Slashdot Mirror
Supreme Court May Decide the Fate of APIs (But Also Klingonese and Dothraki)
New submitter nerdpocalypse writes: In a larger battle than even Godzilla v. Mothra, Google v. Oracle threatens not only Japan but the entire nerd world. What is at stake is how a language can be [copyrighted]. This affects not just programming languages, APIs, and everything that runs ... well ... everything, but also the copyright status of new languages such as Klingon and Dothraki.
The US Supreme Court has no jurisdiction outside of the USA.
So this isn't going to affect Klingons
What I gather is the linked article at Slate seems more ominous than this sounds.
The Slate article is sensationalistic, like most news these days, designed to make people feel outrage.
From the brief, I understand that Google took code and changed it (which may or may not be against the terms) and then redistributed it (via the SDK? the Android OS?) for developers to use.
Java was designed with the intention of every implementation to be 100% compatible.....the same APIs, the same runtime, etc. When Google made Android, they used an incompatible version of Java (mainly changing UI code, but also the runtime and some other things). They used Java to make things easier for developers.
So now the question is whether it is allowed for Google to do that, or if Oracle has the right to stop them. This isn't about whether you are violating copyright if you use a language, and that's one area the Slate article seems confused.
It is also not about whether you can use an API for interoperability purposes. That is covered by fair use, and will still be covered by fair use, no matter how this case is decided. But interoperability not why Android used Java.......Android used Java to make it easier for developers to write programs for their system.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
So in layman's terms... the SFLC want the Supreme to refuse to hear the case, because they think that the copying of a trivial function, difficult to implement in any other embodiment, allows a "thin end of the wedge" argument in favor of GPL'ing everything on Android.
They specifically cite the Lotus v. Borland case in support of this.
They specifically avoid citing the Ashton Tate v. Fox Software case, because doing so would contradict their claims, and weaken the argument that the Supreme court should hear the case.
Clearly, someone needs to file an Amicus brief citing Ashton Tate v. Fox Software, and suggest that the brief needs to be heard.
Why can't Google just ship an OpenJDK build for ARM instead of screwing around with breaking the portability contract of the byte code?
For the same reason that they went with Dalvik, and the same reason their libc is derived from BSD libc (Bionic), instead of GLibc: to get out from under the license, and allow, indisputably, commercial code for which source code is not provided, and to (effectively) technologically, rather than merely legally, indemnify developers, in order to attract commercial developers to the platform.
Oracle has tried to get a piece of Android on and off for years, the same way it tried to get a piece of Linux, and the same way it bought out MySQL and the BSD dbm libraries, when they couldn't legally raise their hand against them.