51–60 of 189 posts
Oooooo shit. Isn't this phrase horrible? Don't get me wrong, I think suing over checkRange is ludicrous... but doesn't saying "declaring code isn't code" terrible? He comes across as he's trying to avoid the issue by playing with words. Of course declaring code is code. The clue is in the name, "declaring CODE".
Sounds like standard courtroom behavior to me
If it's Larry, then it is interesting to see this sort of laziness when so much money is at stake.
Terrible to read what a song & dance Oracle is putting on. 11,000 lines of code! gtfo
The more I read about this case the more I think Oracle is right. And the more I think most people, HN readers included, are grossly misinformed. In the last big thread I asked if anyone could provide concrete examples of terrible things that would happen if Oracle won. I didn't get a good response but the comment was buried. My question stands if anyone has a good answer. I'm very open to discussion here.
[1] Knowingly or otherwise. If a dev bases their code on a Stackover Flow answer they could be unwittingly using closed code.
The more I read about this case the more I think Oracle is right. And the more I think most people, HN readers included, are grossly misinformed. In the last big thread I asked if anyone could provide concrete examples of terrible things that would happen if Oracle won. I didn't get a good response but the comment was buried. My question stands if anyone has a good answer. I'm very open to discussion here.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think he means that the code that doesn't do anything, just describes the interface between two software components is not a code (that you should be prevented from copying) because of its one to one equivalence with the interface. Describing interface with words is exactly the same as declaring it with code. So such code is nothing more or less than verbal description of the interface (or any other description of…
Does this mean that all code written in pure functional languages is not code, since it does not "do" anything?
Constraint logic programs seem more of the grey area I think you're talking about. Is a set of constraints "code" (c.f. https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Prolog/Solving_a_Logic_Puzzle#... )?
Oracle will likely win on technical grounds regarding APIs but only because the law is unsuited to software. It's whether a judge should overrule it on principle of not patent trolling as it's against the public good. It's the fact they bought Sun with the intention of suing Google in order to profit from Android's success. If it was Sun suing it would different. After Elon Musk pledged that other car manufacturers c…
Not sure if I agree. I find that coming up with good interfaces is often more of a creative challenge than the implementation. API's are worthy of some sort of protection since ease of use is a definite competitive advantage. Also, you can easily screw your perf with bad interfaces (especially in C++). E.g., not templatizing, requiring extra allocations, type impedance mismatches, vtable bloat, etc. The interface cer…
To me, that's akin to the NSA collecting phone call metadata and then claiming that it's not really a problem because they don't actually have the contents. Except, as we know, with sufficient metadata, you don't even need contents to figure out what's going on.
The same goes with APIs. With sufficiently comprehensive APIs or sufficiently advanced programming language facilities, which are becoming more and more commonplace (more sophisticated static type checking, macros, and template metaprogramming), more and more information becomes encoded in the declarations, to the point where you really can't claim that the declaration isn't something you should be able to copyright. With the Java API under consideration I agree that the APIs probably shouldn't fall under copyright, but I'm not sure I agree with this precedent being set here more generally.
Is it Oracle's position that all implementations of the Java APIs (or partial implementations) are illegal, unless it's specifically allowed by Oracle? That sounds ludicrous. What about unit testing libraries, for example?