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Oracle Wins Revival of Billion-Dollar Case Against Google

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Re: Oracle Wins Revival of Billion-Dollar Case Against Google

#121

Post by AceJohnny2 »

admax88q wrote: post #42
gsnedders wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

V8 has little to do with Oracle, fundamentally. V8 came about because they wanted a higher performance JS VM for their browser; the JVM was never in contention there.

Sure it does. Why did they want a higher performance JS VM for the browser? The language of choice to build interactive applications on the web before JS was really viable was Java. A high performance JS VM means we don't need to use applets anymore.

This is ignorant. The rise of Javascript had little to nothing to do with the fall of Java applets, which failed due to their own issues.

Java applets were already considered a dying tech when Google made their push to heavily-Javascript-dependent apps, and the performance requirements that led to.

Note also that despite the similar name, Javascript and Java have technically nothing to do with each other. It is a quirk of business history [1] that Netscape and Sun partnered to name Javascript as it is when Sun was first pushing Java as a web technology.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JavaScript#Beginnings_at_Netsc...

Re: Oracle Wins Revival of Billion-Dollar Case Against Google

#122

Post by janoc »

r00fus wrote: post #95
admax88q wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure it does. Why did they want a higher performance JS VM for the browser? The language of choice to build interactive applications on the web before JS was really viable was Java. A high performance JS VM means we don't need to use applets anymore.

> The language of choice to build interactive applications on the web before JS was really viable was Java. I find this amusing. No one ever built anything meaningful client-side with Java. There's a reason Microsoft laughed off Java as "write once, debug many".

Um Eclipse? Netbeans? ArgoUML? (just out of top of my head).

Your statement would be true if you have said "anything meaningful client-side on the web with Java". On the web Java was restricted to Java applets and was never really in competition with JavaScript.

Desktop is quite another story.

Re: Oracle Wins Revival of Billion-Dollar Case Against Google

#123

Post by bitwize »

jkaplowitz wrote: post #75
bitwize wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Regardless, the CAFC has ruled -- twice -- that APIs are subject to copyright. The Supremes are likely to deny cert again, so that stands as the law of the land. You steal someone's API, you pay a penalty. Don't like it? Write your Congressman.

Law of the case, not law of the land. This only stands as law of the land when the plaintiff manages to include a patent claim (even a weak one that later gets thrown out) to force the case under the Federal Circuit's jurisdiction, as happened here. They don't normally hear copyright cases. While I'm sure more such patent claims will get bundled with API copyright claims in the future where a plaintiff can credibly m…

As I understand the CAFC to work, subject matter jurisdiction only applies to determining whether CAFC can rule on a case. Once they so rule, that ruling is precedent throughout the land -- irrespective of whether the topic of their ruling fell within their subject-matter jurisdiction.

Re: Oracle Wins Revival of Billion-Dollar Case Against Google

#124

Post by lmm »

devit wrote: post #56

Is this going to the Supreme Court or is this the final decision?

It's been sent back to the lower court to determine damages. After that Google can appeal to the Supreme Court if they can find some grounds on which to do so, and then the Supreme Court will decide whether to hear it or not.

Re: Oracle Wins Revival of Billion-Dollar Case Against Google

#125

Post by jrs95 »

curt15 wrote: post #113
djsumdog wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But the thing is Google didn't use the Oracle Java engine. They implemented their own runtime environment that's mostly API compatible with Java (and getting further from that as the years go on). This gets into really critical concerns around APIs. If commercial product A sucks and I'm in a shop where we made our own drop in replacement that implement's A's APIs .. then we open source that drop-in replacement and pu…

GNU/Linux is a partial (but incomplete, since no Linux distro is unix(tm) certified) a reimplementation of proprietary Unix, and with billion-dollar companies like Red Hat and IBM it's certainly a commercial endeavor at proprietary Unix's expense. It would seem to be an attractive target if a plaintiff like SCO could somehow move the case to the federal circuit (as none of the standard appeals courts have declared AP…

Seems like it’s really just an excercise in lawfare. The underlying legal “principle” is flexible.

Re: Oracle Wins Revival of Billion-Dollar Case Against Google

#126

Post by niftich »

gsnedders wrote: post #33
stephen wrote: post #22

I wonder how the $$ Google might pay to Oracle compares to the $$ it is spending to move away from Java by building replacements (v8, Go, Dart, Flutter/Fuschia, etc.) that are all essentially "GC languages with a great runtime VM". E.g. I can understand Oracle/Sun needing some amount of money for stewarding Java, as the teams required to build/maintain/QA/release the JVM were AFAIU in the hundreds, so not cheap. But…

V8 has little to do with Oracle, fundamentally. V8 came about because they wanted a higher performance JS VM for their browser; the JVM was never in contention there.

Though it has little to do with the parent post's point, technical development of both V8 and HotSpot was led by Lars Bak.

V8 didn't come about because of the JVM, but it was done by the same guy who wrote the JVM.

Re: Oracle Wins Revival of Billion-Dollar Case Against Google

#127

Post by admax88q »

r00fus wrote: post #95
admax88q wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure it does. Why did they want a higher performance JS VM for the browser? The language of choice to build interactive applications on the web before JS was really viable was Java. A high performance JS VM means we don't need to use applets anymore.

> The language of choice to build interactive applications on the web before JS was really viable was Java. I find this amusing. No one ever built anything meaningful client-side with Java. There's a reason Microsoft laughed off Java as "write once, debug many".

Java applets were huge, and still are quite big in enterprise.

Re: Oracle Wins Revival of Billion-Dollar Case Against Google

#128

Post by throw_away »

djsumdog wrote: post #63
redm wrote: post #28

I think the part that gets lost in all of this is that Sun offered to license Java to Google previously for $100M. [1] Google turned that down and bypassed Sun because they didn't want to pay (or license). At the time, Sun was happy to see Java being used by Google, even without the license. Still, Google knew exactly what they were doing. [2] My point is, they did this to themselves and they knew what they were poss…

But the thing is Google didn't use the Oracle Java engine. They implemented their own runtime environment that's mostly API compatible with Java (and getting further from that as the years go on). This gets into really critical concerns around APIs. If commercial product A sucks and I'm in a shop where we made our own drop in replacement that implement's A's APIs .. then we open source that drop-in replacement and pu…

And yet Oracle ships an S3 compatibility API: https://docs.us-phoenix-1.oraclecloud.com/Content/Object/Tas...

Re: Oracle Wins Revival of Billion-Dollar Case Against Google

#129

Post by JepZ »

IAmEveryone wrote: post #80
JepZ wrote: post #64

OT: Thinking about API copyright I wonder how that is supposed to work in other programming languages e.g. Golang. Lets assume Google owns the copyright of the 'io.Writer' interface for the moment. Is everybody who has implemented a struct with a Writer method which satisfies the 'io.Writer' interface and as oracle stated it 'who wants to use them for a competing platform or to embed them in an electronic device' now…

Short answer: no The law doesn't work as a set of naive rules like "If API->You need a license" because human life is full of nuances that can never be fully captured in a set of rigid rules. I know that people are uncomfortable with this truth, because our systems of courts often appears to the casual observer as just a bunch of "elders" making subjective decisions. Hence "smart contracts" etc. And while the critici…

While I understand your point, your argument has very little foundation. You are basically saying: "Everything works very well and if a judge decides something you should respect that, as he has good reason to judge it his way".

One thing I have a particular problem with is that even judges from the same country seem to come to different results on the same case. I know its not unusual but that underlines my point that just because some judge came to some verdict, it isn't necessarily true.

And if 'the system as it exists in the US today is actually working quite well', why does a company like Google with a lot of smart people will have to pay a fine which probably will be as valuable as the whole Java platform? In a system that actually works well, the smart people would have seen what was going to happen and different judges would come to the same result.

And that something as 'simple' as a single method interface doesn't require any creativity is just wrong. I am sure there are a lot of famous creator quotes about that, the first I was able to find is from Steve Jobs:

  Simple can be harder than complex: You have to work hard to get your thinking clean to make it simple. But it’s worth it in the end because once you get there, you can move mountains. [1]
In the case of Golang that would translate to: It is much harder to build a universal single method interface for all kinds of write operations opposed to specific write methods for different use-cases.

[1]: https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/445279-simple-can-be-harder...

Re: Oracle Wins Revival of Billion-Dollar Case Against Google

#130

Post by simias »

pjmlp wrote: post #69
djsumdog wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But the thing is Google didn't use the Oracle Java engine. They implemented their own runtime environment that's mostly API compatible with Java (and getting further from that as the years go on). This gets into really critical concerns around APIs. If commercial product A sucks and I'm in a shop where we made our own drop in replacement that implement's A's APIs .. then we open source that drop-in replacement and pu…

All telecommunication companies, Nokia, Motorola, Alcatel-Lucent, .... have their network elements APIs copyrighted and pattented. Try to sell a device that comunicates with a e.g. BTS station without buying their licenses, to see how it ends.

In my experience the big hurdle is getting your device certified, not licensing issues. That's not really an IP issue however, it's just that uncertified devices might misbehave and create issues for other users.
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