This is ridiculous. Google won two jury trials and the CAFC has no business deciding copyright cases.
>> Google won two jury trials and the CAFC has no business deciding copyright cases. I think that's their only business, by design. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Court_of_Appeals...
The CAFC is the appeals court for patents, which are not the same as copyrights. The local circuits handle copyright cases, except when there are also patent-related claims in the case.
So if you are a plaintiff in a copyright lawsuit and you want your appeals to get the pro-IP biased treatment from the CAFC instead of going to the local circuit, make sure to find a way to include a patent claim in your suit.
The problem for ORACLE is that if they win, they will have a Pyrrhic victory. The old adage of "Be careful what you wish for, you may actually get it" applies here.
Greed has consequences and greed will be the undoing.
It is sad. When I was young, about 16-19, I had a friend who worked for Sun Microsystems and he was an amazing mentor, and maybe twice a year I got to meet some of his colleagues too. They embodied 'the hacker' spirit that I believe hacker news represents - long grey hair, very open minded, very friendly, and loved being passionate about tech discussions while keeping an open mind and a willingness to be wrong. These…
I don’t mean to be overly negative, but I hope you recognize the irony in describing your image of a hacker as someone with long, grey hair, and proceeding to say that superficial traits like appearance don’t matter, only ideas.
I did notice that after submitting it, and made a mental note in correcting it in the future. It was more for comic effect / appeal to stereotype - but that failure is mine. I'm always learning :)
Whaaa? I mean Java is undoubtedly more popular because of Android but it's not like it was hurting before. Sure, there aren't a lot of consumer-facing applications running Java but it's pretty much the standard on the enterprise side of things.
Java on mobile was (virtually) dead before Android. Now it's thriving and relevant again.
It was thriving in Europe, on flaghship Nokia and Sony-Ericson devices.
SavaJe OS was going to be the next generation when Android came into the scene.
Android first architecture diagrams look quite similar to the initial SavaJe OS presentations.
Devil’s advocate here... the method signatures, the layout of the classes, what inherits from what, what bits are private vs public, are all pretty non-trivial. Moreover it’s where a lot of the subjective decision making happens, whereas the actual implementations are straightforward once you know what the method signatures should be. I don’t necessarily agree with the decision but I can see where they’re coming from…
Triviality isn't the determining factor of what's copyrightable. Edit: And particularly there's tons of case law that this stuff isn't copyrightable, see Sony v. Bleem, where a company literally wrote an emulator of a PS1, and courts said that was fine. Even to straight up sell as a competing product, and for running on competitors machines. Edit2: And the otherwise shitty DMCA even has explicit exemptions for softwa…
No? It runs on the JVM and Kotlin/JVM links the Java standard library as part of its class path and compiler emits JVM bytecode, but that's not the issue here. I feel like people do not understand what this lawsuit is about. There's also a lot of technical people here reading the decision and making tech-minded assumptions about the business strategy. A far simpler solution than reconstructing the entire ecosystem would be to just switch off Dalvik VM and use the JVM.
The problem has nothing to do with using the Java API. It has everything to do with copying the OracleJDK API and implementation then building a secondary non-compliant JVM to run it. The OracleJDK (which is different from the OpenJDK) is not licensed in a way that allows copying.
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…
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, Google copied the header structure for more than six-thousand methods.
So, for those like me who don't quite understand all the legalese: I've been operating under the belief that APIs and protocol "structures" were ruled as "non-copyright-able" before, while "implementations" absolutely were copyright-able. Was I wrong then, or am I wrong now?
Java on mobile was (virtually) dead before Android. Now it's thriving and relevant again. Perhaps, but is that a good thing if you're Oracle? Especially considering the fact that it's Google Java that's thriving and not Oracle Java.
It seems to me that it's a good thing for Oracle. Oracle/Sun was never going to make any headway in the mobile space. It just wasn't going to happen. So, it wasn't a loss to them, because they had already lost that market. But, with Android, Java got a boost that bled over to the server, and to a lesser extent, the desktop. It can be argued what the size of that boost was, and if it had any real impact (I would argue…
Java was already king of the enterprise server long before Android happened.
Around 2006, many companies were moving their server stacks from C++, considered old and stagnated, into Java application servers.