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Op-ed: Oracle Attorney Says Google's Court Victory Might Kill the GPL (arstechnica.com)

Posted by msmash on from the the-other-side-of-the-coin dept.

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.

3 of 357 comments (clear)

  1. They don't know what they're talking about by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    It's the implementations that they're protecting with the GPL, not the interfaces.

  2. Bullshit by somenickname · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

  3. Re: Oracle wants us to have crappy computers. by Bing+Tsher+E · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.