Ten years after Oracle first sued Google over the code in the Android platform, the two tech giants are finally facing off in the Supreme Court. Since then, there have been three trials and two appeals. Billions of dollars are at stake; many millions have been likely spent on a parade of seasoned litigators, expert witnesses, and bizarre trial exhibits intended to explain programming to non-technical juries. All this may be coming to an anticlimactic close on Wednesday morning, with a teleconference Supreme Court oral argument in the middle of a pandemic.
Google must win this case. Not because Google somehow deserves it, but because Oracle and its CEO are the scum of the earth dead set on destroying the very foundations of programming.
If programming APIs are allowed to become a “franchise” that gets “licensed”, then we ‘ll see lawyers forming queues in Lamborghini dealerships long enough to go around the block.
kurkosdr,
I agree, if they side with oracle (or even defer to earlier rulings in which oracle has already won), it has the potential to cause great harm to independent developers who only use APIs in order to be compatible with defacto standards. It would be the strongest legal tool yet for a dominant corporation to use to stop competitors from producing new compatible implementations. Whatever the outcome, this case will have ramifications far beyond oracle and google.
(comment further down) > API copyrights. This has far reaching consequences and has the potential to lock down the industry even more than software patents do
I wonder how (US) Congress would feel about this – after (and if) they get around to understanding what “API copyrighting” would allow companies to do? They already have their hair on fire about how Google/Apple/Facebook/etc need to be broken up. Arguably for the *sole* reason that “they are big”, not necessarily any “monopolistic reason”. Yes, they act in ways that are monopolistic – buying up companies and possibly preventing “independent evolution” of them. But I can’t see how breaking them up would fix that.
Google has created created a fracture on the Java community with their Android Java dialect, where even after moving into OpenJDK they keep cherry picking whatever they feel like instead of proper compatibility, forcing Java library authors to create Android versions of their libraries, thus turning Android Java into their own version of J++.
They screwed Sun and instead of buying it, left quietly the party and hoped that no one would care to take it home.
Except charming Oracle was there, and nasty as it is it was the only one caring for Sun.
Thankfully so, had Google bought Sun we would be stuck with Java version 6 and Maxime would never turned into GraalVM.
They should be hit very hard with the law hammer just like Microsoft was.
“They should be hit very hard with the law hammer”
While I would love to see things get better, I read what you wrote but my question is what law applies here that they broke ? Because are these covered by a law ?:
“Google has [created] a fracture on the Java community with their Android Java dialect” – was this already the case before Google bought the company that created Android ? And even if so, what law applies here ? Isn’t Java a standard ? So if you don’t adhere to a standard that’s a problem for interoperability but I know of no law that forces a company to do so. Other than normally anti-trust, but Android itself was just a little player in the Java space when it started. Sun and IBM, etc. were the big companies. Normally anti-trust doesn’t apply to smaller players in a certain space.
“had Google bought Sun” – I doubt you can force a company to buy an other.
Lennie,
I have the same thoughts. While I understand why some aren’t happy that android reimplimented java APIs into an incompatible VM/bytecode rather than use a standard java bytecode and implementation but regardless there’s no law that says they can’t take a language and invent their own bytecode for it. Furthermore I’m not even sure if the license agreement prohibited what android did. But the biggest problem to me is that the court broke with decades of precedent in order to rule for oracle on the basis of API copyrights. This has far reaching consequences and has the potential to lock down the industry even more than software patents do today.
I had a lot of respect for sun, they did a lot of great things and often pushed technology farther than others. I was sad to see their demise. The main problem for sun isn’t that anyone broke the law, it’s simply that the new android flavor of java became more popular than the original. Obviously google didn’t write android, they bought the technology from a small company and google was able to use it’s scale and popularity to make android a household name. The original java on mobile became irrelevant. However to be completely honest this may have happened with or without android. If google had gone with some “project Y” smartphone, not based on java, it probably would still have displaced java for mobile anyways and sun would still have been no better off.
What the courts did are really scary indeed. And I hope the Supreme Court doesn’t mess things up.
But really this all comes down to: Sun needed money it was dying, Oracle seems to only want to buy Sun exactly because of this Android/Java/Google story and make their money back from that.
That Oracle found some of the best lawyers to convince a court in the US isn’t such a big surprise.
It’s how courts in the US kind of seem to work.
The difference between Google and MS is that Google never licensed Java from Sun and thus wasn’t contractually bound by the license agreement to be compatible. MS hoisted themselves up by their own petard by breaking compatibility in breach of their contract with Sun. Google created a FrankenVM with their own bytecode that could eat source code written in Java syntax, but they never licensed Java proper and were not bound by compatibility agreements.
Oracle better be careful with this one. IBM was long in the Database business before Oracle became a glint in Larry’s eyes. IBM probably has a lot to say about lay-out and structure and naming of database internals in relation to interfacting with them.
People that keep repeating this argument just don’t get that SQL is an ISO standard and Oracle just like any RDMS has paid for it.
There is more to databases than just the structured query language. Also nice way to sidestep the main point. Google didn’t have a contract with Sun forcing compatibility, so they could do whatever the hell they wanted with their own Dalvik VM.
Agree with r_a_trip. If Google did not signed the Java agreement, they did not have the obligation to keep Java compatible. In my perspective, Google did not modified Java, they cloned Java without using Sun’s source code. Google’s Java is not actually Java (just like Linux is not Unix), and the fight right now is not for the Java trademark or source copyright, it is for the API description.
If Oracle wins, it will create a very dangerous precedent for the industry. If Oracle win, will it also turn Linux into illegal? According to some lawyers, yes. Ready to Sue !!!
“Except charming Oracle was there, and nasty as it is it was the only one caring for Sun.”
I consider that instead “Oracle being the only one caring for Sun.”, it was the one that provided the better compensatory deal for Sun last managers that were not able to lift the company again.
Again, this is not only Google vs Oracle. If Oracle wins this it will set a precedent that the API functions in the documentation (not the source code) is copyrightable and nobody will be able to create any kind of software clone. Many emulators developers will be sue because they read the documentation and create an original (self code) clone of third party functions.
I won’t be able to create my own IBM OS/2 Warp API clone :_(
Regards