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> plenty Actually, just one, the desktop. In virtually every other market, Linux is either dominating or has a firm share.
MS dominates the server side in corporations too.
So maybe MS dominates the withering on prem data center world. But that’s smaller than cloud nowadays.
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> plenty Actually, just one, the desktop. In virtually every other market, Linux is either dominating or has a firm share.
Phones, billions of devices running various embedded real-time os, gaming like Xbox and playstation, watches, smart TVs, medical devices, space systems, and many other places are not Linux dominated, and many of these have almost zero Linux presence.
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This is a complete dramatization. Are you copying 10k lines of code from a licensed code base into your project without permission and using it in your commercial product? Github projects already should strive to use correct licensing, and comply with the license of code they use. There is nothing new here.
You don't understand what this case is about. This is about copyrighting API descriptions. Not copying code, but reimplementing an API that someone else created. Think about how many people created each part of the various web APIs. Is XmlHTTPRequest now owned by Microsoft? Who invented the Blink tag? Who owns which parts of the SQL language? The entire software industry is built on the idea that APIs are not copyrig…
Wonder what happens if I call it "_write()"
I think it is quite likely that we as a society would be better off without any kind of copyright or IP. This might prevent some of the parties doing huge upfront investments in some of the projects, but if we learned something from OSS and, most importantly, Linux is that gradual and tiny improvements over 30 years can compound to a behemoth that eats any commercial solution for lunch.
I am not sure I agree with this statement in the absolute. I think about art, and artists as a musician myself. One advantage of copyright is that it does, indeed, give artists recourse when people use their works without compensation. The photographer whose picture was copied and pasted onto an advertisement. The musician trying to sell their first album. You could argue that litigation is too costly for an individu…
I don’t know, you see, sometimes I have some doubts about my uncertainty. But should I trust my memory about what might have happened in my head in the past?
>I think about art, and artists as a musician myself. One advantage of copyright is that it does, indeed, give artists recourse when people use their works without compensation.
Practices of art and culture, including music, long predate any copyright law. Or even money, most likely (an archeologist will tell you that with more confidence about the veracity of such a claim).
According monopoly of exploitation rarely turn into proliferation of diversity, most of the time it will fall into feedback loop where a few entities will "take it all" and widely spread the "best fit for all".
>The photographer whose picture was copied and pasted onto an advertisement.
There are different topic here. In the French droit d’auteur, you have a separation of "moral rights" – including who is granted to publish your work in which context – and "patrimonial rights" – how monetization of the work is managed.
> Those in Oracle's camp say if its copyright is not protected, that will discourage innovation. Look at the way YouTube Content ID encourages innovation and then imagine GitHub Content ID. “Your repository contains 3 copyrighted method calls. You’ve been issued a copyright strike.” I’d love to see every open source repo on the internet go private for 1 day as a demonstration of what could be lost if copyright is all…
No it wouldn't. Lawyers and executives don't care about your error-prone CI/CD pipeline.
If this (somehow) succeeds, could IBM sue Oracle over SQL compatibility?
There are specific exceptions for compatibility. Android Java never tried to be compatible, various required APIs were replaced or are just flat out missing from the runtime library.
"the amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole."
Trying to achieve full compatibility would seem to require copying more of the original API, not less.
> Those in Oracle's camp say if its copyright is not protected, that will discourage innovation. Look at the way YouTube Content ID encourages innovation and then imagine GitHub Content ID. “Your repository contains 3 copyrighted method calls. You’ve been issued a copyright strike.” I’d love to see every open source repo on the internet go private for 1 day as a demonstration of what could be lost if copyright is all…
I think it is quite likely that we as a society would be better off without any kind of copyright or IP. This might prevent some of the parties doing huge upfront investments in some of the projects, but if we learned something from OSS and, most importantly, Linux is that gradual and tiny improvements over 30 years can compound to a behemoth that eats any commercial solution for lunch.
It’s not at all clear how you are comparing Linux to its closed competitors, but frankly, if that’s the best example you can pick, I’d suggest copyright is largely winning that battle. Yes, Linux has probably “won” in some markets (servers/IoT being the obvious ones), but there are plenty of markets where that is not even close to being true.
To point back to the substance of the thread and Oracle's claims...
Google didn't copy any of Oracle/Sun's Java source code base into Android Java. Oracle lawyers acknowledge this.
Instead, Google copied the API of function name spellings and also the hierarchy of organization (tree of namespaces) of those API methods. I asked about this in a previous comment and some folks more familiar with the case replied with citations of court opinions: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7852100
So to give a flippant summary of the current situation: you _can_ copy some exact spellings of API function names (e.g. other browsers Chrome/Firefox/Safari can copy Microsoft IE XMLHttpRequest() exactly without renaming it to RetrieveHttpXtensibleMarkupLang()) -- as long as you don't copy too much of the API surface area. The threshold of "too much" and getting in legal trouble is yet to be determined by The US Supreme Court.
If Oracle ultimately wins, it seems like millions of programmers will have to reach for a thesaurus to find synonyms to name functions. We'll have to waste brain cycles coming up and alternative spellings of methods to stay away from copyright infringement.
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Would Linux have succeeded to the extent it has without copyright? Its licensing model depends heavily on copyright law.
I guess the argument is that "copyleft" is not needed without "copyright". In particular, look at the four freedoms: 0) free to run the program as you wish, for any purpose 1) The freedom to study how the program works, and change it so it does your computing as you wish. 2) The freedom to redistribute copies so you can help others. 3) The freedom to distribute copies of your modified versions to others. The only thi…