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Opposition Mounts To Oracle's Attempt To Copyright Java APIs
An anonymous reader writes with a bit from Groklaw: "The remarkable outpouring of support for Google in the Oracle v. Google appeal continues, with a group of well-known innovators, start-ups, and those who fund them — innovators like Ray Ozzie, Tim O'Reilly, Mitch Kapor, Dan Bricklin, and Esther Dyson — standing with [Thursday's] group of leading computer scientists in telling the court that Oracle's attempt to copyright its Java APIs would be damaging to innovation." As usual, Groklaw gives a cogent, readable introduction to the issue.
. . . to Innovators, Entrepreneurs and Funds File Amicus in Support of Google in Oracle v. Google Appeal.
Freedom to fear. Freedom from thought. Freedom to kill.
I guess the War on Terror really is about freedom!
Hey Timothy, wake up! How about the link?
Here it is in case you can't find it:
http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20130531131600482
"Innovators, Entrepreneurs and Funds File Amicus in Support of Google in Oracle v. Google Appeal ~pj"
http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20130531131600482
It was Sun that did that, then perhaps IBM. Certainly not Oracle.
.. to object to this. These good people basically say "it would be godawful if Oracle managed to get a copyright on APIs". What they should say is "according to copyright laws, APIs are not material that can be protected by copyright". Because that is what matters to a court. _If_ APIs could be protected by copyright (which they can't) it would be absolutely wrong for a judge to listen to these people.
(Why do APIs not have copyright protection? Because copyright does not protect facts, ideas, systems, or methods of operation. If a file contains just the API itself, it is not protected. If it contains comments, preferably in poetic form, the file cannot be copied, but still the API can be extracted. And making use of the API description is most definitely not protected by copyright law).
I was there in the days when "you won't get fired for buying IBM", and IBM VPs would get flown in to talk to your boss' boss' boss' to tell them that their 14th level underling was considering buying a non-IBM peripheral, and that while IBM encouraged fair competition, the presence of a non-IBM peripheral 'might' delay support response until it was proved that the peripheral had nothing to do with the problem, and "your company might have to be shut down while the problem was worked out." It was extortion, pure and simple. And it worked until they lost the anti-trust suit (which started in 1969, lasted 13 years!)
See where IBM is now. It could happen to Oracle. Customers don't like any vendor having them by the balls, even when they are nice about it, and Oracle has never, in my experience, been nice. But those are cool boats! :D
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No it doesn't.
However, if you were Google or IceTea you couldn't make a clean room implementation as the words and phrases to make a program source compatible is owned by Oracle.
By extension you must now pay Oracle $999 for JavaSE or whatever the fuck Oracle wants to charge as no competition is allowed to exist.
Microsoft would also use this to end SAMBA (A.D compatibility for Linux and MacOSX), Wine, and ReactOS. After all MS would own the exact words and strings of characters of each API call and can quote this case as an example.
Sco can rise from the grave too and claim they own sh, sed, awk, ed, vi, cat, and all of unix because it looks the same and has the same characters as Unixware etc cleanroom implementation or not.
http://saveie6.com/
Already decided in court? Yes. Settled? Far from it.
This is about Oracle trying to appeal the former decision.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
I'm sorry, but a "successor in interest" is not responsible for, nor the cause of the actions of, the succeeded.
AFAIK, replicated APIs were in java.lang.* - classes like Array and Exception which are basically baked in the specification of language. Even if you aren't going to touch Java the platform, you will need those if you use Java the language (you're aware of distinction, right?)
PS: So, are you saying that something like Wine is infringing, or that Google is not infringing?
No, it isn't. Jonathan Schwartz has made it clear repeatedly, in court even, that Sun would never have brought this lawsuit. And he did welcome Android's use of the Java programming language when it was announced.
it worked until they lost the anti-trust suit (which started in 1969, lasted 13 years!)
Correction: IBM never lost the anti-trust suit. They successfully fought the court battle until the Reagan administration dropped the whole thing.
It would be more correct to say "it worked until microcomputers yanked the carpet out from underneath the minicomputer market." We all hate Microsoft now, but microcomputers running DOS or Windows freed us all from IBM's iron fist.
(Now Internet computing and mobile devices will free us all from Microsoft's iron fist, which anyway isn't quite as frightening as IBM's iron fist was back in the day.)
Java is already "forked". The OpenJDK project is since Java 7 the reference implementation for Java and is licensed under the GPL.
Nothing prevents you to write a custom installer without the Ask toolbar or whatever. Every Linux distribution ships OpenJDK in the main repositories.
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