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US Justice Department Urges Supreme Court Not To Take Up Google v. Oracle
New submitter Areyoukiddingme writes: The Solicitor General of the Justice Department has filed a response to the US Supreme Court's solicitation of advice regarding the Google vs. Oracle ruling and subsequent overturning by the Federal Circuit. The response recommends that the Federal Circuit ruling stand, allowing Oracle to retain copyright to the Java API.
Sun was flush with cash at the time of the acquisition, and also had a great deal of solid IP and customer faith. Solaris prior to Oracle was *the* most solid OS available in my opinion, and sparcs were always great for their target audience. Sun's only problem is the market became too commodity - fabbers need to make billions of chips now to stay competitive, and that just wasn't possible. But Sun had paths forward to fix these things - they were actually on the right road already, imo - forming ties with AMD, coming up with a way to keep their core but become commodity, by giving AMD access to high tech they needed. A road that Oracle took them off - Sun would be just fine today if Oracle hadn't bought them.
If the laws we have now were in place back then the computer revolution wouldn't have happened. We would still be paying $5000 for IBM Mainframe access terminals.
Or in a slightly less Dystopian view, computers today would look like iPhones, with one vendor having a stranglehold on the platform and completely anemic third party hardware support outside of cosmetics.
I read the internet for the articles.
I believe it's not that you can't use the API, but that you can't interface non-GPL code with the kernel due to the restrictions of the GPL. That you would use the API to do so is incidental to that restriction.
If instead you want to build your own kernel implementing the same API, I don't believe they have any objection.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
Google probably does copy/paste of the Java source code all the time, like lots of other people, because it's open source, so that is a meaningless accusation.
Google distributed interface definitions that look very similar to Oracle's. That's probably because in Java, there really aren't a lot of different ways of describing the same interface. Furthermore, interfaces should not usually be considered copyrightable.
Google also distributed some copyrighted Java source files. That was stupid, but those files appear to have been test cases, not code that ships on handsets, and it appears to have been unintentional. It's hard to argue that Oracle suffered any harm from that and Google came into compliance.
The idea that Java was ever free was rooted in Sun's original promises about making Java an open standard. But Sun dragged that process out for years and eventually just reneged on it, all the while filing patents and making sure that they owned the platform completely. Sun probably did that because they had learned that open and free platforms like Linux and X11 were eating their lunch.
Because a lot of FOSS developers had counted on Sun's promises, by the time it was clear that Java was going to remain proprietary and that Sun was going to break their promises, those developers preferred to maintain the myth that Java was "free" instead of facing reality, losing their investments and livelihood, and moving away from the platform.
Microsoft was kind of the opposite; Sun beat them over the head with a legal stick, that's why they created .NET. And Microsoft pretty quickly tried to put the legal framework in place to guarantee that .NET was a free and open platform, but because of Microsoft's rotten history, people didn't trust them.
I don't think this should make your head explode, it's just companies reacting to their past experiences, and people acting with rational self interest, even if their self-interest is really harmful to the community (like people who advocated Java as a free and open platform after around 2000).
Or Google has been resisting the NSA a little too much.
This.
It's pretty obvious that this is a punishment for adding encryption to Android devices, and for going to SSL for all web transactions, making it much more difficult to spy, despite administrative objections.
The recommendation is clearly punitive because Google has pissed the executive off, and consistently opted on the side of data protection, and has disclosed many of the recently discovered OpenSSL and SSSL protocol flaws which made eavesdropping easier.