631–640 of 643 posts
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Hell, Oracle got started by cloning the SQL API.
Which they payed for, unlike Google has done with Java. SQL standard and the respective certifications have to be payed for.
Before that, Oracle ripped off Chamberlin and Boyce's work. Which they should be able to do, because APIs shouldn't be copyright-able.
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Beware interpreting copyright law with the assumption that interoperability is relevant. The law doesn't care.
copyright has a fair use clause, which states that one can decompile software to produce a derivative for the purposes of interoperability. This then must assume that any apis being implemented has to both fall under copyright (otherwise, this law does not apply to api), but also means that the law allows for the use of the api for the purposes of interoperability (and therefore, you cannot claim to have the sole rig…
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I was a huge C64/Amiga fan, but I honestly don't think it would have been Atari or Amiga, both companies were horribly managed. And the Mac was just horrifically overpriced for what you got. At the same time Apple was shipping a $2k non-multitasking, B&W, 128k computer with shitty graphics and sound, Commodore was shipping the Amiga 1000, with twice the memory, and a custom chipset that was not equaled until years la…
Who knows, with the PC out of the way, even with their management mistakes, they might have survived. And even if not, surely there would be another brand to gladly take their place.
Commodore was vertically integrated like Apple of today, they had a stellar custom chip development team, and had revolutionary chips in the worlds (AAA and Hombre) that would have been like 3dfx, but in 1992, delivering a quantum leap in gfx and single-texturing 3d pipeline well before others.
I'm really bummed the company flushed it down the toilet and "Xerox PARC"'ed itself, by having a winning team of researchers and engineers, but not being able to make a business.
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Which they payed for, unlike Google has done with Java. SQL standard and the respective certifications have to be payed for.
The ANSI/ISO standards came out nearly a decade after Oracle's DB was released. Before that, Oracle ripped off Chamberlin and Boyce's work. Which they should be able to do, because APIs shouldn't be copyright-able.
At least Oracle payed something back, unlike Google, ripped off Sun and then stepped on it on their dying breath.
If it wasn't for Oracle we would be stuck porting Java 6 to other languages.
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People keep bringing SQL up, yet don't realize that SQL is an international standard which one needs to pay ISO for, and also to pay for certifications. Oracle has payed for SQL. Google has not payed for Java.
The first SQL ISO standard is from 1987. Oracle's first commercial SQL DBMS came out eight years earlier in 1979. In 1987, Oracle was already the largest database vendor and IBM's database business never recovered from that setback. That said, I don't know if Oracle had some sort of licensing agreement with IBM during those early years. The question is what any such agreement would have looked like in light of the re…
IBM is doing pretty fine with DB 2 and Informix.
Appellate courts do not lightly overturn jury verdicts using highly fact-specific reviews of evidence. There is a reason they call a jury a "trier of fact". There is a reason for this: if it were the rule that an appellate court could easily step in and second-guess how a jury weighs evidence, there would be little room for finality with jury verdicts because lawyers are very skilled (and become very tiresome) endles…
Just to get this straight, because I think I roughly know the legal system works in the US, from TV and movies, but then when I apply it to a real world case such as this, it seems too ridiculous for words: by "jury" you're actually referring to a group of about 10-12 randomly selected laymen with no background in law whatsoever, and even specifically selected to also have no background in the subject matter (because knowledge equals prejudice /s), and they get to decide on the outcome of a billion dollar case?
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RE> Nature of the Copyrighted Work: Dealt with previously In my entire career you could not copyright an API. There is good reason for this. If you wanted to do business with certain entities, the implementation had to be multisource. The new implementation had to come from a cleanroom, but in this case it came from open source (which seems equivalent). Therefore you have one judge making one decision that is an anom…
There's a lot of similar responses regarding the API copyright issue. APIs have been 'subject to copyright' for 4 years, since the 2014 decision in this case. Lets see some key details: This is the 2012 ruling: http://www.groklaw.net/pdf3/OraGoogle-1202.pdf Alsup indicates that SSO isn't dead law, but finds that APIs aren't copyrightable because they are 'the only one way to write" things to get the key functionality…
Which part of "let's find a small group of the least qualified people to decide on billion dollar cases" ever seemed like a good idea to anyone?
Then there's the judge, who has a background in law but NOT in programming.
Then there's the lawyers, who have a background in both (assuming the expensive lawyers G and O can afford), as well as years and years of practice influencing the decisions of small groups of laymen.
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The ANSI/ISO standards came out nearly a decade after Oracle's DB was released. Before that, Oracle ripped off Chamberlin and Boyce's work. Which they should be able to do, because APIs shouldn't be copyright-able.
And how do you think standards get written, out of thin air? At least Oracle payed something back, unlike Google, ripped off Sun and then stepped on it on their dying breath. If it wasn't for Oracle we would be stuck porting Java 6 to other languages.
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Strictly speaking, Java isn't used in Android. There is no JVM in Android, and there never was. It doesn't run Java bytecode. Java ends where dex translates Java bytecode. In recent version of Android, there's another layer where Dalvik bytecode is compiled to the target architecture. So don't think of Java being in Android. The Android toolchain uses Java, but the Android runtime is not a Java runtime. For one thing…
It also erodes Google’s claims of fair use. Leveraging the Java language and APIs benefited Google much more than it benefited the Java ecosystem at large. Almost anything that targets Java can now be used on Android, but the reverse is not true. The sharing largely flows one way. Google had little interest in expanding the reach of the Java platform—they wanted to attract Java developers to their “looks like Java, b…
The same could have been said of Visual J++ but Sun killed that opportunity before it could really flourish.