilworker]

5 Seconds sound like the real thing: from http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3940683

From OpenJDK:
private static void rangeCheck(int arrayLen, int fromIndex, int toIndex) {
                                if (fromIndex > toIndex)

                                                throw new IllegalArgumentException("fromIndex(" + fromIndex +
                                                                                            ") > toIndex(" + toIndex+")");

                                if (fromIndex arrayLen)
                                                throw new ArrayIndexOutOfBoundsException(toIndex);

                }
From Google:
private static void rangeCheck(int arrayLen, int fromIndex, int toIndex) {
                                if (fromIndex > toIndex)
                                                throw new IllegalArgumentException("fromIndex(" + fromIndex +
                                                                                            ") > toIndex(" + toIndex+")");

                                if (fromIndex arrayLen)
                                                throw new ArrayIndexOutOfBoundsException(toIndex);

                }
}

Re:5 Seconds

[Githaron]

Well, if you are flying at orbital speeds because you have the nose up there, it's about 40km of difference...

That is a different problem domain which uses a different scale of time intensity.

Re:5 Seconds

[Githaron]

5 seconds? I'd say 5-10 minutes. Searching for that algorithm probably would take a lot longer than coding it...

True. Although, I was making the generous assumption that the "infringed" code was already pulled up.

Re:5 Seconds

[LiENUS]

It looks like the lawyer is arguing it saved them a day or two and that since google is making $3 million a day on android that that is $6 million google wouldn't have had if they didn't steal rangeCheck. The judge then points out that as you say... it saved 5 seconds.

Re:5 Seconds

[Anonymous Coward]

Because 5 seconds make all the difference.

Try telling my girlfriend that

Re:5 Seconds

[Anonymous Coward]

5 seconds? I'd say 5-10 minutes. Searching for that algorithm probably would take a lot longer than coding it...

...you ARE aware who the defendant in this case is, right?

Re:5 Seconds

[Anonymous Coward]

4-5 = -1

Poor, poor girl.

Re:5 Seconds

[Anonymous Coward]

Thanks for the killing the joke, Githaron.

Re:5 Seconds

[idontgno]

Wolfram Alpha tells me that $3 million a day is $34.72 per second. So, Google's copyright malfeasance scored them a market-leading edge of at least $173.60.

Oracle's unjust loss must be made right! Oracle must be made whole!

Too bad it's too small for a Kickstarter or something. Maybe an PayPal donation site?

Re:5 Seconds

[19thNervousBreakdown]

Testing it on the other hand--that's the expensive part.

Re:5 Seconds

[slew]

From yesterday; the Oracle lawyer was attempting to argue that Google profited by stealing rangeCheck since it allowed them to get to market faster than they would have had they wrote it from scratch.

Because 5 seconds make all the difference.

So instead of spending 5 second and some chump change to pay someone to write it, Google chose to copy it instead. Hmm, that's even more evil if you ask me as that shows an intent to copy... ;^)

That's like arguing that if you shoplift some water from a vendor (i.e,, someone that is trying to sell said water), it's okay because it is was cheap and I could have gotten it cheaply at home if I really wanted to. The facts as I understand them in this case are you attempted to negociate to buy it, and did not come to terms, you didn't get it at home, and you did shoplift it. The main arguments you are likely to have are that water isn't really property at all (which is one common argument against copyrights in general), or if it could be considered property, somehow this specific water is in the public domain or your use of the water constituted fair use. Of course the loss that one incurs due to the misappropriation of property could be small, but in most cases, society generally makes punishment punitive to deter future transgressions. Unfortunatly in this area the law is likley against Oracle, as copyright damages are mostly statutory in nature, not punitive.

Re:5 Seconds

[Lisias]

5-10 minutes, including the bureaucratic work of doing it on a CMMI level process.

boolean function rangeCheck(
                    const int value,
                    const int min,
                    const int max)
{
                    return ( (min

MARK. I took me less than a minute! ;-)

Re:5 Seconds

[Lisias]

boolean function rangeCheck(
                                        const int value,
                                        const int min,
                                        const int max)
{
                                        return ( (min <= value) && (value >= value) )
}

Ok. More 7 minutes tryiung to figure out why the comparasion operators fucked up a block of what should be a plain text block. X-(

(thanks, slashdot!)

Re:5 Seconds

[Lisias]

boolean function rangeCheck(
                                const int value,
                                const int min,
                                const int max)
{
                              return ( (min <= value) && (value <= max) );
}

And an additional 3 minutes to figure out that the code I was writing in another window was typed here by mistake.

So, yes - I give you that. 5 to 10 minutes. You're right. :-)

Copyeur Und Pasteur : the most practiced software development process. :-P

Re:5 Seconds

[grumpyman]

FYI based on wiki numbers, Oracle generates about $1129 in revenue/second.

Re:5 Seconds

[Anonymous Coward]

It's i, not -1. She's imaginary, after all.

Re:5 Seconds

[Nethemas the Great]

I think it'd take longer to copy/paste than it would to just write it. Oracle should pay Google for time lost...

Re:5 Seconds

[MightyMartian]

I was thinking a bottle or a coupon drive, myself.

Re:5 Seconds

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually that is how it should be dealt with. Google, should be charged the percentage of value this added to their product. Take what their average coders would be payed for creating the rangeCheck method, let us be nice and say it took a coder a day to write this common text book method so $200, divide that by the total lines of code in Android and multiply it by the resulting total sales and derivative works sales; since Oracle says that it let them get to market quicker. So let us say it would be $200/1,000,000 lines of code * 6,000,000,000 total sales to date which equals $1,200,000. $1,200,000 would seem to be a fair and equitable for Oracle's actual loss. Given Google has removed this line from their current code and there seemed to be no malicious intent in its use, their should be no need for reoccurring license fees or additional penalties and this case can be over.

Re:5 Seconds

[Anonymous Coward]

What testing could fathomably be needed?

All it does is make sure the numbers you're inputting are within a range

input x
if x 10000 then goto badentry else goto goodentry

If you can manage to screw that up to the point of it needing to be run through a test more rigorous than 're-read what you typed to check for a simple typo', then you're clearly doing it wrong.

Re:5 Seconds

[Dahamma]

Except rangeCheck is a void that throws an exception. And "function" isn't even a Java keyword. Now go spend the next 10 minutes fixing it so it compiles :)

Re:5 Seconds

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't you mean max ge value?

Re:5 Seconds

[Anonymous Coward]

And Alsup basically told Oracle's lawyer that he was smoking crack- "You're one of the best lawyers in America. How could you even make that argument?"

Re:5 Seconds

[19thNervousBreakdown]

If you go into testing not assuming you're doing it wrong, you're doing it wrong.

Re:5 Seconds

[Anonymous Coward]

No, let me Google that ... oh, wait.

Re:5 Seconds

[madhi19]

Hell at that price if I was stuck in the Jury box I wrote the check myself! loll

Re:5 Seconds

[ZombieBraintrust]

Google is a buisness made up of many people. An employee of a vendor who had a contract with Google copied the code here. A vendor Google no longer uses. The code itself was quickly removed once it was found. Google never negotiated to buy rangecheck.

Re:5 Seconds

[StikyPad]

Assuming you want a useful result, you probably want something closer to this: ( (min <= value) && (value <= max) ).

Re:5 Seconds

[Zaphod The 42nd]

Not to mention that all of that profit isn't due to early-to-market. The same sales would likely be made just the next day. The profits wouldn't be as nearly effected. You lose a few sales to people who decide to get a different phone, but pretty tiny numbers all together. Getting the product out the door a single day earlier (and we're talking about minutes saved here) makes very little cost difference, unless its a holiday or something.

Re:5 Seconds

[Zaphod The 42nd]

For something expensive like a phone anyways, a one-time purchase you save up for and agree to a contract with. Its different for cheap goods.

Re:5 Seconds

[Anonymous Coward]

The do realize that paramiter checking is one of the first things taught to entry level software engineers at school. Heck I was doing it before I had any formal education. And even then, 9 lines of code checking paramiters could be more likely a coincidence than stolen/infringed code. There are only a handful of ways to check paramiters, and it's likely that googles coders just happened to figure out the same method suns coders did. Heck I'm sure even the typewriting monkey could figure it out fairly quickly. 9 lines isn't much, unless googles coders are truely incompident. Which given googles hiring practices is fatefull. Heck couldn't that small an amount be considered fair use anyway?

Re:5 Seconds

[Sulphur]

boolean function rangeCheck(
                                                                const int value,
                                                                const int min,
                                                                const int max)
{
                                                            return ( (min = value) && (value = max) );
}

If value is a constant, then the whole thing can be computed at compile time.

Re:5 Seconds

[shutdown -p now]

More 7 minutes tryiung to figure out why the comparasion operators fucked up a block of what should be a plain text block. X-(

You've used <tt> - it's not a "plain text block", it's a "monospaced span". It can still contain HTML formatting inside.

Slashdot actually gives you the ability to conveniently format pieces of code and such - that's <ecode>. This treats any < and > as verbatim characters inside the element, except for those that make up its closing tag.

Re:5 Seconds

[hairyfeet]

Hell I'm not a big fan of Google, mainly because i don't care for their new privacy settings and how they will try to block those hooking into their stuff while at the same time whining that big content...try to block those hooking into their stuff but c'mon its a fricking rangecheck! Hell I haven't coded since the days of VB and even I know that a range check isn't exactly an earth shaking or novel idea and certainly isn't worth actually arguing a court case over. All you are doing is making sure an input falls between X and Y and if it is below X or above Y then you throw an error...that's it.

If I was Oracle I'd be wanting to know WTF is this law firm doing with my money because this isn't even FUD, its JUST STUPID. Hell what is next, they gonna use the Chewbacca defense? I would think even a non coding judge when explained what this actually does would say 'They are arguing over....that? Seriously?". Frankly if THIS is all Oracle has to bring to the table not only should the case be dismissed as a waste of the court's time, but Oracle should be fined for even bringing this shit up as this is just as lame as the asshole that sued for a billion dollars because his pants got messed up at the dry cleaners.No, that actually isn't fair as at LEAST the guy did get his pants messed up, hell this may as well be them trying to claim subtraction as IP, it is THAT stupid.

Re:5 Seconds

[theshowmecanuck]

If they had to Google for the code they would take three weeks. They'd first have to wade through hundreds of thousands of web sites trying to sell them range extenders. "Range Extenders, your girlfriend will love our range extender! Try the viagra while you're here!"

Re:5 Seconds

[auLucifer]

Just to add a little more time, what if min is greater than max? Simple error that someone could come across by accidentally calling your rangeCheck putting the values in backwards

Re:5 Seconds

[auLucifer]

Oh, it's to check an arrays bounds too so better make sure it fits those bounds

Re:5 Seconds

[Anonymous Coward]

I think this function is vulnerable to a buffer overflow attack. In addition, it has memory leaks everywhere...

Re:5 Seconds

[Anonymous Coward]

You're getting Bing and Google confusedhttp://lmgtfy.com/?q=range+check+algorithm+java&l=1/

Re:5 Seconds

[Chrisq]

boolean function rangeCheck(
const int value,
const int min,
const int max)
{
return ( (min = value) && (value = max) );
}

If value is a constant, then the whole thing can be computed at compile time.

I think you have a problem with assignments to constants! Are you an Oracle plant trying to show that it is "not obvious"?

Re:5 Seconds

[coolsnowmen]

I'm not sure if this is a coding joke I'm missing, but this is definitly not right. This probably won't even run.

Re:5 Seconds

[Anonymous Coward]

Wow, a range check was stolen code? What crap. One could code it in-line as a function call, or even a macro.

Imagine if the code was a binary search routine. That would really confuse an individual without a programming background.

I am delighted that the judge programmed for pleasure or in his past.
 

Re:5 Seconds

[Lisias]

I used [code], not [tt].

I'll use [ecode] nowadays. Thanks!

Re:5 Seconds

[Lisias]

It was intentional.

I'm not dumb, I don't want Oracle suing me!!!! X-)

Re:5 Seconds

[Anonymous Coward]

Integer overflow, not buffer overflow you ignorant boob!

Exactly where are the memory leaks.

Seriously, what happened to slashdot? Is this the home of morons now?

Mistrial!

[Hatta]

Obviously this competent, experienced jurist should have recused himself because of this conflict of interest.

Re:Mistrial!

[h4rr4r]

Knowing facts is a conflict of interest?

Re:Mistrial!

[gstoddart]

Knowing facts is a conflict of interest?

If you're Oracle, and you're claiming that "checking if an integer is within a range is your super top secret IP that Google stole" it is. Their lawyer was outright saying this would be difficult to write.

A judge with a working BS meter is never a good thing for the plaintiff -- I believe you missed the inherent sarcasm.

Re:Mistrial!

[Bob the Super Hamste]

In the US court system yes. Actually knowing anything is probably a conflict of interest.

Re:Mistrial!

[zlives]

what conflict of interest?

Re:Mistrial!

[idontgno]

Competence and resistance to manipulation conflict with the interests of the plaintiff in winning the case even with a complete lack of legal validity.

See also "I object on the basis that it makes me look bad!"

Re:Mistrial!

[Anonymous Coward]

It was the judge that said all this.

Re:Mistrial!

[Darinbob]

In murder cases I'm pretty sure the judges know how knives work.

One thing you should not do as a judge is ever take the word of a lawyer as truth. As you can see in this example Boies has a script to play and the judge is throwing a curve ball; Boies just keeps on with the script regardless and it seems like he's not even thinking about what he's saying. Thus the absurd notion that it would take him 6 months to write the same code. The long time to write code fits the plot of the story the lawyer is trying to tell and he seems to assume that the judge will accept this "fact"..

Re:Mistrial!

[Anonymous Coward]

Wooooooooosh!

Re:Mistrial!

[Blindman]

As strange as this may sound, Judges are supposed to use their experience but not their knowledge. Technically speaking, knowing computer programming may present a bias in this case. Taking an extreme example, a Judge shouldn't precede over a murder trial that he or she witnessed. Here, the Judge is basically saying, "I know difficult code. I have written difficult code. And, this sir, is not difficult code." Since, Oracle's argument depends in-part on the value of this code, the Judge has arguably decided that issue, which may come up if Oracle is not happy. I don't disagree with the Judge, but he is not supposed to be making these kinds of factual findings.

Re:Mistrial!

[QuantumLeaper]

So programming something isn't an experience? Everything anyone does gains knowledge though experiences. At least for me, knowledge and experience are the opposite sides of the same coin.

Re:Mistrial!

[Luckyo]

You're taking the argument too far. Essentially by your standards a judge who did anything related to murder investigation could not preside over a murder case. A judge that ever sold a house could not preside over a real estate dispute. Etc.

It's inane. Judge cannot preside over a case in which he has a significant interest over, such as a murder case he had to experience personally or witness. But not all murder cases in general.

Same here. Judge who understands coding could and should preside over a case that has code-related disputes. He should not however preside over a case if he has coded anything actually disputed. A base experience in the case field is not only allowed, it's recommended for judges.

Re:Mistrial!

[TheLink]

It may be the truth that it would take 6 months for Boies to write that code. But if he's a programmer and told his/her boss it would take 6 months or even 6 days to write that he should be sacked.

From what I understand the code was copied but it was trivial. It's as if Ford sued Toyota for billions because someone used the exact same sensor to check whether a car door was fully shut or not, instead of reinventing a different one. Yes that could happen too, but it's still stupid.

Re:Mistrial!

[elashish14]

Exactly what I thought when I read this. Don't all good lawyers simply prey on the uninformed judges and jurors? How could they possibly allow someone intelligent and reasonable to preside over this case? I don't understand the legal process so well, but if a juror said something like this, wouldn't a mistrial be pretty much automatic?

On a side note, why can't all cases be presided over by judges who have an informed opinion on the subject at hand?

Re:Mistrial!

[elashish14]

Knowing facts is a conflict of interest?

Judging Oracle's lawyers' arguments, I'm sure they wouldn't hesitate to try....

Re:Mistrial!

[dumbunny]

Patent lawyers and judges often have an undergraduate degree in their field of specialization. It is implausible to have once earned a CS or related degree from a real university and then not be able to code something simple like the stated problem in few hours or days at most, perhaps equipped with reference guides for the language and / or editor. These are smart people with decent technical backgrounds. The judge isn't the anomaly; the patent lawyer who would take 6 months to code a simple problem is the anomoly.

Re:Mistrial!

[Anonymous Coward]

The defendant's attorney... "When you are driving on a freeway, there's a minimum posted speed and a maximum posted speed. Is that difficult for the average driver to understand?"

Re:Mistrial!

[rtb61]

The judge's example really brought up an interesting point. How will human thinking alter as people are being introduced to computer coding and younger and younger ages. I saw one interesting example of how the simplest mathematics can be taught as computer programming. How will the nature of human thinking change when a more methodical computer programming approach to problem solving is taught at a much younger age. Rather than solving math problems from an early age you solve computer programming problems, so far best language for that Ruby. Normally you take a written problem, convert it to a math problem and then convert it to a programming program, when ideally you should just be translating a written problem into a programming problem.

Re:Mistrial!

[Anonymous Coward]

Judges are supposed to use their experience but not their knowledge.

"I have written difficult code."

That's experience.

6 Months for Range Check?!?!?!

[Gr33nJ3ll0]

I think I'm beginning to understand why Oracle has chosen to sue, rather than innovate, they're idiots and lazy to boot! :)

Re:6 Months for Range Check?!?!?!

[medv4380]

So they have 1 of the Virtues of truly great programmers.

Re:6 Months for Range Check?!?!?!

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't know.

They're actively ignoring a longstanding security issue, claiming massive legacy DB breakage, yet will be fixed in the newest release of Oracle DB; 12 I think. You could call that innovative marketing, suggesting people upgrade for security reasons, however I'm gonna go out on a limb here and call it bleghhhh.

Re:6 Months for Range Check?!?!?!

[Anonymous Coward]

I think the lazy idiot might be the person who either didn't RTFS and understand that it was a lawyer speaking or thinks that Oracle get lawyers to write their software rather than software developers.

Re:6 Months for Range Check?!?!?!

[Anonymous Coward]

I think that Oracle is neither lazy or ignorant. The are simply fierce competitors and are just as happy to buy market share or customers in the courtroom as in the boardroom or the lab.

Re:6 Months for Range Check?!?!?!

[Anonymous Coward]

If only they were smart...

Re:6 Months for Range Check?!?!?!

[shutdown -p now]

1 month to compute EROI and decide to implement it.
1 month to sign off on the budget for the feature.
1 month to write a functional spec.
1 month to write a design spec.
1 month to write a test spec.
10 minutes to write the code.
20 minutes to write the unit tests.
1 month to get the lawyers to sign off on the code affirming that it doesn't infringe on any patents etc.

Re:6 Months for Range Check?!?!?!

[Anonymous Coward]

I think you're confusing system admins with programmers... system admins should be lazy in order to automate/script as much as possible and therefore be able to get back to the latest episode of the Guild

Re:6 Months for Range Check?!?!?!

[Anonymous Coward]

In case anybody's confused, the parent is referring to "lazy", not "idiot".

Re:6 Months for Range Check?!?!?!

[Anonymous Coward]

So they have 1 of the Virtues of truly great programmers.

And 1 of the Virtues of a .. normal? manager.

Re:6 Months for Range Check?!?!?!

[medv4380]

If only they were impatient, and full of hubris.
Fixed that for you AC. Intelligence is not one of the virtues of a Truly Great Programmer.

Re:6 Months for Range Check?!?!?!

[Anonymous Coward]

I am sure all of their employees are lazy and idiots. Legal Department != Engineering. Take your head out of your ass man.

Faster

[Murdoch5]

How much slower would it really have been, one day? Even less? rangeCheck from the sounds of it is a quick sit down, sip coffee, program it up and walk away method. I'm not sure that the act of copying it saved any amount of time that in the true sense of a marketing would matter. If they had copied a method which computed the inverse matrix of an image that then could be used to unlock a phone I would see the point.

Calling rangeCheck into question is like bringing a student to court for using compair() in C, anyone could write it but it's so simple no one does.

Re:Faster

[Anonymous Coward]

If they had copied a method which computed the inverse matrix of an image that then could be used to unlock a phone I would see the point.

That can be done in an hour.

Re:Faster

[Anonymous Coward]

for using compair() in C.

What is this "compair" you speak of?

Re:Faster

[Anonymous Coward]

Calling rangeCheck into question is like bringing a student to court for using compair() in C, anyone could write it but it's so simple no one does.

Most people who try to use compair() in C can't spell.

Re:Faster

[ArhcAngel]

He probably just wanted to avoid getting sued by Oracle for referencing it correctly.

Re:Faster

[Dekker3D]

Personally, I don't even think I'd have to pause to think about it. Range checking becomes as natural to a programmer eventually as basic grammar becomes to most human beings.

Re:Faster

[Essellion]

I actually think it would take longer to copy it than to make your own.

And its so minimal that given the same variable names I can see multiple students in the same class coming up with the exact same function, except for spacing.

Re:Faster

[Hognoxious]

A shit movie, with him with the long face in it?

Finally!

[Anonymous Coward]

If all judges, lawyers, and legislators knew how to write maintainable code, the law would be much simpler.

The refactoring sessions would be amazing.

Re:Finally!

[garyebickford]

Law can be viewed as an attempt to impose/construct a partially-complete logical system for managing interpersonal conflict. Of course, the language in which it is written is rife with ambiguity and other issues. So in principle, lawyers (which includes pretty much all judges and at least 1/2 of legistlators IIRC) should be able to follow along pretty easily.

Of course any attempt to impose a rational system (much less a logical one) on reality will suffer from Incompleteness.

Re:Finally!

[spatley]

hell I would be happy if software developers could write maintainable code!
(ducks)

Re:Finally!

[hackula]

I suppose we should start calling prisons "debuggers". We can say "Oh, just run him through the debugger and see if the system works out".

And...

[Anonymous Coward]

The people rejoiced!

English as a second language summary?

[Anonymous Coward]

Reading that summary made me feel like I was taking crazy pills. So many mixed tenses. Could someone clean that shit up for readability?

Re:English as a second language summary?

[MozeeToby]

If I can't parse a sentence after three tries I give up.

I gave up trying to read the summary... I suppose there's no sense in lamenting the state of the editing that (doesn't) get done on submissions though.

Re:English as a second language summary?

[Anonymous Coward]

There is a range check function in both Java and Dalvik. They look more-or-less the same, because it's a three-line range check function.

Oracle's lawyer says that the function would take six months to write, and Google plagiarized it.

The judge points out that writing this is a five-minute task at most.

Re:English as a second language summary?

[Anonymous Coward]

No problem.

"They took our code!!!"

Re:English as a second language summary?

[MiniMike]

Reading that summary made me feel like I was taking crazy pills. So many mixed tenses. Could someone clean that shit up for readability?

Can't fix it. Oracle wrote an algorithm to check for proper tenses, and I don't want to risk getting sued for stealing it.

Re:English as a second language summary?

[Anonymous Coward]

"Judge William Alsup revealed that he can write code, one month into the trial. Will this affect the outcome? I think so! The lawyer tried to claim that Google copied the nine lines in rangeCheck to get Android to market faster. But the judge interrupted him. The judge understands how straightforward it is to program rangeCheck from scratch: 'rangeCheck! All it does is make sure the numbers you're inputting are within a range, and gives them some sort of exceptional treatment. That witness, when he said a high school student could do it — '

And the lawyer showed he didn't understand: 'I'm not an expert on Java — this is my second case on Java, but I'm not an expert, and I probably couldn't program that in six months.' Perhaps every judge should be a coding judge — it must make the law seem a lot simpler..."

(I didn't touch the Judge's or lawyer's quotes - assuming they _are_ quotes.)

Yowee. You weren't kidding. That is not good English.

BTW English protip, in general: "reveal" is a terrible verb, in modern usage. It means almost nothing. It's often passive, too. Avoid it.

Re:English as a second language summary?

[Anonymous Coward]

BTW English protip, in general: "reveal" is a terrible verb, in modern usage. It means almost nothing. It's often passive, too. Avoid it.

Why do English speakers (or is it an American thing?) hate the passive mode?

Re:English as a second language summary?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, seriously. This is the third time in the last week that I have encountered something written in english that was so garbled that it left me confused as to what the author was trying to communicate. When did this happen? Get off my lawn?

If a lawyer reuses a document...

[Anonymous Coward]

A lawyer will likely handle similar cases over their career. In doing so, they will very likely reuse some of all of documents over and over. The initial version of these documents were created for a specific client. Is the lawyer stealing from his previous clients?

The same thing could be said about a technical writer. If they write for multiple clients in the same domain, it is likely the intentionally or not, their work will share some sentences, paragraphs or more.

I know that you don't sign a "work for hire" contract with your lawyer so they (as always) have the upper hand. But it does seem that in professions where writing in some form is part of the work output, it is very likely that remnants of previous work will show up in future work. Whether intentionally or not.

Re:If a lawyer reuses a document...

[Aryden]

no because the lawyer maintains those documents as the creator of those documents unless they were obtained from someone.

Re:If a lawyer reuses a document...

[Anonymous Coward]

I did say "I know that you don't sign a "work for hire" contract with your lawyer so they (as always) have the upper hand." which was intended to mean you don't sign a work for hire contract with them.

Whether there is a legal document backing up a professional's ability to reuse or not, a human's knowledge base grows in their domain and reuse will just happen whether explicitly and consciously or just from memory.

This particular case is clearly a cut and paste but every work by a person is not going to be without any similarity to their previous work.

I'm going to patent i=0

[StillNeedMoreCoffee]

In for loops, and anyone who uses it has to pay me lots of money. I'll let them use it and as soon as they start making money I'll show up at their door to collect their soul.

Re:I'm going to patent i=0

[dkleinsc]

Unfortunately, when you did that, you violated this patent, so all the proceeds of your patent have to go to those guys.

Re:I'm going to patent i=0

[tgd]

In for loops, and anyone who uses it has to pay me lots of money. I'll let them use it and as soon as they start making money I'll show up at their door to collect their soul.

Thankfully I always use "x" for my loops.

Re:I'm going to patent i=0

[Anonymous Coward]

But the method is the same. I work around that by setting i = 1 then i-- before my loop.

Re:I'm going to patent i=0

[19thNervousBreakdown]

No no no, the real way to do it is i = i ^ i

Re:I'm going to patent i=0

[EdIII]

You're both crazy. Fruit loops are the best loops period.

Good News, Everyone!

[3vi1]

This is good news: Because obviously Oracle hired mentally challenged lawyers.

Not only is what their lawyer said obvious hyperbole, but it is totally irrelevant. I don't care how much time it would take for a non-programmer to do it: how long does it take a real programmer to do it.

The answer to that is of course on the order of seconds, since validating input is something every programmer has done thousands of times.

Re:Good News, Everyone!

[Bob the Super Hamste]

The answer to that is of course on the order of seconds, since validating input is something every programmer has done thousands of times.

If only that were true. Yes it is trivial to implement but I have see so much code that doesn't even do the most basic input checking, as in do I even have a fucking value, that I just assume that programmers are really lazy.

Re:Good News, Everyone!

[nomadic]

"Because obviously Oracle hired mentally challenged lawyers."

Actually David Boies is considered one of the top trial lawyers in the country, and he certainly wasn't getting this grief on slashdot when he beat Microsoft during their anti-trust trial. I'm sure he asked someone at Oracle how long it would take to re-create the code and got a wrong answer.

Re:Good News, Everyone!

[Githaron]

Actually David Boies is considered one of the top trial lawyers in the country, and he certainly wasn't getting this grief on slashdot when he beat Microsoft during their anti-trust trial. I'm sure he asked someone at Oracle how long it would take to re-create the code and got a wrong answer.

A good lawyer would not only ask someone in the field how long it would have taken to write the function but also would have been smart enough not to argue it would take a long time to develop after being told contrary by said person. Ergo, this guy is not a good lawyer.

Re:Good News, Everyone!

[reve_etrange]

Thus, the judge:

You're one of the best lawyers in America, how could you even make that kind of argument?

Re:Good News, Everyone!

[farble1670]

This is good news: Because obviously Oracle hired mentally challenged lawyers.

they aren't necessarily mentally challenged. they were told to sue and are making the best they can of an extremely weak case.

it's not unthinkable that someone that has never seen code before would look at that function and agree with oracle's lawyers that it's something special. thank god that didn't happen.

Re:Good News, Everyone!

[nomadic]

Why are you assuming he was told to the contrary? Programmers do lie on occasion.

Re:Good News, Everyone!

[Githaron]

He only asked one programmer?

Re:Good News, Everyone!

[nomadic]

I have no idea how many programmers he may or may not have asked, but it's entirely possible that the Oracle programmers were told en masse to tell him it would take two days to write this code.

Computer access

[betterunixthanunix]

I did not even have access to a computer until I was 11; it is not always a question of stupidity. That being said, I am pretty sure that some time shortly after I started programming, I wrote a function like rangeCheck (although in C, so using return values instead of exceptions). This is not an issue of age; someone with two weeks of programming experience could have written that function.

Re:Computer access

[MightyMartian]

Absolutely. The only difference between one language to another would be exactly how you produce an informative fail. In C, as you say, you return some sort of failure code. In a lot of higher level languages you throw an exception. There is nothing in this code that is innovative or spectacular. It's the kind of range check function that programmers have been implementing for decades.

Re:Computer access

[RabidReindeer]

Absolutely. The only difference between one language to another would be exactly how you produce an informative fail. In C, as you say, you return some sort of failure code. In a lot of higher level languages you throw an exception. There is nothing in this code that is innovative or spectacular. It's the kind of range check function that programmers have been implementing for decades.

Actually, even in C chances are you'd have thrown an exception or setjmp/longjmp. The only really distinct thing about this code was the format of the message.

Other than that you might as well try to patent a basic "for (i = 0; i limit; i++)" loop. SLAP!

What does it matter

[htnmmo]

What does it matter how easy the code was to write? And if it was so easy why did google need to copy it?

I tried to submit this over the weekend but it wasn't selected. http://www.wired.com/wiredenterprise/2012/05/google-oracle-decompile/

"Judge William Alsup ruled that evidence presented during the trial had shown that Google infringed on Oracle’s copyrights by decompiling eight Java files and copying them in their entirety for use with Android."

As someone who really likes Java and Google I don't like this lawsuit one bit.

Sun created Java and mostly gave it away for free except for the mobile part which they were licensing to create revenue. Sun and Google couldn't come to terms regarding licensing and Google decided to just make it themselves.

Sun didn't seem to care, or didn't have the money/will to fight it. Then comes Oracle.

Please resolve this amicably soon. I don't like it when mommy and daddy fight.

Re:What does it matter

[Anonymous Coward]

see http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3940683

The person who originally submitted it to Java'sOpenJDK was working at google when he wrote it, and thought it was his to re-use for Android later! I'm not so sure that is not so, too.

Re:What does it matter

[betterunixthanunix]

What does it matter how easy the code was to write?

It matters in determining whether or not the copyright infringement in any way helped Google. Oracle is trying to claim that Google got to market faster because they copied the code; but if the code is so simple that it could be written as quickly as copied, that argument basically falls apart.

And if it was so easy why did google need to copy it?

I am not even convinced that Google copied those 9 lines. They do not do something particularly unique, and we are only talking about 9 lines -- 3 of which are generic things like braces. It would be pretty easy for a programmer who is adhering to Java conventions to produce identical lines of code without having seen those lines.

Please resolve this amicably soon. I don't like it when mommy and daddy fight.

Programming languages should not be ruled by mommy and daddy. You are asking for trouble when you use a programming language whose fate is left to the hands of industry titans.

Re:What does it matter

[cpu6502]

Recently a judge ruled upto 10% copying of textbooks == fair use.
Same here with code.

Re:What does it matter

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually Google did not decompile it, a subcontracter broke a contract and did so and put these test files into the google code. These test files were never delivered to the android phones.

Re:What does it matter

[codewarren]

Google didn't copy it. Both Google's version and Sun's version were written by the same guy while employed at Google. He wrote it as part of timsort in java which he gave to sun, then reused it in Android.

Re:What does it matter

[htnmmo]

I am not even convinced that Google copied those 9 lines.

Then you might want to try reading at least the text of the link I posted if not the linked court documents themselves.

And maybe this 9 lines of code don't seem like a big deal? What about the other hundreds of lines that were decompiled and copied? There's no story about that? This filing has some more information. http://docs.justia.com/cases/federal/district-courts/california/candce/3:2010cv03561/231846/1157/

The most interesting point is if Bloch did work on the code for OpenJDK and also worked on Andriod code, doesn't that throw the whole "cleanroom implementation" out the window?

Re:What does it matter

[Anonymous Coward]

They didn't copy rangeCheck. The guy worked for Oracle, then worked for Google, and wrote the same function. Is it even a little surprising that someone who wrote a simple rangeCheck function one way might write it the same way again?

Re:What does it matter

[betterunixthanunix]

And maybe this 9 lines of code don't seem like a big deal?

It is not; as everyone has pointed out, those nine lines of code check to see if a number is in a particular range, which is a routine and common programming task. We are also talking about nine lines of code here -- people writing nine identical lines of code is not something to even blink an eye over, especially when the nine lines are so simple. Maybe Bloch really did copy those nine lines, as opposed to just writing them from scratch; the point here is that Oracle argument about those nine lines is completely absurd.

What about the other hundreds of lines that were decompiled and copied?

467 lines of code that was found to have been decompiled. Android itself has over a million lines of code, so what you are talking to amounts to a small fraction of a percent of the total Android codebase. It is equally doubtful that those 467 lines of code accelerated the development of Anrdoid in any significant way, but I suppose Oracle is entitle to whatever damages the judge thinks are appropriate for this particular act of infringement.

The most interesting point is if Bloch did work on the code for OpenJDK and also worked on Andriod code, doesn't that throw the whole "cleanroom implementation" out the window?

Maybe, but so far Oracle has never even be able to convince a jury (whose technical expertise I seriously doubt) that Bloch copied more than 9 lines of code. Oracle was not even able to convince the jury that the 8 decompiled files were copyright infringement; the judge had to rule on that one.

Re:What does it matter

[Anonymous Coward]

No. Not necessarily. "clean room" doesn't mean what most people think it means. "clean room" is just a legal concept used in hopes to fend off exactly these types of law suits. It doesn't mean you can't be sued. It doesn't mean a suit doesn't have merit. And it doesn't define a specifc process; though there certiainly are actions and behaviors are typically associated with best practices.

Re:What does it matter

[Anonymous Coward]

Sorry dude. Oracle isn't your mother. I thought you should know.

Re:What does it matter

[Anonymous Coward]

I am not even convinced that Google copied those 9 lines.

Then you might want to try reading at least the text of the link I posted if not the linked court documents themselves.

And maybe this 9 lines of code don't seem like a big deal? What about the other hundreds of lines that were decompiled and copied? There's no story about that? This filing has some more information. http://docs.justia.com/cases/federal/district-courts/california/candce/3:2010cv03561/231846/1157/

The most interesting point is if Bloch did work on the code for OpenJDK and also worked on Andriod code, doesn't that throw the whole "cleanroom implementation" out the window?

Where did he work first ? Second Sun does not own openjdk, a lot of files in Open JDK were clean room implementation too, or pulled from Red Hat's iced tea implementation.

Re:What does it matter

[b4dc0d3r]

If this is the same case, and I'm pretty sure it is, that was for educational use, which already has "fair use" exemptions. This case has nothing to do with education. It is, generally speaking and depending on which side you ask, about willful infringement and economical advantage gained by copying.

Using that case as a reference is such a gross oversimplification that it is meaningless to discuss in the same context.

http://chronicle.com/article/Long-Awaited-Ruling-in/131859

Re:What does it matter

[Anonymous Coward]

What does it matter how easy the code was to write? And if it was so easy why did google need to copy it?

The same person wrote both versions of the code. They didn't copy it so much as re-implemented it.

Re:What does it matter

[dissy]

What does it matter how easy the code was to write? And if it was so easy why did google need to copy it?

It matters a lot. Google didn't copy anything, Google WROTE IT.

Yes, an employee at Google is the one that wrote that exact bit of code, and sent it to Sun to put in Java. He then had to write the same function for Android, and since it is the same person with the same brain, he wrote the same code.

Or put another way, you used the words "easy to write" just now, and you have used those words before in your life. You are stating you plagiarized those words, from yourself. Which is a very stupid claim for you to make.

Re:What does it matter

[Anonymous Coward]

I am not even convinced that Google copied those 9 lines.

Note that to avoid this problem, the FSF suggests several different tricks, like using a weird brace indentation pattern, and using a different algorithm if possible.

Re:What does it matter

[Anonymous Coward]

Please resolve this amicably soon. I don't like it when mommy and daddy fight.

Sorry but your mommy* is a whoring golddigger :( (and you're likely an illigitimate bastard). That's life.

* The Oracle was female.

P.S. they don't love you.

Colossal waste...

[middlemen]

What a colossal waste of money !

Oracle and Google waste money on lawyers on such silly functions instead of spending the money on building more useful technology.

We as users are the only losers in this non-sensical fight.

Re:Colossal waste...

[Anonymous Coward]

Google offered to settle a long time ago to avoid wasting both time and money. This debacle is on Oracle.

Re:Colossal waste...

[Volante3192]

Your rant assumes that Oracle would actually use that money to build useful technology.

(In Google's case, they're stuck with this because Oracle brought them to trial and they've got to defend themselves, and it takes lawyers to do that. If they didn't defend themselves, Oracle would win by default and that would be a Bad Thing considering precedence.)

Re:Colossal waste...

[Bob the Super Hamste]

I think Google would rater waste money on things other than this lawsuit. If they didn't then Oracle would end up with a default judgment and Google would have to pay them what ever retarded value they made up.

Re:Colossal waste...

[Anonymous Coward]

What a colossal waste of money !

Oracle and Google waste money on lawyers on such silly functions instead of spending the money on building more useful technology.

We as users are the only losers in this non-sensical fight.

More than the users, society as a whole lost out. The resources put into this ridiculous fight (i.e. energy, time, money, etc.) could have been used to actually improve the world in which we live.

Re:Colossal waste...

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, everyone but the lawyers lose. Google and Oracle both lose money. Probably lots of it.

Re:Colossal waste...

[Anonymous Coward]

That's software patents for ya, enjoy your dumbo government (ALL of them in ALL branches).

filing my own motion

[Anonymous Coward]

The great thing about having an Android smart phone is I can follow these events from the comfort of the company throne thus killing two birds with one stone! Thanks Google and HTC.

this is a serious problem

[circletimessquare]

rangeCheck checks if a number is within a range. ok. like if 2 is between 1 and 3. but what of 4? you did mention 4? or 5, 6, 7, or 8 for that matter. and what of 2.5? or 3.5?

how about negative numbers? how about irrational numbers? i will tell you what is irrational: that rangeCheck can be trusted to understand these complex issues and give us an answer we can trust

and 0! magic 0. you are telling me that rangeCheck understand 0 and can tell us if is between two numbers? arbitrarily chosen numbers to boot? the audacity! you mean i am going to just say "cehck if 0 is between 1 and 7" and then i'm going to cpompletely mess things up and turn around and say "oh, and check if 0 is between -2 and 3", and you are going to trust rangeCheck to do this? really? really?!

do you not see the danger here folks? do not see the threat to responsiblity, accountability, that trust that blindly putting our faith in this rangeCheck results in?

think about this serious issue very carefully folks, this is a truly tricky and grave conundrum. here be dragons

Re:this is a serious problem

[Aryden]

How much coke did you snort before you wrote that post?

Re:this is a serious problem

[Anonymous Coward]

Between 1 and 3 lines....

Re:this is a serious problem

[Anonymous Coward]

Obviously not enough; he's still breathing!

Re:this is a serious problem

[circletimessquare]

i thought i was making a joke, but since i am rated zero, i either went completely past funny and hit insane, or people have lost their sense of humor

hello mods... no one sees the possibility that my post above is a joke?

Re:this is a serious problem

[Aryden]

it really came off more as a rant than anything else...

then why didn't they write it

[Anonymous Coward]

I mean if it is so easy to write then why copy it?

Re:then why didn't they write it

[Anaerin]

It's such a short and simple function that you could conceivably get two different people to write it and they'd end up with exactly the same code. The code reads:

private static void rangeCheck(int arrayLen, int fromIndex, int toIndex) {
if (fromIndex > toIndex)
throw new IllegalArgumentException("fromIndex(" + fromIndex + ") > toIndex(" + toIndex+")");

if (fromIndex < 0)
throw new ArrayIndexOutOfBoundsException(fromIndex);

if (toIndex > arrayLen)
throw new ArrayIndexOutOfBoundsException(toIndex);
}

There's nothing you could really remove or change about it. Sure, you could put the checks in a different order, but it wouldn't fundamentally alter the code.

Re:then why didn't they write it

[Anonymous Coward]

The guy working for Google that did write rangeCheck wrote it for the OpenJDK and assumed he could reuse his code in Android. This is common knowledge.

Re:then why didn't they write it

[toadlife]

The issue of wheel reinvention comes to mind.

Re:then why didn't they write it

[AngryDeuce]

Because to do it differently would be to make the code worse. Go to your local hardware store, and look at the hammers. Despite many different manufacturers, they all look and function basically the same. The reason why is because mankind worked out the most efficient hammer design a long time ago and there is nothing left to innovate there.

Imagine how retarded competitor's hammers would have to be designed to get around a patent like the one Oracle is asserting here. This is why there is so much folly in patenting something so elementary, like 'slide to unlock', or a range check.

Re:then why didn't they write it

[Keyboarder]

For that matter, you're even limited as to how you can rearrange the ifs considering that you'd want an IllegalArgumentException to trump an ArrayIndexOutOfBoundsException. I could even see why you might want the exception below zero to trump the exception above the length.

Re:then why didn't they write it

[shutdown -p now]

The telltale sign that Google has really copied the above rather than writing it from scratch is whitespace. Note how this code is generally formatted with the usual rules of "whitespace before and after a binary operator", except that it's missing in toIndex+")" - and it's missing in both Google and Oracle source trees.

Anyway, the argument at this point is not whether Google did or did not copy it - they have already admitted that they did. The argument is the amount in damages that Oracle is entitled to. Google is basically saying that the above code is practically worthless, and does not entitle Oracle to a cut of profits that they've got from Android. Oracle, meanwhile, is saying that it let Google "get Android to the market faster". Judge has called BS on that later claim, noting that the code really is trivial, and could be written as fast as it was copied.

Re:then why didn't they write it

[Anonymous Coward]

You could fix the bugs in it ! LOL.

There is at least 1 major bug in it.

Contest

[Chemisor]

Ok, let's have a contest. Gather a bunch of high schoolers who have some idea how to program in Java, give them the spec for rangeCheck, and see how long it takes them to write it. The winner takes the prize equal to the damages Oracle is asking for. Bonus points if completed in less than 15 minutes.

Re:Contest

[tool462]

Somebody has been spending too much time on TopCoder...

Re:Contest

[thunderdanp]

But that isn't the point! Clean rooming code is a perfectly legitimate way to keep yourself from committing copyright infringement. By all appearances Google opted not to do that, and instead opted to copy code. If that is in fact the decision they made, then they infringed whatever copyright protection there was on that code. I'm not clear on which phase of the trial this is in, but if this is the copyright infringement claim, it makes not one bit of difference if a teenager, tween, or toddler could independently write the code. If Google copied it, they infringed.

Re:Contest

[jmerlin]

And would you consider me in violation of copyright law if I were to copy a single pixel from a single frame out of a 3 hour long movie?

Re:Contest

[squiggleslash]

Once again: nobody copied code. A Google engineer re-used code he'd written. The Google engineer who included this code into the Android libraries had originally written it in his spare time, and made the error of offering it to Sun and assigning copyrights to them so they'd include it in Java.

Re:Contest

[thunderdanp]

No, de minimis copying wouldn't give rise to copyright infringement. One may argue that what Google copied here is de minimis. However, if a plaintiff can show substantial similarity between the allegedly infringing work and the original work, then yes, the defendant in that case could be on the hook. I don't think a plaintiff in the suit you described would be very successful.

Re:Contest

[thunderdanp]

To me, this just shows that Google, or one of its agents, was quite aware that Sun/Oracle held the copyright to the code. Copying is not limited to copy and paste.

Re:Contest

[msobkow]

I challenge you to write the requirements for rangeCheck without the specifications ending up looking almost exactly like the code itself. You might spell out "less than" and "greater than", but other than that, a range checking function is so trivial and obvious that I've been amazed to this day that Oracle actually thought any creativity was involved in it's creativity.

Next up: Oracle claims that "for( i = 0; i < upperLimit; i++ )" is actually worthy of copyright and/or patent...

Misleading title -- Judge didn't say that!

[mattdm]

Title says implies that the judge made the statement about the code being trivial. The judge makes no such claim -- instead, he says that a previous Google witness made that claim. This is a world of difference!

Re:Misleading title -- Judge didn't say that!

[Anonymous Coward]

This is slashdot, and facts aren't what the raving fanboys want to hear!

Re:Misleading title -- Judge didn't say that!

[shutdown -p now]

He didn't say the part about "a high schooler", but he did say something that pretty much amounts to the same thing:

"I have done, and still do, a significant amount of programming in other languages. I've written blocks of code like rangeCheck a hundred times before. I could do it, you could do it. The idea that someone would copy that when they could do it themselves just as fast, it was an accident. "

Re:Misleading title -- Judge didn't say that!

[StormReaver]

The judge makes no such claim

The judge most certainly did make the statement that the rangeCheck code was trivial:

Caleb Garling tweets: "Alsup says he's been writing code since this trial started. He's written rangeCheck code a "100 times". Incredulous Oracle claiming damages...."

The judge didn't say that a high school student could do it (that was a witness, as the judge mentioned), but he did say it was trivial, and implied that he agrees with the witness:

"Judge: rangeCheck! All it does is make sure the numbers you're inputting are within a range, and gives them some sort of exceptional treatment. That witness, when he said a high school student could do it-- "

Hired Help

[andersh]

Google did not copy it. Their contractor reverse engineered Sun/Oracle's code - despite being told by Google explicitly not to do so!

Google used Noser to provide additional resources and accelerate the completion(?) of Android.

On March 28, 2007, Google hired Noser to deliver a package of Java libraries. /See/ TX 30 (Statement of Work between Google and Noser, dated March 28, 2007)

On April 19, 2007, Andy Rubin wrote to Alan Eustace regarding the "Noser agreement": "This is our final java solution — consultants to take our java libraries as a starting place, and bring our java classes up to J2SE spec, in a clean room environment. They have signed up to a pretty aggressive schedule for quite a bit of work. This deal replaces the $18M approved acquisition that we decided to pass on. Barring any unforeseen surprises, I think this is our last big deal ($4M)." (TX 438.)

Re:Hired Help

[squiggleslash]

You're talking about a different copyright infringement.

In the rangeCheck instance, there was actually no copying involved. The author of the piece made the mistake of assigning copyright to Sun for the work after submitting it for inclusion in Java. He later then used the same code - that he'd written - into the Android libraries.

Let that be a lesson to anyone who is willing to assign copyright for unpaid work to a corporation. Even if it's a nice friendly, non-evil one like Sun. The non-evil ones sometimes get eaten by the thoroughly evil.

Quite right

[gweihir]

There is zero inventive value in that function. It is a completely standard approach that everybody writing containers has used hundreds of times.

This Judge seems to get it.

"I probably couldn't program that in six months."

[ibic00]

A truly exceptional lawyer.

Yeah, no.

[JustAnotherIdiot]

'I'm not an expert on Java — this is my second case on Java, but I'm a complete retard, and I probably couldn't program that in six months.'

Because this is the only way that statement is true, even I could figure this out in quicker than 6 months.
Glad to see the judge called this guy on his BS.

The juicy bits

[RemyBR]

For those of you who don't want to read all the transcript, this is what the judge said:

Oracle: I think the law with respect to infringer's profits, rather than damages, only requires us to show that there was a product that contained infringing material and that the product produced revenue, and then the burden shifts to the other side. If I'm wrong about that, I still think it's possible to demonstrate a nexus by showing that speed was very important to Google in getting Android out, and by copying they accelerated that.

Judge: We heard the testimony of Mr. Bloch. I couldn't have told you the first thing about Java before this problem. I have done, and still do, a significant amount of programming in other languages. I've written blocks of code like rangeCheck a hundred times before. I could do it, you could do it. The idea that someone would copy that when they could do it themselves just as fast, it was an accident. There's no way you could say that was speeding them along to the marketplace. You're one of the best lawyers in America, how could you even make that kind of argument?

Oracle: I want to come back to rangeCheck.

Judge: rangeCheck! All it does is make sure the numbers you're inputting are within a range, and gives them some sort of exceptional treatment. That witness, when he said a high school student could do it--

Re:The juicy bits

[MightyMartian]

It's so beautiful, it makes me want to cry... We should have it carved in a great stone monolith for all to see.

If only this judge had been around when SCO was trying to claim ownership to the Linux scheduler.

Re:The juicy bits

[Anonymous Coward]

Right then Oracle's counsel should've backed off...there was a hint dropped by the Judge there...

Re:The juicy bits

[Anonymous Coward]

Thank god for the comments. I read the summary and thought, I bet at least one comment actually writes the summary as it should have been so it makes sense.

Its getting to be the main thing I read the comments for. Decoding the BS and bad formatting in summaries, providing the links to the real articles that should have been in the summary etc.

Can we start letting those with exceptional karma edit the summary? The parent comment provides very much needed context.

Re:The juicy bits

[medv4380]

I totally agree. This Judge is actually competent. Can he be promoted to the Supreme Court?

Re:The juicy bits

[Anonymous Coward]

He was the judge in Apple v Psystar, does that count? :)

Re:The juicy bits

[Anonymous Coward]

Ah no wonder there are so many malware exploits in the wild - Oracle is preventing OS developers from making sure that values passed to a routine are in range - if they check, they are violating copyright. So we get al the malware instead.

Another question, what if they wrote it this way:

        private static void rangeCheck(int arrayLen, int fromIndex, int toIndex) {
                if (toIndex > arrayLen)
                        throw new ArrayIndexOutOfBoundsException(toIndex);
                if (fromIndex toIndex)
                        throw new IllegalArgumentException("fromIndex(" + fromIndex + ") > toIndex(" + toIndex+")");
        }

Would that be a violation? If not, I copyright that piece of code and anyone who uses it owes me lots of $$$

The eight decompiled files

[DragonWriter]

What does it matter how easy the code was to write?

Because it goes directly to the claims that it infringing it was the source of a substantial quantity of Google's profits.

I tried to submit this over the weekend but it wasn't selected. http://www.wired.com/wiredenterprise/2012/05/google-oracle-decompile/ [wired.com]

"Judge William Alsup ruled that evidence presented during the trial had shown that Google infringed on Oracleâ(TM)s copyrights by decompiling eight Java files and copying them in their entirety for use with Android."

The decompiled files are a different issue than rangeCheck. Google didn't decompile them, Noser -- a contractor for Google -- did, against the express prohibition in the Google-Noser contract, which required all original work or open-source code, and expressly prohibited copying or decompiling proprietary code.

I tried to submit this over the weekend but it wasn't selected. http://www.wired.com/wiredenterprise/2012/05/google-oracle-decompile/

"Judge William Alsup ruled that evidence presented during the trial had shown that Google infringed on Oracleâ(TM)s copyrights by decompiling eight Java files and copying them in their entirety for use with Android."

Re:The eight decompiled files

[htnmmo]

It doesn't really matter who decompiled the files. The point is that they were decompiled and copied.

If I hire you to go buy me a car and you do so I pay you for it. If it turns out you stole the car, should I get to keep it?

That also leaves the question of whether that contractor, or other contractors had violated Sun/Oracle copyrights in less obvious ways.

Re:The eight decompiled files

[Anonymous Coward]

Are you also one of those lawyers perhaps?...

Seriously, what kind of code do you expect them to write after decompiling a function like rangeCheck? You got the exception that needs to be thrown, and the ranges... There's not very many ways you can write that function, so if the code style is anywhere near the same hen suddenly you got a function that is byte by byte the exact same. Sure, they could swap the order in which the boundaries are checked, add/remove white spaces here and there... But no doubt if you got handed the decompiled function you'd also end up writing the exact same.

Re:The eight decompiled files

[DragonWriter]

It doesn't really matter who decompiled the files.

It doesn't matter to copyright liability (well, actually, it does, but it doesn't matter to Google's copyright liability.)

It does matter, however, when someone uses quotes about the decompiled file to backup an argument of the form "if its all so easy, why did Google copy it?"

Since, in fact, Google didn't copy it, and in fact the person who did copy it was doing something Google had expressly directed them not to do.

Re:The eight decompiled files

[DragonWriter]

Seriously, what kind of code do you expect them to write after decompiling a function like rangeCheck?

rangeCheck was not from one of the decompiled files, its a different issue.

Re:The eight decompiled files

[htnmmo]

I made the mistake of lumping in this method with the other decompiled code and you seem to be making similar mistakes.

The 9 lines of code were copied. They were copied by a Google employee Josh Boch. Josh actually wrote the code that is in the JDK while working for google but on his own time. He assigned copyright for that code to Sun.

Google had expressly directed them not to do.

The reason Google expressly directed them not to is because they wanted a clean room implementation that would not be encumbered by Sun's IP.

They didn't get what they paid for. It may be the contractor's fault that Sun's IP was violated but Google did reap the benefits of that violation. If it was the contractor's fault that the Sun's IP was violated, Sun now Oracle still has a valid claim for damages. Oracle may want to seek remedy against their contractor for failing to deliver as promised.

Re:The eight decompiled files

[SydShamino]

It doesn't really matter who decompiled the files. The point is that they were decompiled and copied.

If I hire you to go buy me a car and you do so I pay you for it. If it turns out you stole the car, should I get to keep it?

That also leaves the question of whether that contractor, or other contractors had violated Sun/Oracle copyrights in less obvious ways.

You have the analogy all messed up. Google has already stopped using this code, so in your analogy they've already stopped using the car and given it up.

Instead, what happened was Google hired Noser to buy them a car, and in the contract specified that the Noser was absolutely not allowed to steal the car. Noser stole it anyway, and when Google found out they stopped using it. Later, Google was sued by Oracle, who didn't actually own the car when it was stolen but bought it later. This suit wasn't to stop Google from using the car any longer, but to seek billions in damages for misuse of the car during a time that Google thought they owned it (due to deception by Noser) when Oracle didn't actually own it, either.*

Re:The eight decompiled files

[htnmmo]

Seriously, what kind of code do you expect them to write after decompiling a function like rangeCheck?

If they wanted a clean room implementation they should be decompiling code at all.

Re:The eight decompiled files

[htnmmo]

This suit wasn't to stop Google from using the car any longer, but to seek billions in damages for misuse of the car during a time that Google thought they owned it (due to deception by Noser)

Uhm... that's my point. Noser took short cuts to deliver on their contract to Google. Those shortcuts where violated Sun's IP. Violating Sun's IP helped them get android out quicker and provided financial benefits.

Just because Oracle can only legally prove that there was a limited amount of IP theft going on, doesn't mean that it wasn't more widespread. That's what it makes me believe anyway.

Because car analogies are so much fun. If the car was a limo and Google was a limo service, Just because Google upgraded their car after finding out it was stolen doesn't mean Sun/Oracle isn't entitled to loses.

when Oracle didn't actually own it, either.*

Source?

Re:The eight decompiled files

[MightyMartian]

Oh for fuck's sakes. It's a range check function. Jesus, you'd think it contained the cure for cancer the way Oracle goes on. Even if there are damages, they are going to be absurdly small, so small that any victory at this point for Oracle is very much Pyrrhic. Google has won the important war.

Re:The eight decompiled files

[DragonWriter]

It may be the contractor's fault that Sun's IP was violated but Google did reap the benefits of that violation. If it was the contractor's fault that the Sun's IP was violated, Sun now Oracle still has a valid claim for damages.

No one is arguing against that point, so I don't know why you keep arguing for it. My objection was your use of reference to the decompiled files and Google's supposed decision to copy them (which is refuted by the fact that the decompilation was done by a contractor under express direction from Google not to decompile any third-party files) as part of the backing for your post asking why, if it was so simple, did Google choose to copy?

Re:The eight decompiled files

[Anonymous Coward]

Violating Sun's IP helped them get android out quicker and provided financial benefits.

No it didn't. It's a fucking range check. Do you have ANY idea how easy that is to write?

The only reason why the developer involved "copied" the code is because... he didn't copy it. He wrote the original, and the only reason there's a "violation of IP" is because he voluntarily assigned copyright to Sun without thinking through the potential repercussions.

Range check is so trivial that most people who implement it actually write the code inline rather than as a separate function. It's so trivial the most stupid developer I work with could code it in less than a minute.

I assume you're a lawyer, MBA, or politician, because even a high school maths student would know the argument you're making is BS.

Quite honestly:

- It's trivial code. It shouldn't even be copyrightable.

- Even if it was copyrightable, we're talking about Oracle winning on a technicality. Sun didn't write it. They had no involvement in its creation. They gained the copyright due to a misjudgment by the developer. In many jurisdictions, the developer wouldn't even legally be allowed to assign copyright in that way anyway.

Shut up, and leave Slashdot to the adults. Please.

Re:The eight decompiled files

[squiggleslash]

The textbook case of clean room reverse engineering involved the decompilation (actually disassembly) of the IBM PC BIOS. One team of developers did the decompile and documented exactly what each bit of code did, another team, kept separated from the first group by a wall of lawyers, implemented code that did exactly what the BIOS was documented as doing.

There's nothing wrong or "uncleanroomable" about decompilation.

Re:The eight decompiled files

[niado]

I haven't read all the details of Boch's testimony, but if I had to guess I would surmise that the range check function is something the poor guy keeps in a TXT file with a bunch of other routine things that he has to copy and paste a lot while doing work. He was probably working on Java and was like 'oh, need a rangecheck function AGAIN, let me paste in the one I always use!' and then did the same for Dalvik.

I would argue this is a legitimate practice, as the code for that particular function should not be copyrightable in the first place.

Re:The eight decompiled files

[htnmmo]

I'm not talking about rangeCheck specificially but the entirety of code that the judge ruled was decompiled and copied from Java.

That leaves the question of whether the contractor copied other parts of the Java that are not as easy to identify or if they decompiled and copied then rewrote to make it look like it wasn't copied. Maybe they didn't do that with this function because it was trivial. Who knows. But to me this just doesn't look good.

I don't see Oracle as the bad guy here. They had their (Sun's) IP stolen and are right to seek damages.

I don't see Google as a bad guy here either. Their intention was not to violate Sun's IP.

Things got screwed up and now need to be resolved. In a perfect world Sun would have successfully negotiated a deal when Google initially approached them. That didn't happen and now here we are.

Re:The eight decompiled files

[DragonWriter]

I'm not talking about rangeCheck specificially but the entirety of code that the judge ruled was decompiled and copied from Java.

rangeCheck isn't even part of that body of code, which consists of 8 test files that were never distributed on handsets, but which part of the Android source distribution.

That leaves the question of whether the contractor copied other parts of the Java that are not as easy to identify or if they decompiled and copied then rewrote to make it look like it wasn't copied.

What parts of Android the contractor was involved in is, I believe, part of the trial record; it is, at any rate, information Oracle could have subpoenaed and addressed had it any interest in doing so.

Maybe they didn't do that with this function because it was trivial.

They didn't do anything with this function (rangeCheck) because they had nothing to do with it. It wasn't part of the decompiled files, the author of the function was a Google employee (who wrote it outside of the scope of his employment) who both included the file in Android and contributed it to OpenJDK.

Re:The eight decompiled files

[Citizen of Earth]

So this guy's never heard of a the subtroutine concept?

Re:The eight decompiled files

[DragonWriter]

So this guy's never heard of a the subtroutine concept?

I've never heard of the subtroutine concept! What's that, when a bigger fish calls a smaller fish to perform a function required by the bigger fish?

Re:The eight decompiled files

[mzs]

No Bob sets AL = 0, does int 13h, and writes down the values of the registers. Then he does AL = 1 .... After that he hands that document to Fred, who writes the code that acts the same.

Re:The eight decompiled files

[mzs]

Now that's a proper car analogy!

Re:The eight decompiled files

[Anonymous Coward]

Not necessarily. Connectix was doing clean room rewrite of Playstation BIOS for an emulator and they disassembled it for reverse engineering. Sony sued, but court finally found it to be fair use, so the precedent for disassembling to extract specs is set. Sony had to buy Connectix to shut down the emulator.

Re:The eight decompiled files

[hackula]

Ha, this cracked me up. Non-coding "hackers" always talk about "subroutines" for some reason. I am sure it means something concrete on some platform, but usually its a dead give away that someone does not know what they are talking about.

Re:The eight decompiled files

[MightyMartian]

Identical range check functions, no different algorithmically than range check functions doubtless that go back to the earliest days of computing, and identical to many range check functions to be found throughout programs written in the C family for decades, cannot possibly be called IP. It's ludicrous.

Re:The eight decompiled files

[Githaron]

Actually, it is more like a fleet of cars and a single car was stolen.

Re:The eight decompiled files

[htnmmo]

Because it doesn't matter whether it was a contractor or not. Google is ultimately responsible for abiding by the law with the products they release whether they were written by employees, obtained through an acquisition or created for them by a third party at their request.

Re:The eight decompiled files

[DragonWriter]

Because it doesn't matter whether it was a contractor or not.

It certainly does in the context of your earlier suggestion that the decompiled files support some inference related to why Google chose to do it. Since it was a contractor doing something Google expressly forbade them to do, any speculation about why Google chose to do it rests on a fatally false premise.

Google is ultimately responsible for abiding by the law with the products they release

As has been pointed out multiple times in this subthread, most recently in GP -- to which the quoted material above is in reply -- no one is arguing against that point. So why do you keep raising it?

Re:The eight decompiled files

[htnmmo]

I take it assembly and microprocessors weren't part of your education?

Re:The eight decompiled files

[reve_etrange]

A bunch of languages call functions subroutine or "sub," e.g. Perl and BASIC off the top of my head

(in older BASIC codes you see lots of "GOSUB" keywords, the GOTO version of a function call).

Re:The eight decompiled files

[reve_etrange]

Which, in retrospect, just proves your point...

Re:The eight decompiled files

[reve_etrange]

And, of course, both versions of the function were written by the same person...

Re:The eight decompiled files

[MightyMartian]

The larger point on that score is that even if one concedes a copyright violation because the copyright was assigned to Sun, the damages are beyond minimal. It saved at the very best five minutes of time, and I think unless you're talking about a very incompetent programmer.

Re:The eight decompiled files

[pbhj]

Perhaps it's actually historical - a subroutine is a generic term for functions, say, or an objects methods, reusable blocks of code. We called them subroutines back when I learnt BASIC iirc; also pretty sure that we referred to subroutines when I studied assembly (which was much more recent).

Re:The eight decompiled files

[htnmmo]

no one is arguing against that point. So why do you keep raising it?

Not sure why it's such a sticking point so let me be clearer. Obviously when I refer to "Google" I'm talking broadly about the organization, considering a company has no free will and can not choose to do anything. Specifically I'm talking about the part of the organization that worked on Android. In this group I'm also including any contractors Google or it's subsidiaries might have hired. Instead of spending time trying to track down all the people that were involved with the code inside and outside of Google I just use the word "Google" to lump them all together. Because as I said, in the end it's their responsibility.

And I didn't infer anything from that line you're referring to. I was asking a question hoping to get an answer.

9 lines of what everyone thinks is trivial code would be faster to type than it would be to look up to copy and paste.

And the 9 lines is less than 2% of the code that was found to be infringing.

What I am inferring is that if Google didn't know that any of the code was infringing, that they knew that they told their contractor to develop a clean implementation, that information was likely communicated to Sun (I seem to recall some sort of conversation taking place but don't have a link) then any implied license Google thinks they had because of Sun's affirmative acts shouldn't be a factor because they were based on the belief by both parties that the code was not infringing.

Re:The eight decompiled files

[AdamWill]

It meant something in BASIC. Which gives you an idea.

Re:The eight decompiled files

[drinkypoo]

I've never heard of the subtroutine concept! What's that, when a bigger fish calls a smaller fish to perform a function required by the bigger fish?

...while covered in gravy and cheese curds.

Re:The eight decompiled files

[Anonymous Coward]

This guy, Boch, wrote a TimSort method while not employed by Google, and donated it to Sun (which eventually got parted up and made its way into the Java codebase). He then got hired by Google and put TimSort into the Dalvik sources. He admitted that he copied and pasted this into Dalvik from his personal collection (why rewrite a sorting algorithm and potentially mess it up?). I think that rangeCheck being the only lines remaining from his code when he donated it that haven't significantly changed is in large part a happy coincidence for Google that they left out of the trial.

The thing is, rangeCheck is so small that had I written it twice in the same language a year or two apart, I would have written it character for character exactly the same. I'd be willing to bet most professional developers would have the same experience. I can look at code I wrote 10 years ago and recognize it as something I would write the way I do (assuming no bugs and functionality changes).

As an example I found a class in the code I am working on today with the following two methods:

public void Dispose() {
            Dispose(true);
            GC.SuppressFinalize(this);
        }
 
        ~Database() {
            Dispose(false);
        }

Right there is 8 lines of code that another person probably has exactly the same.

Re:The eight decompiled files

[Anonymous Coward]

Qui-Gon: "I cast 'Summon Bigger Fish'."

Re:The eight decompiled files

[Anonymous Coward]

It doesn't really matter who decompiled the files. The point is that they were decompiled and copied.

If I hire you to go buy me a car and you do so I pay you for it. If it turns out you stole the car, should I get to keep it?

That also leaves the question of whether that contractor, or other contractors had violated Sun/Oracle copyrights in less obvious ways.

You have the analogy all messed up. Google has already stopped using this code, so in your analogy they've already stopped using the car and given it up.

Instead, what happened was Google hired Noser to buy them a car, and in the contract specified that the Noser was absolutely not allowed to steal the car. Noser stole it anyway, and when Google found out they stopped using it. Later, Google was sued by Oracle, who didn't actually own the car when it was stolen but bought it later. This suit wasn't to stop Google from using the car any longer, but to seek billions in damages for misuse of the car during a time that Google thought they owned it (due to deception by Noser) when Oracle didn't actually own it, either.*

The outcome is that Java is patented, and is not in the public domain. It is not free, it is not open, and one day a significant project, developed with Java is going to lean that their code violates copyrights.
Interestingly enough, in Germany, a similar lawsuite was rejected by someone who redid the API, but kept the same calling conventions. The judge there ruled that the calling conventions are not copyrightable. My X(int,long) can be the same as your X(int,long) as long as my X function is not derived from your X function.

If a different conclusion is reached, then the ubiquitous for(,,) and while() etc belongs to the estate of the late Denis Richie. The C language belongs to DR, and his estate should get some proceeds from every program.

Re:The eight decompiled files

[uninformedLuddite]

So how would you personally root the gibson without a subtroutine?

No wonder Gore lost

[srussia]

That "Oracle lawyer" is none other than David Boies.

Re:No wonder Gore lost

[Anonymous Coward]

What's your point? Gore lost because SCOTUS is very conservative, and all five of those justices would have picked Bush regardless of who Gore's lawyer was.

The lawyer for Bush in that case was Theodore Olson, who was the Solicitor General (and also the plaintiff's lawyer in the challenge to the Obama healthcare bill). Olson and Boies were both lead attorneys in Perry v. Brown (Perry v. Schwarzenegger), which challenged and overturned California's Proposition 8 banning same-sex marriages.

Yes, Boies must be a really shitty lawyer. It's not his fault when his client wants to sue without even having a case.

Re:No wonder Gore lost

[Anonymous Coward]

What's your point? Gore lost because SCOTUS is very conservative, and all five of those justices would have picked Bush regardless of who Gore's lawyer was.

That's true, conservatives wouldn't have picked Gore because Gore didn't have a case.

The Florida Supreme Court, on the other hand, was loaded with Democrats.

What's needed now:

[Anonymous Coward]

Not a syntax checker, an error checker, but instead, a code judge, which parses your language before use or compilation, and tells you what an idiot you are.

Ya but...

[sunking2]

All this shows is that the judge has no regard for patents and should be removed from the case.

Re:Ya but...

[Eponymous Hero]

lame troll attempt? patents have to describe a process that isn't obvious. range checkers for any language have a very limited number of ways they could be implemented efficiently, and are thus obvious.

Been waiting for this to hit /.

[sl4shd0rk]

I've been following the Oracle vs Google trial on other websites. Not sure why /. hasn't been covering it routinely. It's a pretty big deal not just to Google , but there are some issues being judged which may affect the programming community in general, down the road.

Alsup seemed to be a little perturbed with some of Oracle's ploys to captialize on the assumed "programming ignorance" of the jury. I haven't seen the RangeCheck code, but from Alsups statement it sounds like Oracle is trying to make a case from egregiously far-reaching evidence. One which basically means Oracle doesn't, and never had, much of a case to begin with.

Re:Been waiting for this to hit /.

[sandytaru]

Actually, I've seen linked articles about it here at least every other day.

Re:Been waiting for this to hit /.

[shutdown -p now]

    private static void rangeCheck(int arrayLen, int fromIndex, int toIndex) {
        if (fromIndex > toIndex)
            throw new IllegalArgumentException("fromIndex(" + fromIndex +
                       ") > toIndex(" + toIndex+")");
        if (fromIndex < 0)
            throw new ArrayIndexOutOfBoundsException(fromIndex);
        if (toIndex > arrayLen)
            throw new ArrayIndexOutOfBoundsException(toIndex);
    }

Range checking is soooo Programming 101

[Anonymous Coward]

Yup, I wrote that exact same function 15 years ago in my intro to C class. The whole point of the exercise was to demonstrate "garbage in, garbage out" with regards to math functions. The prof assigned a program that would return sine() of some input value. If that input fit within type int, the output was useful. If it didn't you got garbage. Unfortunately, he had been beating into us from the very first day "Make sure the input is valid!!!" So the very first thing I did after getting the input was feed it into a range check... if the input angle was outside +360 to -360, modulo 360 and return the result to the sine() function. Defeated the whole point, I suppose, but he did (reluctantly) give me full credit for having paid attention to his screeds about stupid users.

Oracle is abusing the courts

[kawabago]

This looks more like Oracle using the courts to drive competitors from the market than to redress any kind of injury to itself. I think it's time for consumers to start suing corporations for anti-competitive behavior that customers end up paying for.

Re:Oracle is abusing the courts

[spacepimp]

This case is about how Oracle can monetize Java. They spent 6 billion dollars on Sun and what Google is doing without direct compensation to Oracle devalues Java. This is the first step of many by Oracle to force profits from their purchase. Ellison is fairly adept at making money, and doesn't seem concerned about whether or not he is liked. This first case of making the Sun purchase pay for itself is not going in his favor currently.

Re:Oracle is abusing the courts

[farble1670]

oracle has an army of lawyers on staff. if they aren't suing, then they are twiddling their thumbs. this is (almost) a no-lose situation for oracle. they are rolling the dice. if they get lucky with the right jury / judge combo, they could get rich. if not, no harm done, barring some insignificant legal fees.

Re:Oracle is abusing the courts

[MightyMartian]

It is very much a lose situation, because if Oracle doesn't win, it means the JVM has a direct competitor that people can recompile their Java apps on, and with Dalvik now on every bloody Android device out there, it means there is a market to build from. In real terms, it means Oracle loses control of Java once and for all.

high school then why does goolge want PHD's

[Anonymous Coward]

high school then why does goolge want PHD's for tech jobs?

that was far too kind

[sribe]

It's well within the grasp of most middle schoolers, and it wouldn't take long to find an elementary school child who could write it ;-)

Re:none other than

[TaoPhoenix]

I wanna know whether David Bowie could programs those nine lines faster than David Boies.

A certain Mr Boies is involved

[bytesex]

That is all that should be said about this case. The guy cannot seem to help finding himself on the wrong side of a technological argument. Why do they keep hiring him ?

Oracle surrenders?

[DragonWriter]

Google pretty much admitted it was copied - claiming it was accidental (the same guy wrote it for Oracle and later, Google).

Actually, its not the "the same guy wrote it for Oracle and later, Google". It wasn't written twice.

Its that the Google employee who wrote it on his own time both included it in the Android source tree and contributed to to the OpenJDK (including the required copyright assignment.)

The question is whether it is worth anything. Google says no. Oracle's own expert witnesses said no. The judge - who has apparently revealed he is a programmer - says no. Oracle are arguing it's worth millions.

Actually, Oracle's pretty much given up on that, too. In a joint stipulation filed today, Oracle has agreed to waive both jury trial and its claim for actual damages and infringers profits on the copyright claims for which liability has already been found if the API SSO issue isn't resolved in its favor, and accept statutory damages for rangeCheck and the decompiled files.

Re:Oracle surrenders?

[nahdude812]

Its that the Google employee who wrote it

Only a Google employee in the sense that he worked for a 3rd party firm (Noser Engineering AG) Google hired to help create Android.

Re:Oracle surrenders?

[WarlockD]

Humm. It might seem that Oracle's laywers are pulling at straws, but I think they had this argument as a backup. Right now they are trying to save face so they threw this in because they don't think the jury is going to rule in their favor on the first, so maybe throwing in a less technical argument and more "Goggle is evil" will work.

The argument is not about the 9 lines of code, the lawyer isn't a coder, the idea is that Google copied the original java to get an idea on how the VM worked. Like how a programmer reads other peoples code to improve his own skills. By doing so, while not specifically infringing, it spread up Android's development, making Google getting to the market faster. Essentially, their argument is, without the decompiled java code Google would not of released sooner, thus, not made "as much" money.

Its all a fishing expedition though. They are hoping the CEO will make some stupid comment. Even if he does, they have to prove a nexus. That is
1. Decompile Java code to get Android out faster
2. Nexus?
3 .Profit!

Otherwise, all that effort is in vain as even if they say it did speed up the Android to market, it doesn't matter if it didn't help Google any.

PS = IMNAL but IRTFA:P

Re:Oracle surrenders?

[DragonWriter]

The argument is not about the 9 lines of code

Part of it is, part of it isn't.

the lawyer isn't a coder,

Well, he certainly claims not to be a "Java expert"; whether he is a coder or not is, I don't think, a point on which there is much basis to make a conclusion, nor is it particularly relevant in any case.

the idea is that Google copied the original java to get an idea on how the VM worked.

No, its not (well, not in the copyright portion of the trial) because ideas aren't protected by copyright, and not even Oracle's lawyers -- as close to it as they come with the API SSO issue -- are going to try to outright make "they stole our idea" the basis for a claim for copyright liability, since even the most clueless federal judge imaginable would have to throw out that argument.

(Obviously, there claim is that specific ideas were stolen in the patent phase, but that's a whole different ball of worms. And, no, the mixed metaphor is not accidental.)

They also aren't making the argument you suggest since, aside from ideas not being so clearly outside the scope of copyright protection that not even BS&F would try that argument, the decompiled files at issue aren't part of the VM at all, but part of Sun's compatibility test suite.

The 9 lines of code, by the way, aren't even the same issue as the decompiled files -- the 9 lines of code are code that a Google employee wrote and contributed both to Android and OpenJDK, and have nothing to do with the 8 files decompiled by Noser while under contract to Google.

PS = IMNAL but IRTFA:

Assuming the obvious interpretation of the acronyms there, I must point out that "read" and "understood" are two different things.

much better way to code that

[Anonymous Coward]

There are plenty of other ways it could have been written, some of them would have been better.

Google could have used a ternary operator instead of two if checks.

Or, which would have been a durn sight more helpful for debugging, when they threw the exception for a mismatch between the fromIndex and arrayLen values they could have included those problem values in the exception data. Instead the only value thrown with the ArrayIndexOutOfBoundsException was the only one that wasn't a problem. That's the kind of programming mistake that strongly supports a conclusion that the Google programmer was blindly copying from the Oracle code instead of thinking about the task.

Much like an example I heard yesterday from a teacher: "you would think when someone looks up several words in the English/Spanish dicionary and all of them were 'sustantivo' or 'proposicion' that they'd realize that was the part of the speech and not the translation of the word".

Programmer by birthright

[Just Some Guy]

His parents named him "Haskell". It was inevitable.

Re:"I probably couldn't program that in six months

[Jeng]

I know absolutely jack shit about programming, but I am fairly certain that if I went to school for six months to learn how to program that it would be trivial for me to write that function.

The concept is just so simple that even I get it.

Google's Lawyer Says Otherwise

[andersh]

Are you sure about that?

Josh Bloch, who wrote rangeCheck, testified that “[a]ny competent high school programmer could write” that method. RT 815:13-16 (Bloch). Even Oracle’s expert Dr. Mitchell conceded that “a good high school programmer” could write rangeCheck with guidance. RT 1316:24-25 (Mitchell).

http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20120516083919975&query=rangecheck

To quote Google's lawyer in court today:

[PJ: Let me remind everyone that the testimony was that a contractor, Noser, did it, and it did it contrary to specific instructions from Google.]

Let me come back to rangeCheck. Every time I talk about this, I feel like I'm either saying it's important or it's not important. That's a false dichotomy. No one can say it's a big thing. But it was something that was copied, and it was important to TimSort, which had a significant performance advantage.

http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20120515120106322&query=rangecheck

P.S. I admit that I could be wrong, I'm not following the case that closely, but this does seem clear cut?

Re:Google's Lawyer Says Otherwise

[squiggleslash]

Uh, yeah. I'm sure about that. Google's lawyer's comments really don't relate to the history of this, they're just convenient off-the-cuff wording.

From a copyright point of view, yes, there was copying because the author of the code was not the copyright holder. From an actual copying point of view, there wasn't, because the author of the code was the author of the original.

Re:Google's Lawyer Says Otherwise

[DragonWriter]

Misreading on several points.

To quote Google's lawyer in court today:

Your post ws posted at 2:57pm on Wednesday, May 16; the article you link to was posted on (and transcribes court discussions that occurred on) Tuesday, May 15. So, "today" probably isn't the word you are looking for.

More importantly, you've confused Oracle's lawyer with Google's. I've broadened the excerpt that you provided to include the part that shows who is talking (material that was excluded from your excerpt is bolded):

Oracle: I'm not an expert on Java -- this is my second case on Java, but I'm not an expert, and I probably couldn't program that in six months. Let me come back to rangeCheck after I've reminded the Court about the test files.

These test files were created by decompiling the Oracle code -- Sun code. That was not an accident, and not something they did by mistake. They did it intentionally, and they did it for the purpose of saving money, or time, or both. You can't look at those decompiled files and say there's no meaning in that; it accelerated Android, that's why they did it.

[PJ: Let me remind everyone that the testimony was that a contractor, Noser, did it, and it did it contrary to specific instructions from Google.]

Let me come back to rangeCheck. Every time I talk about this, I feel like I'm either saying it's important or it's not important. That's a false dichotomy. No one can say it's a big thing. But it was something that was copied, and it was important to TimSort, which had a significant performance advantage.

Bloch + Bloch

[andersh]

Yes, it seems you are correct, The Verge has a better summary.

Bloch testified that he wrote the original rangeCheck code, present in a file called Arrays.java, back in 1997. In court documents, Sun claims a copyright date of 2004 in connection with the rangeCheck code. Block began working for Google in 2004.

The exact same nine lines are also present in an Android file named Timsort.java, which Bloch testified he wrote in 2007.

When asked if he had copied the copyrighted Sun code directly for Timsort.java, Bloch initially responded "I don't recall." In a playback of his 2011 deposition, however, Bloch states that "the same order and same name is a strong indicator that it is likely that I did."

However, he noted that it was a good engineering practice to use the same method, and that he not only contributed the code to Android, but to the Java Development Kit as well (Timsort.java is now part of Java SE 7).

Re:none other than

[b4dc0d3r]

The Mythical Man Month suggests it won't get much faster no matter how many David Boies you throw at a problem, and at a certain point you'd actually be slowing the process down.

Time cube reference FTW!

[Zinho]

Thanks, that made me smile. If I had mod points I'd give you a +1 funny.

9 lines?

[Anonymous Coward]

out of the HOW MANY total? sounds pretty inconsequential to me for something likely found in multiple forum/news postings and libraries that is freely usable by anyone.

Long live c/c++, the mother of all scripting

[Anonymous Coward]

If only oracle, google would fight until they are complete death!!
To-Hell JAVA !!

I've ALWAYS HATED java language! It is NOT a language! It is a coffee brand!!! POINT!

Let's play a word game

[Anonymous Coward]

"I'm not an expert on Java -- this is my second case on Java, but I'm not an expert, and I probably couldn't program that in six months."

I'm not an expert on math -- this is my second case on math, but I'm not an expert, and I probably couldn't add 2 plus 2 in six months.

I'm not an expert on physics -- this is my second case on physics, but I'm not an expert, and I probably couldn't throw a ball in six months.

I'm not an expert on astronomy -- this is my second case on astronomy, but I'm not an expert, and I probably couldn't find the moon in six months.

I'm not an expert on language arts -- this is my second case on language arts, but I'm not an expert, and I probably couldn't speak my own name in six months.

I'm not an expert on medicine -- this is my second case on medicine, but I'm not an expert, and I probably couldn't produce a bowel movement in six months.

I'm not an expert on aerospace engineering -- this is my second case on aerospace engineering, but I'm not an expert, and I probably couldn't make a paper airplane in six months.

Frankly, I'm a little concerned that this is his SECOND case on Java. I hope it's his last.

Not as trivial as everyone is saying

[goombah99]

The problem is not how to check of a range is between bounds. Rather the problem is knowing you need to range check at that point. After all a higher subroutine might have already range checked it. Unnecessary range checks on every subroutine entrance would be inefficient. Thus this is a global design issue and takes a comprehensive knowledge to know. It's that knwoeledge that google stole by copying the pattern from oracle. Other design issues are, how do you pass in or obtain the bounds? Those are data structure issues. What exception to call? how do you make sure it does not break legacy code depending on some behaviour?

The problem here is the Lawyers are too simple minded to understand it's not the code itself but how the code affects the design that matters. And the judge knows just enough to understand that code itself is trivial but not enough to look beyond what the lawyers say is important.

since car analogies are obligate: It's like the guy that goes to the mechanic with a mysterious clunking noise. The mechanic listens for 5 seconds then pulls out a ball peen hammer and whacks the side of the alternator one time. The noise goes away. The guy gets his bill and it says $100. He says it only took the mechanic 5 seconds to do the job. The mechanic takes the bill and itemizes it.

tapping the alternator: 1$
knowing where to tap: 99$.

Re:Not as trivial as everyone is saying

[countach]

Range check at what point? Nobody as far as I've heard has made any argument about where and when this routine might be called. Do you know something we don't?

Re:Not as trivial as everyone is saying

[n7ytd]

The problem here is the Lawyers are too simple minded to understand it's not the code itself but how the code affects the design that matters. And the judge knows just enough to understand that code itself is trivial but not enough to look beyond what the lawyers say is important.

Is it the judge's job to "look beyond" what the lawyers are presenting? If one of the lawyers botches it and doesn't illuminate an important point, is it up to the judge to do it for him?

Bloch worked (works!) for Google, not Noser

[DragonWriter]

Bzzt. Wrong.

Only a Google employee in the sense that he worked for a 3rd party firm (Noser Engineering AG) Google hired to help create Android.

No, not at all. Josh Bloch worked for Google as Chief Java Architect (not for Noser) when he wrote rangeCheck (and still works for Google in the same role.) You seem to be confusing rangeCheck with the 8 decompiled files, which were done by Noser Engineering AG. Those are the two independent issues on which copyright infringement has been found in Oracle v. Google.

Lawyers bill for writing code

[ZombieBraintrust]

Can you imagine the bill if you used lawyers to write code. No wonder they estimated a billion dollars of infringement.

Doh!

[ikedasquid]

ummm...I wouldn't submit this for peer review just yet.

Next on MythBusters

[Anonymous Coward]

- Ok, so we have this two myths about rangeCheck to bust: first is that high schooler can write it and second is that lawer can't write it in six month.
And of course we should try it ourselves too!

It;s about injuction now

[Anonymous Coward]

Patent lawsuit is DOA, copyright lawsuit is also not going very well, at least in damages.
Oracle's only "hope" now is that API's are declared copyrightable and ask for injuction against Android, then shamelessly blackmail Google for billions.

What Google should do: port OpenJDK to Android and rewrite Dalvik as a variant of JVM. Since Sun is licensed as GPLv2 + classpath extension, this makes it perfectly suitable to be used in the same way as the java reimplementation in Android is now (except for calling it "Java").
Then they should settle for some moderate amount just to prevent harm that can come out of this ruling. Here Oracle is also in danger from shooting themselves in the foot (i.e. get sued by SCO kind of companies because of Unix API's in Solaris, not to mention the damage to Linux, on which many of their customers run DB's).
But maybe Larry is going to sacrifice this just to win and cause irrepairable harm.
Although I doubt that this crap is going to go beyond the appeal.

Re:It;s about injuction now

[MightyMartian]

There's enough case law out there against copyrighting APIs, and the judge has shown himself pretty savvy on technical matters, so I assume he's no legal slouch, so I don't think Oracle has much of anything. And since Dalvik is a different virtual machine, there's no real way for Android to simply be moved over to Java.

Slashcode rangecheck

[Anonymous Coward]

yes, it did a rangecheck of the input characters and... oh wait, Slashdot is using it! Lawyers, come to me!

lessor?

[Anonymous Coward]

Google is leasing two evils?

I would have thought that Google has enough money to buy as many evils as they want. Is there some tax benefit to leasing evil as opposed to buying?

Funniest lawsuit ever !

[Anonymous Coward]

OH MY GOD ! A JUDGE WHO CAN WRITE CODE ! LOL AWESOME !

This is the funniest lawsuit ever ! I am very glad this judge can write code... at least he is not being fooled.

And I totally agree with it... those 9 lines of code are a joke and way too simple ! and highly likelyhood of somebody writing the exact same thing ! ;) :)

Buggy code

[Anonymous Coward]

fromIndex > ArrayLen is not checked.

Assuming a zero-based array the code is also flawed; since toIndex could equal arrayLen and not trigger an exception, while it would still be out of bounds.

So both programmers sucked balls hahahahahahaha.

Re:"I probably couldn't program that in six months

[Pieroxy]

I know absolutely jack shit about programming, but I am fairly certain that if I went to school for six months to learn how to program that it would be trivial for me to write that function.

The concept is just so simple that even I get it.

I'm sure you'll get there in a few days, no need for month. That is, if you have an IQ over 80 of course.

Re:none other than

[Anonymous Coward]

The Mythical Man Month suggests it won't get much faster no matter how many David Boies you throw at a problem, and at a certain point you'd actually be slowing the process down.

I think that point would be where you added the first David Boies seeing as it would take him 6 months to write a simple bounds-check routine.

Reminder to Oracle

[NewYork]

"If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants." -- Isaac Newton

A lawyer cannot but a highschool boy can..

[Anonymous Coward]

And the lawyer reveals he doesn't: 'I'm not an expert on Java — this is my second case on Java, but I'm not an expert, and I probably couldn't program that in six months.' Just handling 2 cases on Java does not make you a Java programmer nor you are making a living as a programmer. I would say: "Iam not a expert on Law - this is my second book on such a law and I probably couldn't write such a similar law in six months"..yeah make that 5 years.