You mean give IBM some time. Apache has a mild interest, but it's not exactly their main focus, and they haven't exactly got huge resources to spare. At this point, community interest is probably at an all time low. If Oo rebounds, it's going to be because IBM wants to keep Symphony proprietary, and has plenty of money and resources to throw at Symphony's open-source core. I don't see any other way for Oo to climb out of the pit that's been dug for it.
But backing from IBM is definitely nothing to sneeze at. It'll be interesting to see how things go from here.
We need LO because it's a better product in every way. It incoporates all the GoOO patches created by Novell and Debian, and has undergone a massive cleanup that made the code smaller, faster, and easier to understand, without removing any functionality, and, since the cleanup, has had a steady stream of improvements added.
IBM needs OpenOffice because they had a separate license from Oracle to use OO code in Symphony, and the LO folks aren't offering the same deal--LO is GPL, take it or leave it.
Apache needs OpenOffice because it promotes their preferred license. Which isn't much of a reason, but it's something.
OO seems likely to become an IBM product in all but name. A handful of developers may feel motivated to contribute for whatever reasons, but unless OO undertakes a cleanup like the one LO already accompished, the complexity of the code is likely to discourage casual contributors. A cleanup of OO would likely put them even farther behind LO in features, but without a cleanup, it's going to be harder to add features, which will make it harder for them to keep up in the long run, and will mean that OO's performance will continue to suck compared to LO.
Technically, Doctorow may be his own publisher, since his work is released under a Creative Commons license, but he has an agreement with Tor to make nice, pre-packaged versions of his work for sale to a mass audience, which is probably close enough to the same thing.:)
Really? I didn't think that Peace War or Marooned in Realtime were anywhere near as good as his later works. In fact, I often recommend that people skip those two and read everything else he's written (including the brilliant early novella, "True Names"). On the other hand, A Fire Upon the Deep and A Deepness in the Sky are major classics and easily rank with the best in the field. Nothing he's done since matches those two, but I thought Rainbows End* was outstanding once you got past the disappointment of it not being another AFUTD/ADITS.
* note to the peanut gallery: the lack of an apostrophe in the name of this book is deliberate.
* Vernor Vinge (more Hugos/novel than anyone) * John Scalzi (Hugo for Old Man's War, also SFWA president) * Charles Stross (Atrocity Archives, Clan Corporate) * Stephen Brust (Dragaera series) * Nancy Kress (Hugo-winning Beggars in Spain & more) * David Brin (Multi-Hugo-winning Uplift series & more)
Then there's people who have had some, but not all, of their work published by Tor, like: * Diane Wynne Jones (Howl's Moving Castle) * Jack Vance (SF grandmaster, many Hugos) * Poul Anderson (SF grandmaster, many Hugos) * Larry Niven (Ringworld, many Hugos) * Robert Sheckley (one of the best SF humorists of the mid-twentieth)
Wow, that got modded down? I think that was a perfectly reasonable and relevant question. Jlebar said that all the older versions are available, but didn't mention that they don't get security updates. There's a large group of people who are trying to provide security updates to selected older versions, and the Mozilla crew has basically been blowing them off and denying them the right to use the Firefox trademark for their effontry.
Jlebar says they don't want to force users to run the latest version, but it's pretty clear that if you don't, you're a second-class citizen as far as the Moz developers are concerned. They say that this is all to protect the Firefox name, but it's clear that if you want a reasonably secure older version, you'd better avoid the Firefox name, and go with the unfortunately-named Iceweasel. (Honestly, I'm amazed that Iceweasel hasn't been ported to other platforms, since it gets backported security fixes that Firefox doesn't.)
Would it really kill Moz to allow volunteers who are ready, willing, and able to provide real long-term support for selected versions, and who are actively doing so, to work with the Moz team and use the precious brand? The Kernel devs, the GNU devs, the Apache devs, and the various desktop-environment devs all seem happy to cooperate with Debian on their long-term support goals. Only Mozilla treats long-term support efforts as a personal insult that will tarnish their name.
And I'm supposed to believe that Mozilla has no interest in forcing users to run the latest version? Ok, technically, that may be true, in that they couldn't force anyone to do so even if they wanted, but it certainly seems like they're trying to make it as unpleasant and unrewarding (and unsafe) of an experience as possible.
We have no interest in forcing users to run the latest version.
Really? Then how come you can't come to terms with vendors who want to set their own release schedules? How come you forced Debian to stop using your trademarks, rather than work with them to ensure that security fixes could be properly backported to stable versions? It's not like Debian is lacking in manpower to help shoulder the burden that would create.
Yup. Mining a single asteroid and returning the materials to Earth may not be particularly profitable, but mining the asteroid to seed further mining operations could well be a huge win, in the long term.
Sadly, people aren't very good at taking a long-term view, in general.
Why do I think that? Because the case has been going on for a year and a half now, and I've been following it that whole time. The public trial has just started, but the case was originally filed in August of 2010. Between now and then, Oracle and Google have been fighting the whole time, with dueling motions and dueling experts. In fact, their experts were so much at odds that the court felt compelled to appoint its own, so we're going to see three experts testify during the trial. And further, both sides challenged the court's expert before trial and got parts of his testimony stricken.
Indirect copying is simply harder to prove than direct copying. Not impossible, of course, but to even bring a case, you have to meet certain hurdles, which Oracle wasn't able to get over. Their evidence didn't meet the required minimum standard, and the judge disallowed it, except for the few lines that Google admitted were copied, and some vague claims that the API's might be protectable. Oh, and the documentation, which, after further review, I realize you were right about. More on that below.
Remember, this case is primarily about patents. Oracle knows that Google took great pains to avoid copying their code, for the most part, and only threw in a few vague copyright claims in the some of it would stick. The meat of the trial won't come till the copyright part is done. Of course, a year and a half ago, Oracle had more patents than they do now. Google got the PTO to review the patents, and most of them have not survived that review, so Oracle has been trying to switch their focus to the copyright claims, but they've had limited success with that.
Now, as I said above, you're right about the documentation copyright claims still being alive. I mostly ignored those, because they don't affect Android directly, and my interest is in what's going to happen to Android. Oracle wants a slice of the Android pie, at a minimum, and would prefer if Android were dropped in favor of JavaME. Winning on the documentation claims won't help with those goals. Oracle can get some back payments, but only to cover developers--they're not going to get paid per-phone--and Google can simply pull the documentation and replace it, so Oracle's won't get the on-going license fees they're hoping for, nor any leverage to force Google to switch to JavaME. But a win here would at least help Oracle save face, and help justify the suit to their stockholders.
Dude, it doesn't matter if Oracle has film and eyewitnesses to show Google cutting-and-pasting from Oracle's source code, because the only copyright claims they have are for the API! And as you yourself said, APIs are not copyrightable. Pre-trial motions have already resulted in the following two jury instructions:
1. The Java programming language is open and free for anyone to use. 2. The names of the Java language API files, packages, classes, and methods are not protected by copyright law.
The judge has already seen the evidence Oracle has, and has ruled that no code was copied (except for those frequently-mentioned six lines of code, which Google has already admitted to copying).
It doesn't matter how huge a pile of evidence Oracle may have. The only thing they're allowed to try to claim is the APIs. And I'm pretty sure that not being protected by copyright law trumps even the hugest pile of evidence.
They could have, but it would have been seen as a silly, pointless expense, since Sun was actively supporting, blessing, and cheering for Apache's Project Harmony--which is what the Android libraries are actually based on! Google wrote their own VM from scratch (and Oracle isn't accusing them of copyright infringement there), but they didn't write the libraries!
This also addresses your other comment where you suggest that Google will have a hard time proving they didn't copy from Oracle's implementation. In fact, it should be easy for Google to show that their code is derived from Apache's code, not Oracle's, because it is.
If Oracle should be suing anyone, it's Apache--but of course, there's no hope of "beeel-yuns!" to be found there. Plus, they'd find it pretty hard to get past claims of estoppel.
You're confused. This nine lines is not a smoking gun suggesting further investigation--this nine lines is all that's left of Oracle's copyright claims after discovery and pre-trial motion practice. Nine lines (contributed by the same person who originally wrote them for Sun) out of tens of thousands, and some vague allegations about the APIs is all they have to go to trial with. And you've already admitted that you don't believe API's are copyrightable, so I don't see how you can possibly imagine Oracle is going to win.
Why should the haters be the ones to stop when the apologists continue to spout nonsense and lies? Contrariwise, why should the apologists back down when the haters continue to spout nonsense and lies. It's not like either side has clean hands and deserves a default "win". The only real solution is to get the ones that spout nonsense on both sides to shut up. And...good luck with that!:)
Google demonstrably did not make a clean-room copy.
And your evidence for this bold claim is? Dalvik doesn't work anything like the JVM (it doesn't even use the same bytecode), and the libraries that Google used were based on Apache Harmony, not the JDK. Oracle only found nine lines of code in common between Java and Android, and those nine lines have long since been removed.
Note that while a language cannot be subject to copyright, it can be subject to patents.
Perhaps, though I have a hard time imagining how. Oracle has several patents in their VM, but I don't know of any that apply to the language itself. Gnu gcj implements the language, but doesn't use a VM; it's a native compiler. To the best of my knowledge, gcj does not infringe any of Oracle's patents, most of which involve the JIT component of the VM, which, of course, isn't present in a native compiler.
(There's also the fact that Oracle's patents in the Java VM are rapidly being thrown out on re-examination by the PTO. They've already had to discard most of their original patent claims against Google, since the patents are no longer valid. This is one of the reasons they've been in such a big rush to get the trial started--half of the patents they have left are still pending PTO review.)
However SUN released the licensing for Java no longer matters.
How* Sun released the licensing for Java never did matter, because the license only applied to the implementation, not the language. The Sun Technology Certification Kit (TCK), which was required to use the name Java, did come with field-of-use restrictions, but Apache and Google didn't use the TCK or the name for just that reason. Android is based on Apache Harmony, not code from Sun, and there are no field-of-use restrictions on Harmony.
How Oracle releases a new licensing structure is what matters; and it's clear Google has no interest in adjusting the terms to meet Oracle's new terms.
Ignoring the fact that the GPL is non-revokable, which would make your point false even if it were relevant, the GPL only applies to Oracle's code, which Apache and Google aren't using. The only thing they're really using is the names in the API, and all precedent (and a ruling from this judge) says that such names aren't copyrightable. Oracle is trying to hang their infringement claims on some vague notions of "specification and arrangement". Of a handful of names.
Yeah, it works better as a verb. Back in the late eighties, I tried to persuade them that they should change their name to The Foundation to Free Software, but it was a little late for that.
Hmm, I suppose I can kind of see that. Nevertheless, it seems like a silly thing to complain about in an article about how the limitation is going away.
Article: Gimp removing the 32bpp limit Original Poster: yeah, now if only they'd fix the 32bpp limit
(Plus, he actually had things like the high-quality professional assembler you'd need to build this. I seriously doubt that the built-in ROM assembler is up to the task.)
Yeah, it's like saying that Linux is open to anyone. Anyone can download the complete git repo, and make all the changes they want and even share them, via git, but nothing goes into the main branches without the say-so of Linus or one of his lieutenants.
It sounds like they're basically saying that now, not only is Mediawiki itself open, but so is all the site-specific configuration. But it's open in the same way--you can make your own forks for your own site, but they're not required to accept your changes into their branches for their sites.
Seems like a pretty sensible way to do things, actually.
Blue Ray players license Oracle's JVM. That's reasonable, Oracle/Sun wrote that. Google wrote their own VM from scratch that doesn't work anything like Oracle's JVM. The only thing it has in common is: a bunch of APIs and nine lines of code (added by accident and long since removed). That's it. That's the basis of Oracle's infringement claims.
APIs have long been held to be uncopyrightable. Oracle is trying to change well-established case law, and if they succeed, it's going to raise a shitstorm, not just with Java users, but throughout the industry!
Slashdot Mirror
You mean give IBM some time. Apache has a mild interest, but it's not exactly their main focus, and they haven't exactly got huge resources to spare. At this point, community interest is probably at an all time low. If Oo rebounds, it's going to be because IBM wants to keep Symphony proprietary, and has plenty of money and resources to throw at Symphony's open-source core. I don't see any other way for Oo to climb out of the pit that's been dug for it.
But backing from IBM is definitely nothing to sneeze at. It'll be interesting to see how things go from here.
We need LO because it's a better product in every way. It incoporates all the GoOO patches created by Novell and Debian, and has undergone a massive cleanup that made the code smaller, faster, and easier to understand, without removing any functionality, and, since the cleanup, has had a steady stream of improvements added.
IBM needs OpenOffice because they had a separate license from Oracle to use OO code in Symphony, and the LO folks aren't offering the same deal--LO is GPL, take it or leave it.
Apache needs OpenOffice because it promotes their preferred license. Which isn't much of a reason, but it's something.
OO seems likely to become an IBM product in all but name. A handful of developers may feel motivated to contribute for whatever reasons, but unless OO undertakes a cleanup like the one LO already accompished, the complexity of the code is likely to discourage casual contributors. A cleanup of OO would likely put them even farther behind LO in features, but without a cleanup, it's going to be harder to add features, which will make it harder for them to keep up in the long run, and will mean that OO's performance will continue to suck compared to LO.
Technically, Doctorow may be his own publisher, since his work is released under a Creative Commons license, but he has an agreement with Tor to make nice, pre-packaged versions of his work for sale to a mass audience, which is probably close enough to the same thing. :)
Really? I didn't think that Peace War or Marooned in Realtime were anywhere near as good as his later works. In fact, I often recommend that people skip those two and read everything else he's written (including the brilliant early novella, "True Names"). On the other hand, A Fire Upon the Deep and A Deepness in the Sky are major classics and easily rank with the best in the field. Nothing he's done since matches those two, but I thought Rainbows End* was outstanding once you got past the disappointment of it not being another AFUTD/ADITS.
* note to the peanut gallery: the lack of an apostrophe in the name of this book is deliberate.
Some Tor authors I can personally recommend:
* Vernor Vinge (more Hugos/novel than anyone)
* John Scalzi (Hugo for Old Man's War, also SFWA president)
* Charles Stross (Atrocity Archives, Clan Corporate)
* Stephen Brust (Dragaera series)
* Nancy Kress (Hugo-winning Beggars in Spain & more)
* David Brin (Multi-Hugo-winning Uplift series & more)
Then there's people who have had some, but not all, of their work published by Tor, like:
* Diane Wynne Jones (Howl's Moving Castle)
* Jack Vance (SF grandmaster, many Hugos)
* Poul Anderson (SF grandmaster, many Hugos)
* Larry Niven (Ringworld, many Hugos)
* Robert Sheckley (one of the best SF humorists of the mid-twentieth)
Wow, that got modded down? I think that was a perfectly reasonable and relevant question. Jlebar said that all the older versions are available, but didn't mention that they don't get security updates. There's a large group of people who are trying to provide security updates to selected older versions, and the Mozilla crew has basically been blowing them off and denying them the right to use the Firefox trademark for their effontry.
Jlebar says they don't want to force users to run the latest version, but it's pretty clear that if you don't, you're a second-class citizen as far as the Moz developers are concerned. They say that this is all to protect the Firefox name, but it's clear that if you want a reasonably secure older version, you'd better avoid the Firefox name, and go with the unfortunately-named Iceweasel. (Honestly, I'm amazed that Iceweasel hasn't been ported to other platforms, since it gets backported security fixes that Firefox doesn't.)
Would it really kill Moz to allow volunteers who are ready, willing, and able to provide real long-term support for selected versions, and who are actively doing so, to work with the Moz team and use the precious brand? The Kernel devs, the GNU devs, the Apache devs, and the various desktop-environment devs all seem happy to cooperate with Debian on their long-term support goals. Only Mozilla treats long-term support efforts as a personal insult that will tarnish their name.
And I'm supposed to believe that Mozilla has no interest in forcing users to run the latest version? Ok, technically, that may be true, in that they couldn't force anyone to do so even if they wanted, but it certainly seems like they're trying to make it as unpleasant and unrewarding (and unsafe) of an experience as possible.
We have no interest in forcing users to run the latest version.
Really? Then how come you can't come to terms with vendors who want to set their own release schedules? How come you forced Debian to stop using your trademarks, rather than work with them to ensure that security fixes could be properly backported to stable versions? It's not like Debian is lacking in manpower to help shoulder the burden that would create.
Which in turn would remove the excuse so many of us have to not RTFA. And if people started reading TFA, slashdot as we know it would be over!
Yup. Mining a single asteroid and returning the materials to Earth may not be particularly profitable, but mining the asteroid to seed further mining operations could well be a huge win, in the long term.
Sadly, people aren't very good at taking a long-term view, in general.
Why do I think that? Because the case has been going on for a year and a half now, and I've been following it that whole time. The public trial has just started, but the case was originally filed in August of 2010. Between now and then, Oracle and Google have been fighting the whole time, with dueling motions and dueling experts. In fact, their experts were so much at odds that the court felt compelled to appoint its own, so we're going to see three experts testify during the trial. And further, both sides challenged the court's expert before trial and got parts of his testimony stricken.
Indirect copying is simply harder to prove than direct copying. Not impossible, of course, but to even bring a case, you have to meet certain hurdles, which Oracle wasn't able to get over. Their evidence didn't meet the required minimum standard, and the judge disallowed it, except for the few lines that Google admitted were copied, and some vague claims that the API's might be protectable. Oh, and the documentation, which, after further review, I realize you were right about. More on that below.
Remember, this case is primarily about patents. Oracle knows that Google took great pains to avoid copying their code, for the most part, and only threw in a few vague copyright claims in the some of it would stick. The meat of the trial won't come till the copyright part is done. Of course, a year and a half ago, Oracle had more patents than they do now. Google got the PTO to review the patents, and most of them have not survived that review, so Oracle has been trying to switch their focus to the copyright claims, but they've had limited success with that.
Now, as I said above, you're right about the documentation copyright claims still being alive. I mostly ignored those, because they don't affect Android directly, and my interest is in what's going to happen to Android. Oracle wants a slice of the Android pie, at a minimum, and would prefer if Android were dropped in favor of JavaME. Winning on the documentation claims won't help with those goals. Oracle can get some back payments, but only to cover developers--they're not going to get paid per-phone--and Google can simply pull the documentation and replace it, so Oracle's won't get the on-going license fees they're hoping for, nor any leverage to force Google to switch to JavaME. But a win here would at least help Oracle save face, and help justify the suit to their stockholders.
Dude, it doesn't matter if Oracle has film and eyewitnesses to show Google cutting-and-pasting from Oracle's source code, because the only copyright claims they have are for the API! And as you yourself said, APIs are not copyrightable. Pre-trial motions have already resulted in the following two jury instructions:
1. The Java programming language is open and free for anyone to use.
2. The names of the Java language API files, packages, classes, and methods are not protected by copyright law.
The judge has already seen the evidence Oracle has, and has ruled that no code was copied (except for those frequently-mentioned six lines of code, which Google has already admitted to copying).
It doesn't matter how huge a pile of evidence Oracle may have. The only thing they're allowed to try to claim is the APIs. And I'm pretty sure that not being protected by copyright law trumps even the hugest pile of evidence.
They could have, but it would have been seen as a silly, pointless expense, since Sun was actively supporting, blessing, and cheering for Apache's Project Harmony--which is what the Android libraries are actually based on! Google wrote their own VM from scratch (and Oracle isn't accusing them of copyright infringement there), but they didn't write the libraries!
This also addresses your other comment where you suggest that Google will have a hard time proving they didn't copy from Oracle's implementation. In fact, it should be easy for Google to show that their code is derived from Apache's code, not Oracle's, because it is.
If Oracle should be suing anyone, it's Apache--but of course, there's no hope of "beeel-yuns!" to be found there. Plus, they'd find it pretty hard to get past claims of estoppel.
why is this news for nerds?
Um, it mentions email? Best guess I can come up with.
Well, actually, not the best, but definitely the most charitable. :)
You're confused. This nine lines is not a smoking gun suggesting further investigation--this nine lines is all that's left of Oracle's copyright claims after discovery and pre-trial motion practice. Nine lines (contributed by the same person who originally wrote them for Sun) out of tens of thousands, and some vague allegations about the APIs is all they have to go to trial with. And you've already admitted that you don't believe API's are copyrightable, so I don't see how you can possibly imagine Oracle is going to win.
Why should the haters be the ones to stop when the apologists continue to spout nonsense and lies? Contrariwise, why should the apologists back down when the haters continue to spout nonsense and lies. It's not like either side has clean hands and deserves a default "win". The only real solution is to get the ones that spout nonsense on both sides to shut up. And...good luck with that! :)
APIs are uncopyrightable
I agree, but Oracle doesn't.
Google demonstrably did not make a clean-room copy.
And your evidence for this bold claim is? Dalvik doesn't work anything like the JVM (it doesn't even use the same bytecode), and the libraries that Google used were based on Apache Harmony, not the JDK. Oracle only found nine lines of code in common between Java and Android, and those nine lines have long since been removed.
Fair enough, but pretty much irrelevant to my point. Thanks for the info, though.
Note that while a language cannot be subject to copyright, it can be subject to patents.
Perhaps, though I have a hard time imagining how. Oracle has several patents in their VM, but I don't know of any that apply to the language itself. Gnu gcj implements the language, but doesn't use a VM; it's a native compiler. To the best of my knowledge, gcj does not infringe any of Oracle's patents, most of which involve the JIT component of the VM, which, of course, isn't present in a native compiler.
(There's also the fact that Oracle's patents in the Java VM are rapidly being thrown out on re-examination by the PTO. They've already had to discard most of their original patent claims against Google, since the patents are no longer valid. This is one of the reasons they've been in such a big rush to get the trial started--half of the patents they have left are still pending PTO review.)
However SUN released the licensing for Java no longer matters.
How* Sun released the licensing for Java never did matter, because the license only applied to the implementation, not the language. The Sun Technology Certification Kit (TCK), which was required to use the name Java, did come with field-of-use restrictions, but Apache and Google didn't use the TCK or the name for just that reason. Android is based on Apache Harmony, not code from Sun, and there are no field-of-use restrictions on Harmony.
How Oracle releases a new licensing structure is what matters; and it's clear Google has no interest in adjusting the terms to meet Oracle's new terms.
Ignoring the fact that the GPL is non-revokable, which would make your point false even if it were relevant, the GPL only applies to Oracle's code, which Apache and Google aren't using. The only thing they're really using is the names in the API, and all precedent (and a ruling from this judge) says that such names aren't copyrightable. Oracle is trying to hang their infringement claims on some vague notions of "specification and arrangement". Of a handful of names.
* not "However". Please learn English.
Yeah, it works better as a verb. Back in the late eighties, I tried to persuade them that they should change their name to The Foundation to Free Software, but it was a little late for that.
First bullet point on the front page of www.gegl.org:
"Floating point handling and processing and output of larger 8bit, 16bit integer and 32bit floating point per component buffers larger than RAM."
Hmm, I suppose I can kind of see that. Nevertheless, it seems like a silly thing to complain about in an article about how the limitation is going away.
Article: Gimp removing the 32bpp limit
Original Poster: yeah, now if only they'd fix the 32bpp limit
Sorry, nowhere near as much fun! :p ;)
(Plus, he actually had things like the high-quality professional assembler you'd need to build this. I seriously doubt that the built-in ROM assembler is up to the task.)
Yeah, it's like saying that Linux is open to anyone. Anyone can download the complete git repo, and make all the changes they want and even share them, via git, but nothing goes into the main branches without the say-so of Linus or one of his lieutenants.
It sounds like they're basically saying that now, not only is Mediawiki itself open, but so is all the site-specific configuration. But it's open in the same way--you can make your own forks for your own site, but they're not required to accept your changes into their branches for their sites.
Seems like a pretty sensible way to do things, actually.
Blue Ray players license Oracle's JVM. That's reasonable, Oracle/Sun wrote that. Google wrote their own VM from scratch that doesn't work anything like Oracle's JVM. The only thing it has in common is: a bunch of APIs and nine lines of code (added by accident and long since removed). That's it. That's the basis of Oracle's infringement claims.
APIs have long been held to be uncopyrightable. Oracle is trying to change well-established case law, and if they succeed, it's going to raise a shitstorm, not just with Java users, but throughout the industry!