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Op-ed: Oracle Attorney Says Google's Court Victory Might Kill the GPL (arstechnica.com)
Annette Hurst, an attorney at Orrick, Herrington & Sutcliffe who represented Oracle in the recent Oracle v. Google trial, has written an opinion piece for Ars Technica in which she urges developers and creators to not celebrate Google's win in the hard-fought copyright case as the decision -- if remains intact -- is poised to make them "suffer" everywhere and also the free software movement itself "now faces substantial jeopardy." As you're aware, in a verdict earlier this week, a federal court announced that Google's Android operating system didn't infringe on Oracle-owned copyrights because its re-implementation of 37 Java APIs is protected by "fair use." Hurst writes: No business trying to commercialize software with any element of open software can afford to ignore this verdict. Dual licensing models are very common and have long depended upon a delicate balance between free use and commercial use. Royalties from licensed commercial exploitation fuel continued development and innovation of an open and free option. The balance depends upon adherence to the license restrictions in the open and free option. This jury's verdict suggests that such restrictions are now meaningless, since disregarding them is simply a matter of claiming "fair use." It is hard to see how GPL can survive such a result. In fact, it is hard to see how ownership of a copy of any software protected by copyright can survive this result. Software businesses now must accelerate their move to the cloud where everything can be controlled as a service rather than software. Consumers can expect to find decreasing options to own anything for themselves, decreasing options to control their data, decreasing options to protect their privacy.
It's the implementations that they're protecting with the GPL, not the interfaces.
Re-implementing an API and wholesale lifting a GPL software package are not even vaguely related. And, the end part of her quote, where she proclaims doom and gloom if we don't all move to the cloud, is ponderous hyperbole. The is just scare tactic garbage from an attorney who wants to bait the waters before she takes on the appeal and charges Oracle millions of dollars for the privilege.
Never read such a stupid article. If oracle has won; alot of open source projects had been dead in the USA. In EU they had lived on since there APIs are not copyrightable because of interoperability.
Now they can continue to live even in the US.
As for the point that this makes it possible for people to steal open source code. It wont. Since it's always been possible to take open source code and reimplement it as closed code. Its never been forbidden before and thus this won't change that. APIs has never been seen as protected by the software industry before and its a sad state that USA has changed that.
Just saying it like it are.
. At the time IBM's BIOS was reverse-engineered they weren't even the best computers.
IBM's BIOS wasn't reverse-engineered. The source was available directly from IBM via the Technical Reference Manual. Phoenix and Compaq both merely did a clean-room reimplementation based on looking at the function call interfaces in the actual source code and what that code actually did, then writing a detailed set of requirements for the coders. No reverse-engineering was needed.
Please stand clear of the doors, por favor mantenganse alejado de las puertas
IBM's BIOS was not reverse engineered. The commented Assembly Language source code for the BIOS is published in the Technical Reference Manual which anybody could purchase.
Phoenix had to hire programmers to read the IBM source, write a human language specification, then hand that specification over to a seperate team to code their version of BIOS. Anybody on the first team, or anybody who had access to and read the published IBM source code was disqualified to work on the reimplementation.
In other words, IBM published their BIOS in commented human readable source code. The PC was in this regard among others, an open architecture.
LGPL covers the code that implements the interface, and allows for less restricted use. It covers the same thing as GPL, just like every other license, its just a different one. Its no more or less different from GPL than BSD or MIT, for instance.
Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
GPL, you link to the API and distribute, you are required to provide source.
LGPL, you link to the API and distribute, you can keep your source closed.
GPL and LGPL, you re-implement the API, you can keep it closed source. That's actually the POINT of open source. If you're not willing the put the work in, you can share with others. If you put all the work in yourself, you can do whatever you'd like.
The judge did rule that interfaces are not copyrightable but that got overturned on appeal. He then asked the jury to decide if it was fair use. The jury voted yes to that.
The judge (William Alsup) did rule that the java API were not copyrightable in the earlier case. The appeals court overturned this ruling. Hence the current case which was started on the basis that the API was copyrighted and the open question was about fair use.