Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Opposition Mounts To Oracle's Attempt To Copyright Java APIs

Posted by timothy on from the but-larry-wants-it dept.

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.

14 of 187 comments (clear)

  1. Link? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Where is the link?

  2. WTF?!? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Insightful

    So Oracle think they can just jump in and claim ownership of APIs that are in the Java specification -- most of which were added to the spec via the JSR process? They have no chance here.

    1. Re:WTF?!? by game+kid · · Score: 4, Insightful

      On the contrary, they were really good at making people and distro maintainers move from their MySQL to MariaDB.

      --
      You can hold down the "B" button for continuous firing.
    2. Re:WTF?!? by Aryden · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Their whole point was to monetize Java. They want money from the "4 billion devices that run Java" which they aren't getting. It's not the branding they are concerned with, that is taken care of via trademark, this is all about the use of Java apis.

    3. Re:WTF?!? by binarylarry · · Score: 4, Insightful

      A Java fork would be great.

      Get control away from shitbags like Oracle over to some kind of foundation. Get rid of the fucking Ask toolbar spyware, improve the platform more quickly, etc.

      --
      Mod me down, my New Earth Global Warmingist friends!
    4. Re:WTF?!? by Smallpond · · Score: 3, Insightful

      A Java fork would be great.

      Get control away from shitbags like Oracle over to some kind of foundation. Get rid of the fucking Ask toolbar spyware, improve the platform more quickly, etc.

      A fork wouldn't help since Oracle is asserting copyright on the API, not the code.

  3. The End by PCK · · Score: 4, Insightful

    However unlikely it is that Oracle wins this, if this were to pass it would be the end of the software industry as we know it.

    I really hope that somehow there is some kind of backlash against Oracle when this ends. Well I can dream at least.

    1. Re:The End by jd2112 · · Score: 4, Insightful

      However unlikely it is that Oracle wins this, if this were to pass it would be the end of the software industry as we know it.

      I really hope that somehow there is some kind of backlash against Oracle when this ends. Well I can dream at least.

      Oracle has practically every corporation in the world by the balls (i.e. all their corporate data is locked up in Oracle databases and business logic in Oracle applications). They could start killing babies and it wouldn't affect their bottom line.

      --
      Any insufficiently advanced magic is indistinguishable from technology.
    2. Re:The End by Kjella · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Back in the real world, how much would you think the asking price of the first copy of Photoshop or Lord of the Rings should be? And if your answer to that is to put it on Kickstarter, I'm going to laugh. If you want custom development it's going to be $50+ a day at minimum wage, many hundred dollars a day if you want it to actually work (if that's not a requirement you can put it on rent-a-coder too) and nobody's going to "take one for the team". And you've got no guarantee you'll get what you wanted unless you have an iron-clad contract listing exact deliveries with no cure, no pay conditions - and you still have to fight the developer over it. Hell, if any of those methods worked open source would already have taken over since you could hire people to work on it for you today, without changing the law.

      People in general don't want that risk, plain and simply. I don't want to fund an author that is looking to write a book or even pay chapter by chapter if I feel there's a risk he'll just leave me hanging in the middle. I'd like him to write it, then I can choose to buy it or not. That is your analogy fail, I want to walk the proverbial isles of the app store the same way I walk in the grocery store, I want to see the finished product on offer and either pay or pass it up. That's how "every other labor industry does" but in your world everything in the store should then be free, because all the work is already done. Real world goods have overhead too, it's not like the price of a pound of beef is literally all cost attached to that pound, there were probably lots of fixed cost that'd be paid if that cow was there or not. But that overhead was spread across all pounds of beef the way a developer spreads his overhead (that is, actually writing it) across all the copies.

      Or the TL;DR version: I think $1 for Angry Birds was a bloody good deal and don't see it happening without copyright to organize the "pooling".

      --
      Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
  4. Re:*sigh* by Nerdfest · · Score: 4, Insightful

    The best thing you can do is to start moving towards languages with truly open specs and APIs, like C has. Go may fit the bill, but I'm not sure. The other thing is to do absolutely everything you can at home and at work, to stop *any* money going to Oracle and companies like them. Move towards open-source, or products from companies that play more nicely with others. If these companies don't get punished in the profit department, they don't take notice. There are enough senior people here and on other forums that a *severe* dent could be made in Oracle.

  5. Re:both money and control, The Oracle Way by turgid · · Score: 4, Insightful

    considering it takes Oracle longer to patch an exploit in Java than it does for Apple to patch an exploit, if indeed they acknowledge one, perhaps it would not be a bad thing to let ol Larry take 120 percent of nothing, and standardize on another universal API across the web.

    This is the correct answer.

    --
    Stick Men
  6. Re:*sigh* by garyebickford · · Score: 5, Insightful

    And end software patents. And a pony.

    --
    It's easier to be a result of the past, but more fun to be a cause of the future! http://www.spacefinancegroup.com/
  7. Re:Oracle is stupid... by fibonacci8 · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Where it's headed is Motorola, Intel, and the other processor manufacturers would have a field day asking Oracle for their API usage royalties.

    --
    Inheritance is the sincerest form of nepotism.
  8. Re:both money and control, The Oracle Way by Zontar+The+Mindless · · Score: 3, Insightful

    And they don't *want* MySQL to succeed: they want it *dead* in the industrial space, so people will use Oracle's much more prifitable databases. They bought Sun to get the commercial database customer list, to shoot that incompatible Sun architectural oddness through the head, and to shut MySQL down.

    This is EXACTLY why Oracle have, I dunno, *doubled* the number of devs and QA working on MySQL! It's all a ruse! Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain!

    Oracle do a lot of things. Things that waste tonnes of money--e.g. paying hundreds of staff to develop a product you're planning to discontinue--are generally not among them.

    --
    Il n'y a pas de Planet B.