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White House Sides with Oracle, Tells Supreme Court APIs Are Copyrightable
- username3 11y agoEvery API function name should have to be trademarked instead.
- angersock 11y agoWhat can we do? Is there a place we can (as an economic sector) throw money to make this happen? Fucking hell. EDIT: Thanks Obama! "The Justice Department is weighing in on the hot-button intellectual property dispute between Google and Oracle, telling the Supreme Court that APIs are protected by copyright. The Obama administration's position means it is siding with Oracle and a federal appeals court that said application programming interfaces are subject to copyright protections. The high court in January asked for the government's views on the closely watched case."
- schoen 11y agoThe current posture of this case is a petition for certiorari (Google asking the Supreme Court to hear its appeal). These are not merits briefs (about who should win) because the Supreme Court hasn't agreed to hear it yet. They might decline to hear it and then it would go back to a lower court for further proceedings in the underlying case, but with arguably an adverse precedent out of the Federal Circuit on the books. While I think it's now too late to file amicus briefs on the cert petition, if certiorari is granted (as Google hopes and the Solicitor General just argued against), anyone can file amicus briefs on the merits. Companies, trade associations, nonprofits, individual experts. I don't know exactly whom people should write to in the government expressing their displeasure with the Solicitor General's position. (It's supposedly a completely nonpolitical decision, so it's unusual for people to openly lobby about it or express opinions about it to elected officials.) You can certainly write to Congress saying that you want to see legislative clarification that APIs are noncopyrightable.
- Natsu 11y agoSlight correction regarding the part saying that 'anyone' may file one: "An amicus curiae brief may be filed only by an attorney admitted to practice before this Court as provided in Rule 5." https://www.law.cornell.edu/rules/supct/rule_37 https://www.law.cornell.edu/rules/supct/rule_37
- schoen 11y agoSorry, that's quite right. I should have said "through an attorney" to avoid the possible interpretation that you could personally write and file a brief. That rule is stricter than other Supreme Court rules related to filings by parties. If you're a natural person and not a corporation, you can file pro se pleadings before the Supreme Court in your own cases. Just not in other people's cases.
- Natsu 11y agoYes, that's how I interpreted it, but I thought I should point it out to avoid confusion. I also thought I remembered this being a fairly recent rules change, so there's that too.
- Splendor 11y agoThis link should probably be changed to point directly to the Ars post: http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2015/05/white-house-sides-with-oracle-tells-supreme-court-apis-are-copyrightable/ http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2015/05/white-house-sides...
- sctb 11y agoThanks, we updated the URL from http://lwn.net/Articles/646160/ http://lwn.net/Articles/646160/.
- bch 11y agos/^\([a-zA-Z_]*\)(\(.*\))$/ggl_\1(\2)/ ?? This ruling sounds horrible... very curious to hear point-of-view of people who think otherwise. Edit: my regexp joke is mangled by markup, but who cares ? Edit: fixed regexp display (not that it affects joke).
- dunstad 11y agoI don't know if I'm failing to read regexes or failing to see the humor. Can someone explain/kill the joke for me?
- gknoy 11y agoI believe it's basically a suggestion that one replaces each `foo` or `bar` API call with a prefix, e.g. `ggl_foo`, `ggl_bar`. I expect that doing so would get one slapped (literally or figuratively?) by a judge for being a wiseass.
- bch 11y agoThe API is just a signature for calling the function -- I was joking that instead of screen_draw(int x, int y); what Google could do is: ggl_screen_draw(int x, int y); and say "New API -- they've got screen_draw(), we have ggl_screen_draw()".
- dragonwriter 11y agoCopyright protects deivative works, not just literal copying, so if copying the API is a violation, so is such a direct transformation.
- andreyf 11y agoput a couple of spaces in front of it *like this*
- nastygibbon 11y agoCan someone give us an ELI5? Pros/Cons etc.
- hajile 11y agoPros: Oracle makes a bunch of money from Android. Cons: Kills innovation for fear of lawsuits. Feeds the patent trolls.
- runn1ng 11y agoThe case doesn't touch patent law in the slightest, if I understand it correctly, though. (I am not saying the DoJ opinion is good in any regards whatsoever, to be clear)
- mark-r 11y agoNo, but it adds copyright trolls to the mix. At least you can count on patents to expire eventually, copyrights are forever in software years.
- AnimalMuppet 11y agoPatents are forever in software years. Copyrights are longer than that.
- mark-r 11y agoI think of patents as being a lifetime, not forever.
- rayiner 11y agoThe key distinction is, of course, you can't infringe copyright by accident. If you build your platform on someone else's proprietary API, without their permission, then can you really complain when you get sued?
- 11y ago
- username3 11y agoNaming things is one of the hard things in Computer Science.
- angersock 11y agoThe other hard thing is collecting royalties, apparently. Fuckers.
- JoshTriplett 11y agoNot nearly hard enough, apparently.
- beat 11y agoThe other hard thing is cache invalidation, and off by one errors.
- gamesbrainiac 11y agoWhat does this mean for android?
- marcosdumay 11y agoIf the White House position is successful, it means Android as open source software is finished. It may go on as proprietary, maybe. It also means SQL, C, C++, POSIX, and more stuff that I can count are forbiden land for open source, and every company making products that include or derivate from them own a non-negotiable unknow amount to some party.
- gnud 11y agoNote: In the US. The rest of us have less crazy copyright laws, at least until we're forced to adopt yours through TTIP.
- marcosdumay 11y agoOf course, at the US, at least at first. My country is not even a party to the TTIP, but I bet once it's there, we'll import it somehow.
- rincebrain 11y agoIt's not obvious from the LWN article, but the reason it says "White House" is that lawyers from the DoJ have filed an Amicus Curiae ("Friend of the Court") brief informing them of their stance on the topic. [1] [2] [1] - http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2015/05/white-house-sides-with-oracle-tells-supreme-court-apis-are-copyrightable/ http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2015/05/white-house-sides... [2] - http://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/google-oracleverrillijr.pdf http://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/google...
- TallGuyShort 11y agoIs the term "White House" often used to refer to anything within the executive branch? I have always assumed it meant the office of the President and perhaps his cabinet...
- Spooky23 11y agoDOJ people don't just wake up and submit opinions to the Supreme Court at the approval of some random middle manager.
- dragonwriter 11y ago> DOJ people don't just wake up and submit opinions to the Supreme Court at the approval of some random middle manager. Well, no, the Solicitor General, under whose authority such things are done (and who is the person to whom the Supreme Court issues -- as it did in this case -- "invitations" [treated as commands] for input), is one of the highest-ranking officers at DoJ. And still not part of the White House.
- remarkEon 11y agoThe Solicitor General is still appointed by the WH, and confirmed by the Senate. I would think that he/she, ostensibly speaking, would probably be in direct dialogue with the WH with respect to the executive's position on legal matters, especially considering that they so often end up on the Supreme Court anyway.
- briantmaurer 11y agoProgramming is in this odd position somewhere between the structure of math and the creativity of writing. Some things feel as obvious as basic addition, which clearly should not be copyrightable, while other things feel as clever as complex poems, which clearly should be copyrightable. I am not a copyright expert, but in my opinion APIs usually fall closer to the structured math half of programming. ex. GET, POST, PUT, or DELETE to the following: /users /messages /comments /login /logout /signup /payments etc. Who gets those copyrights?
- Zikes 11y agoWell... POST /cart http://www.google.com/patents/US5715314 http://www.google.com/patents/US5715314
- dadair 11y agoI don't understand patents like this... Could a store owner in a mall patent the way that users walk into the store, buy a t-shirt, and leave? Anyone able to explain to me how the linked patent was deserved? I'm genuinely curious.
- josho 11y agoWhen I lived in Java based environments I would have agreed with you. But, having moved on and seen C#, Ruby/Rails, Objective-C, etc. Seeing how differently APIs have been implemented I have an appreciation for the creativity possible in API design. But, there seems to be a balance, is the API of a single class copyrightable? No, probably not. Is the API of a large system like Java's copyrightable, I really do think so. Having said that, I disagree with the protections an API suddenly gains once we say I have a monopoly on its use and license. E.g. This verdict likely just made every emulator an act of copyright infringement. Does intel own the API on the x86 instruction API and can lock out AMD?
- sabujp 11y agoif they did that, they would become a monopoly. It's the only reason they keep amd alive.
- antimatter 11y agoSilly question. Is there any potential for Google to move off of Java (perhaps to Go) for Android development as a result of this?
- elpool2 11y agoSeems unlikely, since the article mentions that Google has already stopped using the code in question.
- comex 11y agoGoogle stopped using a bit of code from the OpenJDK that they accidentally copied wholesale. The main claim is on the basic concept of reimplementing the Java standard library, which Google can't stop doing in a hurry.
- Splendor 11y agoProbably not, but Google has already developed a different runtime. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Android_Runtime http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Android_Runtime
- codecamper 11y agoridiculous. copywriter apis will breed a whole new class of lawsuits making it less feasible for smaller companies to compete. What about POST to /login who copyrights that one first? Of course there is the right to parody. I wonder if we'll see parodies of APIs as a way to sidestep copyright.
- JoshTriplett 11y agoOn the one hand, this would have serious implications for compatible FOSS reimplementations of proprietary APIs, such as Wine, libc, emulators, etc. On the other hand, this would make it far easier to enforce copyleft licenses like the GPL. I'm one of the people who provided text and examples filed in the EFF's amicus brief against, and on balance I'm not a fan of stricter copyright like this, but it's interesting to consider how this ruling could be used positively.
- codecamper 11y agoBut how often are laws used positively?
- wmeredith 11y agoThis is an overly cynical view. The vast majority of laws are used positively. The are the foundation of this country. When they are abused it makes headlines (sometimes). When everyone gets to work and back safely and can afford to pay the mortgage and buy a big screen, it's just business as usual.
- codecamper 11y agoI'm asking that based on what I've heard from a friend who runs a VC backed company. He said he needed VC largely because an incumbent in his category decided to sue him rather than compete. The lawsuit was rather frivolous, but when you get a bunch of people with a dim view of computer programming involved, then you need lawyers. And lawyers are EXPENSIVE. They are much much much more expensive than computer programmers. And then it becomes not so fun to run a company. It was about writing great software. Now it's about defending yourself in court. Total nightmare.
- wmeredith 11y agoThat's a pretty nightmarish scenario, and I sympathize with your friend. However, it does nothing to convince me that most laws are used for evil.
- codecamper 11y agoIf the federal government cannot figure out how to protect people's tax returns from hackers (yes the IRS was hacked by "criminals" recently), and if it spends hundreds of millions (billions?) on re-coding the IRS only to fail every time, then it certainly has no business trying to regulate APIs.
- sambeau 11y ago"declaring code and the structure, sequence, and organization of the API packages are entitled to copyright protection." Would this apply to REST APIs too? Someone needs to explain to them that that would be like being able to copyright how files are organised in a drawer, how books are organised on shelves in a Library, how a book is indexed, how departments in a company are named, how streets are numbered, how campus room numbers relate to floors and buildings, roads, flights, cashier tickets, ...
- fixermark 11y agoI suspect a subset of that has, in fact, been tried (and the rest only hasn't been tried because of obvious prior art).
- HillRat 11y ago[T]hat would be like being able to copyright ... how books are organised on shelves in a Library Probably not the best example to give, since the Dewey Decimal System is actually a copyrighted product(http://cocatalog.loc.gov/cgi-bin/Pwebrecon.cgi?v1=11&ti=1,11&Search_Arg=OCLC&Search_Code=NALL&CNT=25&PID=a1c_oV24oYjDw_2TajcNrJL1eB09&SEQ=20150527171629&SID=2 http://cocatalog.loc.gov/cgi-bin/Pwebrecon.cgi?v1=11&ti=1,11...). Similar to how the AMA has copyrighted the ICD codes. I do wonder if using identical function names, but different argument names, would be sufficient to escape infringement.
- russell_h 11y agoI'm sure that would be found to be a derivative work. The entire thing is derived from this doctrine: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Structure,_sequence_and_organization http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Structure,_sequence_and_organiz...
- abhorrence 11y agoSo speaking of how books are organized on the shelves at many libraries... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dewey_Decimal_Classification http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dewey_Decimal_Classification
- 11y ago
- Joky 11y agoI've always wondered if there is not a general conspiracy of lawyers to protect their "industry". They have all interests to keep the current patent system, as well as extending copyright protection to anything: it keeps the demand for lawyers high. Of course you have the same view of software and/or system engineer, who build broken systems just to justify billing more maintenance :)
- rhino369 11y agoJudges are pretty far removed from the actual legal industry to give a shit. But there are definitely lobbies that exist to further the legal industry. The trial lawyers lobby is HUGE in the democratic party. Probably the most influential because they have money but also direct connections. They were sorta behind killing the patent reform act from 2013 because it had "fee shifting. The more appropriate charge is that lawyers overvalue the law and litigation as a whole and it creates a bias. But the recent courts have given away a lot of power that they didn't' have to. Courts uphold arbitration terms in contracts, SCOTUS made it harder to sue in a series of civil procedure cases, they give deference to administrative agencies. I work in the patent industry, mostly on the defense side, and a lot of my coworkers really really hate patent trolls. They see first hand how shitty these trolls behave. I recognize their behavior is paying off my student loans, so I don't get so angry. I'm sort of shocked how personally they take it. But professionally they attack patent troll ferociously. Many big firms wrote amicus briefs supporting crack downs on the trolls even though they'd lose a lot of money if it actually works.
- the_watcher 11y agoMany judges are former trial lawyers. I don't think there is some vast conspiracy, but many of these laws are in the interest of trial lawyers, so many judges probably have at least some subconscious bias towards interpreting laws in their direction.
- ahallock 11y agoNo more a conspiracy than lions hunting a gazelle. It's just in their nature.
- arfar 11y ago
- stormqloud 11y agoAnother win for lawyers. Unfortunately now the USA is goign to try to push this ruling all over the world with TIPP (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transatlantic_Trade_and_Investment_Partnership http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transatlantic_Trade_and_Investm...). It's not enough that the USA destroys their own entrepreneurial spirit but everybody else as well.
- fapjacks 11y agoWorry not, friend. It will implode under its own weight soon enough. It is not sustainable.
- shit_parade2 11y agoWhy do people care what the supreme court rules? The US is no longer a country ruled by law. If anything the more ridiculous and barbaric the government becomes the better as it will only swell the ranks of those who realize the government is illegitimate.
- elif 11y agoAre you saying people should also ignore the lawsuits that come as a result? I don't think that strategy works usually.
- drkrab 11y agoIf APIs are copyrightable, then so are protocols. Hmm.
- btilly 11y agoEntirely predictable. Obama's VP was one of the strongest supporters of all things copyright in Congress during his legislative career. Obama's administration has clearly been on the side of Hollywood etc as well. Given that fact, on any issue you can depend on this administration to come down on the side of the strongest and most expansive possible interpretation of what should be covered by copyright. In this conflict, Oracle wants copyright to cover more things. Google wants it to only cover what it has historically covered. Therefore this administration will back Oracle.
- throwawaykf05 11y ago* In this conflict, Oracle wants copyright to cover more things. Google wants it to only cover what it has historically covered. * This is incorrect. By most reasonable readings of copyright law, API's have always been covered by copyright, unless deny that API design holds any modicum of creative expression. So it's more Google that's trying to reduce the scope of what's protected rather than Oracle trying to expand it.
- btilly 11y agoWe can argue what readings are reasonable until the cows come home. But most lawyers had thought this area of copyright law settled. Creative expression is copyrighted. Functional expression is not. In cases like http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sega_v._Accolade http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sega_v._Accolade, use of copyrighted material where necessary for functional interoperability has been ruled fair use. See http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1323818 http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1323818 for some of the history about how this came about.
- throwawaykf05 11y agoI am somewhat familiar with the history of these cases, and I would disagree that most lawyers thought it settled because this case is subtly but significantly different. The Sega etc. cases were about binary interoperability, which I'd agree is well-settled law. The thing that most of us programmers get confused about is, APIs are for humans to design systems that interoperate with other systems. They are not necessary for binary interoperability, at least for Java. To understand what I mean consider this: You can design an API for file handling that looks nothing like the Java API and yet compiles down to exactly the same JVM bytecode. Case in point: Jython and JRuby. It is the byte code level interfaces that cannot be copyrighted because they are purely functional. The human readable Java API on the other hand are just one form of expression of that underlying functionality.
- suprgeek 11y agoA Stunningly bad idea if this were ever to stand. A really idiotic move by the Whitehouse - increasing the scope of the Copyright law is probably the last thing people thought of with the whole "Hope & Change" thing. Something like WINE would be in a whole mess of trouble not to mention that a decision of such magnitude would enrich the Lawyers and decimate the Software industry.
- discordianfish 11y agoI think this will cause a lot people to move away from java and ultimately harm Oracle most, causing other companies to not follow their example. Let's just stay away from java, there are plenty of free languages.
- iolothebard 11y agoI'm doing everything I can to kill Oracle at my organization. I work for the State government too. One success story will breed many more is my hope.
- datashovel 11y agoI'm looking forward to seeing if there are any relevant announcements at Google IO over the next few days.
- VaidasC 11y agoI don't understand this panic in people minds. Java is free to develop with. Java APIs can be copied and used, with one condition - all APIs from JDK should be used and nothing can be removed. Google failed to comply with this.
- prahladyeri 11y agoJava is as much an Oracle product, as water is an Aquafina product or space is a NASA product. So, no, Java has gained enough ubiquity and popularity now so that no one company can monopolize it. Many open source implementations of Java already exist like Apache Harmony project, the OpenJDK or Red Hat's Iced Tea apart from Oracle's reference implementation. Coming to the point of there being plenty of languages, I don't think there are any exact substitutes. Low level languages like C/C++ are a bit overkill for application development. Python is good (I'm a big fan myself), but an interpreter is much slower than a JIT compiled language even on a quad-core. I think we should have python as an option, but that should not be the only language. The only real replacement (and even a better one) in my opinion is C#. C# is a much evolved language than Java and is also open source (Microsoft has made it so through the MCP).
- thrillgore 11y agoTraitor!
- comex 11y ago(To rehash what I said on Twitter...) I don't think this is as bad as the headlines make it sound. Here's a direct link to the brief in case you can't find it in the article (I couldn't): http://computemagazine.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/Google-v-Oracle-Solicitor-General-Brief.pdf http://computemagazine.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/Google... While the DoJ does fully agree with Oracle on the question of copyrightability, the brief goes into some length about its belief that interoperability issues would be appropriate and relevant to a fair use argument - fair use being the question that was never decided in the original trial due to a hung jury, and AFAIK would be subject to appeals regarding the legal standard anyway. For example, it states: "Interoperability and lock-in concerns like those raised by petitioner can appropriately be considered as part of fair-use analysis." Now, if you're FOSS Patents, you take the one sentence where the DoJ uncritically repeats a claim about interoperability that's been made several times in the record and never really contested, as part of its restatement of the facts, and you extrapolate it into something "damning" for Google's entire fair use argument: http://www.fosspatents.com/2015/05/us-dept-of-justice-finds-googles.html http://www.fosspatents.com/2015/05/us-dept-of-justice-finds-... The claim is: "The Android platform uses the Java programming language, but petitioner purposely designed Android not to be compatible with the Java platform or interoperable with Java programs." I'll get to that in a bit. Mr. Mueller argues that the discussion on the relevance of fair use is just window dressing and that "the U.S. government has also concluded that Google can't make a 'fair use' argument based on compatibility or interoperability because of the specifics of this case". Based, as far as I can tell, only on that sentence (and a repetition later), never mind that the brief also explicitly mentions that Google's argument about programmer fluency (i.e. even if Android isn't compatible with Java software, it avoids lock-in by letting programmers use their existing skills) is relevant to fair use... or the fact that the issue which is supposedly pivotal is only mentioned in passing... or that the appeals judgement which Google is trying to get overruled already states, and the brief quotes, that there are not yet "sufficient factual findings" regarding the questions involved in fair use - for the DoJ to actually be rejecting Google's fair use argument, it would have to be supposing that there are already sufficient findings, without actually saying so. So much for that. But let's get back to that statement, about Android not being compatible with Java programs. If you're like me, you found it absurd on its face when it first showed up in the appeals judgement, because while Android is not compatible with entire JME applications, it is compatible with many Java libraries and with non-UI code, which in reality is extremely important if you're trying to port your Java codebase to Android. I think (correct me if I'm wrong) that Google can't really start an argument over it, because Oracle made these contentions at trial and Google did not contest them then. I fail to understand how Google's lawyers allowed such a misleading claim to reach a jury when it did - maybe, as non-programmers, they didn't fully understand the issue either. But in any case, if the Supreme Court rejects Google's case and there is a new trial on fair use, Google will have a chance to start fresh with the whole line of reasoning. It will arguably be better for all of us if the Supreme Court accepts the case anyway and decides Oracle has indeed failed at the first hurdle - that Google has not copied something copyrightable in the first place - because the more uncertainty there is around clean room reimplementations in general, the more people will be discouraged from working on such projects, decreasing interoperability. Also, fair use is partially a question of fact (as opposed to law) and thus for a jury, and while I wouldn't trust judges these days to truly understand the facts and actual practices around software issues, as opposed to making analogies that act like a funhouse mirror... I trust randomly selected juries even less. But in reality, the applicability of copyrightability vs. fair use is a relatively arcane question that will be decided in part by however the statute happens to be worded, and Oracle getting to the next hurdle instead is not the end of the world. Also, even if the lack of compatibility with entire applications is (implicitly or explicitly) found critical in such an argument, projects like Wine which are more principled about compatibility and do run entire existing applications will have some wiggle room. So don't despair...
- yonran 11y agoWhat is the motivation for the Solicitor General to put out such a brief? Is he required for some reason to make statements about matters he does not understand? This brief repeatedly claims that programmer familiarity was the sole reason for copying the JDK APIs and completely rejects the fact that compatibility with existing libraries (such as Guava, apache commons) was a technical goal, on the absurd grounds that Android does not implement ALL of the JDK (e.g. java.awt, javax.swing).
- datashovel 11y agoIt seems obvious at this point that no matter where the government draws the line, the open source movement will fight through it until all software that should reasonably be freely available is freely available. For this reason I really think it's a moot point. The unfortunate aspect of this is every hour / day government employees continue to debate this is another hour / day those government employees could be doing something useful.
- datashovel 11y agoOracle ... said the appellate court's decision was a "win for the entire software industry that relies on copyright protection to fuel innovation." http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2015/01/supreme-court-asks-doj-to-weigh-in-on-google-oracle-api-copyright-flap/ http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2015/01/supreme-court-ask...
- arihant 11y agoA parallel question - who owns copyrights to community written APIs of MySQL that Oracle so conveniently sells?
- seizethecheese 11y agoThis thread is overwhelmingly against this stance by the DoJ, with a few "mixed" reactions. Whenever I see threads like this I wonder about opposing viewpoints... Does anyone think this is a good thing? If so, why?
- empthought 11y agoThe appeals court overturning Posner's decision about the general copyrightability of APIs and the amicus brief are both good things, because they are based on the correct legal rationales. Assuming your position is that copyright protection should apply to software at all, that is. The fact that the existing fair use exception language is not clearly and explicitly permitting Google's use of the API is a bad thing.
- curiously 11y agoOracle finally showing their true colors...
- w0rmwood 11y agoEternal facepalm. Expected better than this.
- fian 11y agoSo, if the Supreme Court rules that APIs are copyrightable, then wouldn't that mean that someone could use AWS with some, for example, Java code generation tools that created classes with method names comprised of randomly selected words from a dictionary - effectively performing a "million monkeys with a million typewriters" attack on the entire possible API naming space? Publish the generated code on Github. Early on, you would need to test the generated code against publicly published APIs to ensure you didn't publish code infringing on existing APIs, however, over time you could "own" the remaining API naming space.
- dragonwriter 11y agoNo, while you might get a copyright that way, copyrights aren't patents. They only protect against actual copying and derivation. Independently authored works which happen to be similar, even identical, to some subset of a corpus are not a copyright violation. You don't get ownership of the naming space, just exclusive right to copy from your own work.
- VaidasC 11y agoI don't follow this too much, so might be talking nonsense, however I don't understand where all this fuss is coming from. From the start of this I interpreted situation this way - Java's goal was "run everywhere" (wherever it succeeded or not is for everyone to decide, but its irrelevant here). Java JDK follows this goal with main license requirement - you can implement your own SDK, but you should take all APIs, not part of it - all or nothing deal. Goal being that programs from main JDK should run on your new SDK. This principle was violated by Google and I just don't see why anyone would support Google side from rational point of view (not talking about morality, innovation or whatever).