161–170 of 189 posts
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Apple were not the first smartphones. Without even nitpicking on Palm, etc, you're forgetting Blackberry.
I wouldn't call the blackberries smartphones. They were feature phones where one of the features was a proprietary email system.
> Bicks moved on to another e-mail, which he was allowed to put up on the courtroom screens. The message was a note from Andy Rubin to upper management, laying out strategic options for Android. One option was to do a deal with Sun, while a second option to go ahead and use Java without a license, but the company would "make enemies along the way." If it weren't for the dreaded consequences to the industry, I would l…
You think they should lose based on them breaking a law or you would want them to lose because you don't like them? If it's the latter I guess it's a good thing you don't like Oracle a little more. As you pointed out, this case had far ranging consequences for the software industry and any personal opinions of how much you personally like or dislike any company need to be 100% put aside.
No matter what the result of this will be, it will be sad. They are the worse that can happen to software industry.
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Exactly. And, let's be honest, the position Google took would have been supported by Sun. They would have wanted other implementations of their API. Oracle is only doing this because they can. They have the money. They have the desire (to fuck with Google). So they do it. I really don't get the anger toward Google. I don't think they did anything wrong here. If they did, it will haunt a lot of other companies than ju…
> I really don't get the anger toward Google. I don't think they did anything wrong here. If you check the internal email records, I suspect you'll find that Google thought that it was doing something wrong.... http://www.fosspatents.com/2016/05/heres-mountain-of-willful...
Here's an question that should pair up pretty well to the API copyright-ability question. Is the list of words and their order in a dictionary copyrightable?
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Which is why I am against trials with jury. Professional judges are much less likely to fall for lawyer's "bullshiting skill".
Then judges just become targets for corruption, leverage and political capture.
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Wouldn't an Oracle win be good for Free Software? Google isn't the good guy here, they wanted to create derivative work without GPL'ing it. Which they considered a "virus" and "infectious". I see companies like Google trying to have their cake and eat it too. Everyone wants to lean on someone elses work but not use GPL or license their own as such. It's only bad for the industry as it exists today. Tomorrow hopefully…
Not in my opinion. The GPL is a license that depends on accepting the license -- or not. It is always acceptable not to accept the license and write your own. That's part of software freedom. In fact this judgement puts GNU Classpath in a very tenuous position because their code is also not based on the the GPLed version of Java (having been written before Java was GPLed). Even GNU is now in jeopardy because who the…
But I did want to clarify one thing you said because I found it confusing.
> The GPL is a license that depends on accepting the license -- or not. It is always acceptable not to accept the license and write your own.
If you do use GPL code you have to also license it as GPL. Any derivative work you create containing even a smallest portion of the previously GPL licensed software must also be licensed under the GPL license. That's what Google meant when they called it infectious and viral. Unfortunately for these large corporations, it was also the solution (other than doing the heavy lifting in-house as Apple did).
When you don't accept GPL'd code, you write your own code and license (or adopt another).
I'm going to go out on a limb here. While I'm definitely not on Oracle's side for this case, I'm not so sure I agree with the statement that declaring code is not code in general. 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 figur…
The NSA are collecting private metadata, that's the problem there. The Java APIs are public information (everyone who creates Java programs needs a copy of them and needs to know what they do).
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".
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.
It's really not about whether bad things would happen or not. It's about what is the correct decision. I define an interface for a box. It has methods push() and pull(). I implement a wooden box that conforms to this interface. Many happy users push and pull my box via the interface all day. Someone comes along and implements a metal box that conforms to my interface, so that users can push and pull a metal box. I su…
Sure. That's plausibly reasonable. The API definition is significantly more detailed that just the method names. The metal box maker could easily have created their own API. But instead they use an API created by someone else.
* Compiling against headers is an important issue. That would be bad. I raised this question in the last thread but it didn't seem to be an issue.
* A closed S3 API seems fine to me. Amazon doesn't have an obligation to make switching easy. At the same time they'd have incentives to make their API open to encourage people to start using S3. Permissive open source software is exceptionally popular these days. If Amazon wants to write a closed API that presents an opportunity for someone else to write an open API.
* I think we'd be in a much better place if software could NOT be patented but APIs were copyrighted. Implementation code is already under copyright.
* I don't think "got there first" is a real concern. TCP and UDP both define connect(), send(), and receive(). But they are radically different APIs with radically different specifications.
Thank you for your thoughtful reply. This is a good discussion.
One basic travesty not covered in these comments is that a jury of people who have zero clue what software is or how they work are being asked to judge an entire industry on a topic they can't possibly understand. Sadly in civil cases the concept of a jury of your peers is not a right. In reality a jury of software engineers and the like would make more sense since they at least understand how software is put togethe…
Yes, I completely agree with the above. Litigation is handled poorly, taxation handled poorly (federal and state), identity handled poorly (Social Security Admin), legislation, elections, law enforcement, and these are just the things I can think of... At every step of the way, something or someone outside of your business can topple your personal life and your company's life just for trying to do business in the USA…