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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

#331

Post by carussell »

pjmlp wrote: post #251
monocasa wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> better That's it. The VMs on the market at the time we're absolutely terrible for phones. John Carmack was commenting on how JavaME gave you worse performance than an original IBM PC, and HotSpot's strategies absolutely destroy battery life.

Except that wasn't the only approach available. There are OEMs selling commercial JDKs for embedded use, with their own VM, JIT and AOT compiler variations, and library extensions. Contrary to Google, they always played by the rules.

The whole subthread focusing on the Android VM is completely irrelevant. The entire argument at this point has to do with the inclusion of the Java APIs. Not even Oracle or the appeals court are harping on Google's custom VM.

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

#332

Post by fapjacks »

AgentME wrote: post #292
monocasa wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The court has made the point now that literally just the class and method names are subject to copyright.

Isn't Java open source? (Does this not include the APIs that are part of it?)

When it comes to Oracle, it doesn't matter. There's a reason MySQL was forked into MariaDB basically the second Oracle bought it.

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

#333

Post by hcknwscommenter »

gefh wrote: post #305
hcknwscommenter wrote: post #268

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reimplementation does not necessarily violate copyright. Copying does violate copyright (absent fair use). Like verbatim copying. Example, Google didn't have to use the “java.lang.Math.max(a,b)” header, but they did. They did copy because they wanted to leverage the existing Java developer base who would easily be able to develop for Android, without having to do the hard work of building their own ecosystem. Overall…

How many ways are there to define max? Surely AT&T should turn around and sue Oracle for lifting max(a, b) from stdlib. Or maybe SCO will rise from the grave and try it again.

An infinite number of ways. Call it max(b,a) [i.e., reverse the order of b and a inputs]. But Google didn't do any of that. They copied.

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

#334

Post by izacus »

jgh wrote: post #317
jandrese wrote: post #271

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If API are copyrightable how do clean room implementations work? It seems IBM could sue the clone makers for the BIOS API if that's the case.

Does that mean all the cloud providers who are copying S3's API for object storage are violating some copyright?

I'm sure Amazon would love that to be true and force any competitor to beg for licensing.

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

#335

Post by shagie »

AceJohnny2 wrote: post #121
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.

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 qui…

The original use of JavaScript was to pass DOM information to the applet and back. https://docs.oracle.com/javase/tutorial/deployment/applet/in... and https://docs.oracle.com/javase/tutorial/deployment/applet/in... are the docs for this largely forgotten functionality.

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

#336

Post by protomyth »

hcknwscommenter wrote: post #324
protomyth wrote: post #307

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If the BIOS API was copyrightable, they would have had to do nothing and simply declare that they owned the copyright to the API and thus no clones. Since they couldn't do that, they had to go to the extra step.

That is simply incorrect. Copyright covers copying. It does not cover independent re-implementation. That is the point of clean-room re-implementation. It is not copying because--> clean room. Silly Example: you design a phone book containing all the names and phone numbers of everyone in the city. To the extent that any subjective decisions were made in the design, it is a copyrighted work. I design a phone book. If…

No, you are not getting the point of the whole "copyright the API" thing this discussion is talking about. If I can copyright the API then it doesn't matter if you clean room or not since the API is copyright and I can sue the heck out of you no matter how you did your work. That is my point that you are missing. IBM didn't believe they could copyright the API so they took some additional measures. If they thought the API was copyrightable then Compaq would have gotten sued out of existence. This is what makes Oracle's assertion so scary for the computer industry.

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

#338

Post by geodel »

pjmlp wrote: post #155
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…

Most third party commercial Java vendors, selling JDKs for embedded development also have their own VMs and AOT compilers, with variations better suited for their hardware. Aicas, PTG, IBM, MicroEJ, .... Big difference with Google? They play by the rules.

> They play by the rules.

Or they will be sued out of existence. Google? probably not. IBM tried Harmony play along with Apache but backed away after legal threats.

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

#339

Post by hcknwscommenter »

protomyth wrote: post #307
hcknwscommenter wrote: post #245

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>IBM was so sure that the BIOS API could not be copyrighted they basically made their source public That is not how copyright works. You almost got it right with your comment "anyone reading the manuals to understand the BIOS was tainted and couldn't write a competitor." Copyright protects against copying . It does not protect against independent development. Hence the clean room set up.

If the BIOS API was copyrightable, they would have had to do nothing and simply declare that they owned the copyright to the API and thus no clones. Since they couldn't do that, they had to go to the extra step.

Replying to your comment below. I am not missing your point. I am merely pointing out that your point is incorrect as a matter of law. Copyright does not cover re-implementation. Copyright only covers copying. Your statement that IBM could sue company using a clean-room developed re-implementation of IMB's BIOS if IBM owned a copyright to their BIOS is incorrect as a matter of law.
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