281–290 of 771 posts
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Maybe after the dust settles. But you can bet lots of people will reenact the SCO saga, and now they won't have to lie on every claim.
I would love to see IBM try to sue Oracle for the entirety of its history of database revenues over its use of their SQL API...
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Not at all. Please read page 14 of the amicus curiae brief in support of Google by Microsoft ( https://www.supremecourt.gov/DocketPDF/18/18-956/128381/2020... ). Here is the relevant paragraph: """ In another example from the 1990s, an open-source developer created a program called WINE, which al- lowed developers to enable Windows applications to run on computers that used the Linux open-source system, without expli…
Companies don't bother with principled consistency, and so I wouldn't expect any from Microsoft if this goes Oracle's way. It's totally possible that Microsoft thinks APIs being non-copyrightable is good for them on net, but that if SCOTUS decides otherwise that they might as well go crush WINE anyway since they now have the means.
In addition I would be a bit surprised if wine has copied 11000 lines of header files from windows, arranged identically to Microsoft Windows source code.
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This is really an important distinction. Social issues like gay marriage and things like this are completely orthogonal. The Democratic Party as a whole is very much neoliberal or liberal as opposed to left. Liberal judges are much the same.
The Democratic Party would be considered center-right in any other country of the world, but the USA.
Any other Western democracy (including some Western-model democracies outside of the West proper), sure. But then the left-right axis is not really readily transferrable to outside of that domain, anyway.
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The IBM implementation of SQL far predates the ISO standard. Does something being standardized somehow relinquish the copyright? The idea of APIs being copyrightable is new, has IBM somehow relinquished its copyright claims for SQL to ISO? This article discusses the possibility at length https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2020/03/before-it-sued-g...
I think you have to have demonstrated that you have taken steps to protect your copyright. I’d imagine submitting to a standard would relinquish that. Patents on the other hand ...
Should Oracle win this case, I predict that Free Software licenses will emerge as the clear market choice. Licenses that enshrine interoperability along with the freedom to modify or reimplement in part or wholesale will suddenly provide significantly more value over non-Free software which will be a proprietary minefield and the value will not be for technical but purely from legal liability. Anyone setting out to d…
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AWS licenses it's client library as under the Apache License. ( https://github.com/aws/aws-sdk-java/blob/master/LICENSE.txt ) Doesn't that mean anyone can build an interoperable service? I can then benefit from other cloud providers implementing the same API. I don't need access to AWS' source code, I wasn't going to deploy a private cloud anyway. All I want is robust competition.
Using a client is different than reimplementing compatible classes.
So you get a copy of the API with Apache license and are free to build your own implementation of it.
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I don’t understand why software and other IP rights aren’t de facto open-source after 10 or 20 years, if nothing else for archive and legacy purpose, but also to encourage sustained innovation. I’m not even leftist; but even in the capitalist/libertarian theory, the state shouldn’t help guard private companies’ rights in software. If you publish it, the recipient has it, period. The state lending its judges to enforc…
> I’m not even leftist; but even in the capitalist/libertarian theory, the state shouldn’t help guard private companies’ rights in software. If you publish it, the recipient has it, period. The state lending its judges to enforce exclusive rights for a few years is already a big extraction of collective resources for private interests. How is software, something of which there is an infinite supply that doesn’t exist…
Millions of people using his back yard at once would be an entirely different matter!
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The Democratic Party would be considered center-right in any other country of the world, but the USA.
The DNC would be center right in Saudi Arabia? By what metric? What is with the ridiculous hyperbole that's so common when talking about America on the internet, especially by non-Americans? Talk about "American exceptionalism" - just in a different way.
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This could be easily explained using an analogy like a pipe. If you need to connect a hose to your house, the connector (interface) needs to match the spigot size and threads. The API is simply the information about the size and thread measurement, along with the knowledge that you can get water out of it when you turn the handle. Having this knowledge and building compatible hoses or spigots doesn’t mean you have st…
That is a terrible analogy since the potential conceptual range of APIs is so wide and because it does disservice to the conceptual power of APIs. Good APIs embody the key architectural and conceptual decisions. They define the key concepts and how they interact. But at the level of a programming language, this is of immense scope and power. Java defines an imperative language with built in garbage collection with ab…