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Oracle Refuses To Accept Android's 'Fair Use' Verdict, Files Appeal (wsj.com)
An anonymous reader quotes the Wall Street Journal:
The seven-year legal battle between tech giants Google and Oracle just got new life. Oracle on Friday filed an appeal with the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit that seeks to overturn a federal jury's decision last year... The case has now gone through two federal trials and bounced around at appeals courts, including a brief stop at the U.S. Supreme Court. Oracle has sought as much as $9 billion in the case.
In the trial last year in San Francisco, the jury ruled Google's use of 11,000 lines of Java code was allowed under "fair use" provisions in federal copyright law. In Oracle's 155-page appeal on Friday, it called Google's "copying...classic unfair use" and said "Google reaped billions of dollars while leaving Oracle's Java business in tatters."
Oracle's brief also argues that "When a plagiarist takes the most recognizable portions of a novel and adapts them into a film, the plagiarist commits the 'classic' unfair use."
In the trial last year in San Francisco, the jury ruled Google's use of 11,000 lines of Java code was allowed under "fair use" provisions in federal copyright law. In Oracle's 155-page appeal on Friday, it called Google's "copying...classic unfair use" and said "Google reaped billions of dollars while leaving Oracle's Java business in tatters."
Oracle's brief also argues that "When a plagiarist takes the most recognizable portions of a novel and adapts them into a film, the plagiarist commits the 'classic' unfair use."
Boycott the fuckers! Do not use Java.
The story at the time was that Oracle only paid so much for Sun because it thought that by hammering on Google for Android with Java licensing claims it could force Google into a patent cross-licensing deal for its distributed database patents, which Oracle needed to scale.
Does this mean, then, that Oracle is still having trouble scaling? It suggests to me that Oracle would be a bad choice at this point for web-scale development. I honestly would have predicted that they would have their own solutions in place by now.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
Better yet IBM are set to rack it in to the tune of many more billions if Oracle can get this ruling to stick. Think of all those lost DB2 sales from that SQL server copying IBM's language.
Oracle should be careful what they wish for.
Ellison logic: Cliffs' notes is classical unfair use.
Java today is a pointless language used only because other people are using it.
That would be wishful thinking. Java is picked for new projects for the same reasons as always: you don't need to be a genius to master it and it does provide the software engineering features necessary for large scale projects, however clumsy they may be. You would be certifiably nuts to pick C for anything at enterprise scale. That would be a firing offense. Rust looks promising but unproven, maybe it will be a conservative pick five years from now. C# and Go requiring buying into, respectively, Microsoft's and Google's ecosystems. There is no reason to think that Microsoft intends to play the intellectual property game any nicer than Oracle does. Go is immature and has been crticized for lack of extensibility. Python is a viable choice for many projects, though it continues to suffer from inattention to performance and threading issues and idiosyncratic warts such as significant whitespace. Javascript is a horribly flawed language with huge support, mature JIT optimization, and a broad talent pool that make it a viable choice particularly for frontend work. As of today, there is no alternative that deals a knockout punch to Java, however much we wish there were.
When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
MySQL spawned several forks and somehow hasn't been destroyed by Oracle (don't ask me how).
Solaris has been getting more and more useless since SUN ceased to exist. Now it's officially scheduled for execution.
SPARC (SBus) architecture still exists, but only a crazy man would stake his professional reputation on recommending its use in the enterprise.
JAVA started out as a noble idea - it wasn't really intended to be fast, or even for general purpose programming. It was intended to usher in the IoT.
Oracle was a database. It still is - and despite the massive publicity, not always the best one for the job.