Oracle Clings To Java API Copyrights

An anonymous reader writes in with a story about some of the ramifications of the Oracle-Google lawsuit. "You could hear a collective sigh of relief from the software developer world when Judge William Alsup issued his ruling in the Oracle-Google lawsuit. Oracle lost on pretty much every point, but the thing that must have stuck most firmly in Oracle’s throat was this: 'So long as the specific code used to implement a method is different, anyone is free under the Copyright Act to write his or her own code to carry out exactly the same function or specification of any methods used in the Java API. It does not matter that the declaration or method header lines are identical. Under the rules of Java, they must be identical to declare a method specifying the same functionality — even when the implementation is different. When there is only one way to express an idea or function, then everyone is free to do so and no one can monopolize that expression. And, while the Android method and class names could have been different from the names of their counterparts in Java and still have worked, copyright protection never extends to names or short phrases as a matter of law.'"

Comments

Unix

[MrEricSir]

Can you imagine if Bell Labs had sued for control of the Unix APIs? We'd never have GNU, Linux, or many other projects that rely on those.

It would be a different world.

Re:Unix

[Anonymous Coward]

While I agree with the ruling, Oracle didn't sue for control of Android.

No, their motive was simply the same as every lawyer in the copyright business: "All your moneys are belong to us".

Re:Unix

[symbolset]

They wanted control of what Android has become. They would have had it: Google tried to negotiate terms that would have given them that. But they wouldn't grant the licence necessary to let Android become what it has become. So Google had to do something else. It worked out for us. Android would not have been accepted as fast, nor progressed as fast, nor been as lightweight, if Sun had taken that deal. We wouldn't have as many of these amazing new things.

Personally after having followed the case and read through what Oracle has claimed here I am unwilling to use anything from their company ever again - no matter how indirectly derived or loosely controlled. It truly is despicable.

Re:Unix

[ZombieBraintrust]

Google couldn't get JSE to work on a phone, but could have implemented JME with little effort.

Not true. Google didn't implement JSE because many of the libraries in that standard don't make sense on a touch screen phone. They cut out a bunch of libraries and they changed the I/O library. JME has different rules than JSE. Oracle was protecting its mobile business and wanted a cut of app revenue.

Re:Unix

[jbolden]

We just had a test of this on a major GPL company. Trolltech was sold to Nokia for $153m. Their product was GPL / commercial and profitable, though $150m was grossly overpaying. Nokia LGPLed it which killed the 2 distribution model and thus Trolltech's way to make money on software. When Nokia sold Trolltech to Digia I think it was about $5m total.

Re:Unix

[Anonymous Coward]

One note on this idea that lawyers are about taking everyone's money - it is akin to saying that software developers are out to take money from anyone who is a client of their development skills. Lawyers are proxies - they themselves don't do anything at all.

They are like paid soldiers on the legal battlefield. Lawyers don't have standing to sue anyone themselves, nor can they bring suits without a client. The client is the one who is suing, and the client is the one who has a claim. Lawyers can be paid hourly, or flat fee, or contingency percentage. In other words, if the client is asking the lawyer to bring suit, and will pay 10% of the damages in fees, then the client has agreed to that.

The real question is: why are you so indignant that lawyers get paid to represent clients? Do you hate the adversarial court system? Then legislate to change it. Do you hate lawsuits? Them legislate change to how lawsuits are brought. The idea that lawyers get PAID (heaven forbid) to represent someone's interests should not be a shock to you. We pay for all kinds of services from waiters to janitors to tax accountants to represent our interests, but if it is a legal representative, OH NOES!

I have family members in the legal profession, and they are good people - I get very tired of hearing about how evil lawyers are. If anyone is evil it is the CLIENTS.

Re:Unix

[sjames]

There are too many lawyers that are too willing to say or do ANYthing for money. At least whores have limits.

That's not to say all lawyers are that way (I know a few who I believe to be good people doing good things), but too many are. As officers of the court, it is their duty to keep crap out of the courtroom.

As for the rest, nobody ever lost their house because someone hired a waiter but they couldn't afford one so they got their own sandwich.

Lawyers are hardly the only problem, but they (collectively) have the power to stop it and don't. They are also the public face of the very troubles system.

Re:Unix

[symbolset]

I don't care if Oracle released it under the BSD license. They claimed in this suit to have copyrights on max() and min() as if they invented that shit. It took a judge who was a programmer also to call them out on it or that stupid shit would have gone to a jury ignorant of the technology history. "I could implement that in 15 minutes" or some such he said. They claim to have various patents to prevent all of Java, Unix, Linux, Windows and every other thing involving technology everywhere in this universe and any alternates that subordinate all of the open source licenses they grant.

A company like that, their output is toxic. The safest course is not to deal with them or anything claiming to be derived from them at all. That means nothing from Solaris (not even ZFS or its derivatives), no MySQL (forks should be safe for now), No BTRFS, no Java - or anything even in the most remote sense related to Java. If they would sue over the API, what wouldn't they sue over?

It's a shame as Oracle has bought up some of the greatest stuff in IT - but perhaps that's the point. Uncle Larry isn't and has never been in the giving stuff away business and has no respect for the folks who are. He's found great success in the selling stuff business so when he finds givers in dire straits he takes their scalps and then scalps their customers too.

I have no interest in buying him another island. I've got useful stuff to do.

Reading between the lines

[SinisterRainbow]

I'm always surprised in these types of articles that the main point is not about the US justice system which allows such crap to happen in the first place and the lack of reprisals against those bringing frivolous lawsuits. When there's little risk and high possible reward, they are going to keep happening. Why not speak their language and punish their pocketbook when they fail. Make it risky to abuse things or be ignorant about things (tho doubtfully the later).

Google should have bought Sun

[Anonymous Coward]

Google worst decision was to let Oracle buy and cannibalize Sun. It would have saved us and them from all these nonsense. Also Google's philosophy is so much closer to Sun's: great engineering and giving back to open source. The only thing Google is different than Sun is that they know how to profit from their products.

Heck, if they didn't want to spend all the money on their own they could lead a group of companies to buy out the IP of Sun.

It's really a pity that Oracle got a chance to buy Sun. I couldn't have imagined a worst end for such a great company.

Re:Google should have bought Sun

[MightyMartian]

Was it a mistake? Oracle has blown huge sums of cash in acquiring and then attempting to defend and monetize Sun's IP. And what have they got for all of it? Linux is still carving into Solaris and Sparc market share. Java was already leaving Sun's hands long before Oracle bought it.

Oracle bought very little for a lot of money, and now they're left arguing a spec is the same as an implementation.

I expect Ellison to join Ballmer in the stupid executive's retirement home. Both have fucked up hugely.

Wrong in quite a few ways.

[Anonymous Coward]

1. You have to obey the rules to get the Java license, but your compiler, if it isn't being called java, doesn't have to obey them. dalvik.
2. The license doesn't require you implement at least one java standard. You have to implement a minimal functionality and can place your own in a different namespace. But you don't have to implement at least one java standard. But see #1 as to why this doesn't apply
3. dalvik was written because Google didn't want to implement java to their license, not because they couldn't.

Your assertion of google's jerkness is predicated on incorrect assertions.

Re:Wrong in quite a few ways.

[FrangoAssado]

Much as I dislike Oracle, I don't feel Google played fair on this, they took someone else's technology and effectively stole it.

How exactly did any technology got stolen?

1) Dalvik is completely different from the usual Java VMs (Dalvik is register-based, while Java VMs are stack-based). That's how they got away with a VM that interprets (modified) Java bytecode without infringing any patents related to Java (as was confirmed by the "Oracle vs Google" case).

2) Android uses the exact same interfaces than Java, but that has been standard practice for decades (Unix, for example). No code between Android and Sun/Oracle's Java is the same, except for the stuff that must be the same to implement the same interfaces. The "Oracle vs Google" confirmed that's OK (as the summary says).

In the end, what happened is that Google didn't want to pay Sun/Oracle for a license to use Java mobile, so they implemented their own Java-compatible system (or rather, bought it from other people). That's how technology evolves. As someone else said here a few posts back: imagine if anyone wanting to do a Unix-like OS had to pay a license to someone. Where would we be now?

Re:Wrong in quite a few ways.

[jbolden]

Stallman has defended right to fork long after XEmacs. At the time what he said was:

The long delay in releasing Emacs 19 is the FSF's fault. (In some sense, therefore, mine.) While it's regrettable that there are multiple versions, I can't blame people for filling the gap that the FSF left. One of the goals of the copyleft is to allow people to do this--so that one central maintainer's lapse does not hold back the rest of the community.

Re:Wrong in quite a few ways.

[LarryWest42]

You're getting your facts wrong. Sun *approved* of Google's efforts, publicly and officially, in the forum of their CEO's blog.

Search (e.g., Groklaw) for Jonathan Schwartz's blog from November 5, 2007:

• "I just wanted to add my voice to the chorus of others from Sun in offering my heartfelt congratulations to Google on the announcement of their new Java/Linux phone platform, Android, Congratulations!"

And it continues in that vein, referring to Android as a Java-based platform.

This is after much discussion between the companies. The context matters. Google weren't being jerks.

Read up on the Oracle's lawsuit at groklaw for more factual background and generally reasoned commentary on the Oracle suit.

Larry

Ann Droid vs technical documentation

[Anonymous Coward]

Oracle kicks off its legal arguments with the tale of a mythical writer, Ann Droid who copies the titles and some sentences from a Harry Potter book and publishes her book. Oracle then argues that we would not accept that.
BUT, API's should rather be compared with writing an anatomy book. We all would have chapters like 'Introduction, digestive tract, neural system etc.'. So if the argument of Oracle hold, no_one_can write another anatomy book (or most technical books).

Re:Touch down for common sense!

[Kaenneth]

"Droid" is a valid Trademark vs. "GetCurrentTime()" being an invalid Copyright.

you're quite wrong

[stenvar]

The jerkiness of Google is they went against the direct wishes of the creator of the project.

The creator of the project (Sun) had promised to make Java an open ISO and ECMA standard. That's why people initially adopted it.

After several years, all of that turned out to have been a lie.

Sun decided they wanted to make Java open source, but took measures to make sure any new implementation would be compatible.

Just because Sun decides they own or control something doesn't mean they do.

Then Google decided to make an incompatible version, apparently to avoid the J2ME license issues, but for whatever reason, they made it incompatible. Not cool.

Google didn't decide to make an incompatible version, Android Inc. did.

Android Inc did this before Sun released Java under an open source license.

Android Inc decided to do this because Sun had already screwed them once before on J2ME

Making Android compatible with J2ME would have made no sense; J2ME was a lousy design.

The only thing that's been "not cool" is Sun's long string of lies, their technical ineptness and mismanagement, and Oracle's attempt to establish API copyrights. Everybody else is just trying to dig out from under the consequences of their mess, deceptions and trolling.