During hours of unrelenting cross-examination today, Andy Rubin, Google’s former Android chief, was on the stand in the Oracle v. Google trial defending how he built the mobile OS.
Rubin’s testimony began yesterday. He’s another one of the star witnesses in this second courtroom showdown between the two software giants in which Oracle has said it will seek up to $9 billion in damages for Google’s use of certain Java APIs in the Android operating system. Since an appeals court decided that APIs can be copyrighted, Google’s only remaining defense in this case is that its use of those APIs constitutes “fair use.”
The “API’s are copyrightable”-ruling is one of those rulings we will look back on decades from now and point to as “that’s where it all went wrong”, much like how we now look back upon disastrous rulings like Citizens United or the slew of bad rulings that legitimised software patents.
And we have the despicable Oracle to thank for that. As I’ve pointed out before, it’s no coincidence that the three-pronged legal attack on Android – from Apple, Microsoft, and Oracle – all started at around the same time, and that Larry Ellison was a very close friend of Steve Jobs.
When all this stuff hits the fan even harder, you know who to thank.
Quote: “[…] the three-pronged legal attack on Android – from Apple, Microsoft, and Google -”
Did you mean to say Apple, Microsoft, and Oracle?
Won’t have to wait decades… I thought “this is were it all goes wrong” about 10 seconds after I read about it.
This is one of the most ill-considered interpretations of law in American history. I hope that when the tidal wave of stupid nonsensical lawsuits this ruling will incite hit the courts the appellate court judges responsible for this ruling have to hear every damned one of them.
Hopefully it won’t take decades to undo it and the damage it will cause.
ps. I also find it ironic that, although this is not the only such case, this is one of those “interesting” areas of law where the US courts and the EU courts have basically ruled in completely opposite directions. What is expressly legal in the EU is now illegal in the US, and visa versa. Fun times ahead…
Edited 2016-05-13 01:05 UTC
…even Microsoft could predate without Copyright, but Oracle?
This is going to be a ugly fight
…sometimes are too big, as trying to steer the Titanic.
This issue is probably going to go on damage control mode.
Maybe not. It might still be ruled that using them is fair use.
Doesn’t matter if it is. Trolls will come out of the woodwork filing suits knowing that small companies can’t afford to prove fair use in court, and that many courts won’t understand or care in any case.
There will be a mad scramble to own ever API out over the next decade, and it’ll take another couple decades for the fallout to settle. In the meantime, US development will shift to other countries where the crazy is less prevalent.
Edited 2016-05-13 03:25 UTC
This. All of this…
JLF65,
I agree, the software industry has never wanted or needed API copyrights. The initial court got it right, there was just no good reason to extend the scope of copyright to included programming interfaces. The appellate court screwed up badly, I can only imagine how this precedent is going to be the catalyst for even more frivolous lawsuits against projects that use APIs for the sake of compatibility.
Edited 2016-05-13 04:16 UTC
The difficulty is that every use of an API comes under fair use, because interoperability…..is the only reason why you would reuse them.
Oracle knew what they were doing when the Supreme Court had that little caveat in. Unfortunately it means that software companies will simply be spending large amounts of money needlessly proving fair use in court – if they can afford it.
This spells trouble, we’ve been through this two or three decades ago with things like DR DOS, and the US will quickly become a backwater where software development and developer tools are concerned. This will completely wipe out much of the developer tools market and ensure restriction of competition.
Boycott all companies using the Oracle database…
Let’s face it, we’re just not really really comitted to standing up for what is right.
Boycott anybody using Oracle DB or Oracle Java or Sun hardware… big list, but then, maybe, just maybe Oracle will take notice.
How would you know what DB is being used by a company?
It is not exactly something that gets advertised or included in the financial reports.
Many companies may well have different DB’s for different parts of the business.
My current project is moving a DB off of Oracle but that Oracle license will be used by another project within the company. This will be very back office. The DB I’m involved with will control 90% of the business.
What to do then?
Do you boycott this company? Come on now, we deserve to know.
Oracle is the Titanic here. Too Big to fail. We can’t simply Boycott their products; besides, they have very good engineering. It’s the system…
This is what we get with a government which refuses to learn about technology and refuses to say no when given a big chunk of money. As I said in a post yesterday Thom, these are the people you’d rather have upsetting our infrastructure market? Really? It’s so radically different here that I don’t think you can really comprehend it. Come live here for a while and you might get it. This is typical, and typically stupid, as always.
And by the way, nice job bringing up your anti Apple bias again. I get it. You hate the company. We all get it. You take every possible chance to push it. For that matter, as a company, I don’t much care for them either even though I like the products for the most part. But can we please stick to relevant facts? By all means let your bias run free when you report about Apple or anything to do with them. Pushing it into an unrelated story for the hell of it just looks dumb.
By ignoring them?
That makes no sense.
darknexus,
Give Thom some slack. Just because you disagree doesn’t mean he doesn’t get it or that your view outweighs his. I live here and I agree with Thom.
I also think it’s unfair to characterize “the government” as one entity across these two contexts. The federal government responsible for this API crap is completely unrelated to the local municipalities that decide to offer public broadband. Municipal leaders have vested interests in your town because that’s where they live too. You can personally attend the town hall meetings if you like to be a part of the process. They go with their friends and families to the same schools, the same festivals, the same restaurants. They share the same problems, such as bad internet service. “These are [NOT] the people” who are responsible for the terrible laws that the US is becoming notorious for.
Edited 2016-05-13 13:47 UTC
Separate parts of the government, yes. Separate in their general mentality? No.
why be so unreasonable when some of your posts make a lot of sense. Don’t get it.
Thom’s very obviously *slightly* anti-big corporation, (and government) when they’re collectively throwing their weight around, being anti-competitive or anti-privacy etc.
But though I don’t always agree – he clearly doesn’t show any strong Apple, Google, MS bias – if anything a mild dislike when they’re being dicks, pardon my french; and mild praise when any of them do something cool. Which occasionally they all do. Though on the SW front – it’s been a bloody long while Apple! 😉
Even more off topic – Apple IIfx was my favourite -G4 with altivec were an upward blip on a downward trajectory of boringness….. And similar upward trajectory of uber-corporateness. Snow Leopard was prob peak of OS X before they really started shafting the OS Darwin contributors. I recently got a 27″ imac 5k btw… almost purely for the screen. I’m not a hater, just not a lover anymore. Prefer bananas and raspberry’s these days
much more fun. Wish SD cards weren’t so easily corrupted though.
This story had nothing to do with Apple. That’s why. I don’t think it unreasonable to bash Apple, if they play a part in the story. The bias is so strong in this case that it was injected into a story that had nothing, whatsoever, to do with Apple at all in the form of a vague conspiracy theory against Google. You may think it unreasonable that I call something ridiculous when I think it is. Myself, I see it differently.
The Oracle lawsuit is one of the three pillars of probably the largest coordinated legal assault in the history of technology – the other two pillars being Apple’s and Microsoft’s lawsuits, with Apple’s Steve Jobs being, by all accounts and very clearly, the driving force behind the entire attack.
So no, you are wrong. Apple is *at the very centre* of this story, whether people like it or not.
I don’t think that Apple is anywhere near the centre of this story.
Maybe the idea of attacking Google was suggested by Jobs to Ellison.
Right now, today, it is about Oracle trying to get (steal ?) money from Google.
Oracle is not Apple’s puppet like SCO was Microsoft’s puppet when they attacked Linux.
On SUN sell pricing was included all the futures… Collision is not accidental. Been in the cross hairs since buy out.
One of the biggest mistakes selfish Google took was allowing SUN to sink, beer at the hand.
No, neither Apple is the rooting apple of all the baskets.
…the ‘rotting apple’…
“that’s where it all went wrong”, or maybe, this is the point where software development became so utterly impossible in USA, that companies just started leaving it alone and the rest of the world got all for it.
You know, USA is a very important market, with billions of dollars in pockets, but there is a point, a top of a curve, when companies will just think it is not worth the trouble, and if things like copyright-able APIs keep coming, it will happen.
BTW, I always tough american law system based upon jurisprudence was good, but if a single court can change decades of understandings in just a single pen line, the way system works must be remade.
Their system of law (except Louisiana) is effectively based on British common law and it’s principles. The idea being that it is a living entity that is changed based on precedent. The last legal ruling is now the law. This is part of the reason there are so many appeals and counter appeals. The alternative is the legislature must enact every ruling into an actual law. This can be quite slow and cumbersome especially when reacting to a new fast moving target (net neutrality for example).
At some point America will lose its top spot (all empires fall), but I don’t think this will be the catalyst. As Google have already shown, there are alternatives to the Java API and there will be alternatives to the next API dispute too (or a new standard which everyone will fork
)
Well, they could demand all the cars builders of the world. Need to change the way their cars are driven. Or pay Rights for the User Interface
Interface surfaces are the substantive parts of ALL protocols. Not patentable, the less copyright-able. If the protocol is open, also the interface surfaces.
What is monetize-able here is voice and vote. If Google need them [and everybody need them because of differing agendas] then should contribute to the Guardian of the ‘Code’ [including here failed, past contributions -a new Actor should pay for all of the missed development effort-]. But those failed contributions shouldn’t amount to penalties, or worse, market ostracism.
This week my team completed moving a largeish database (1TB data, > 1 billion rows) away from Oracle to Postgresql, saving the company €100k per year in license and server cost. It felt good, but now it feels even better. FU Oracle.
Please make a Success Story of it – with names – so we will all use it to move businesses away from Oracle!
Most people will find they can do exactly that, and Oracle’s licensing is now beyond crazy – even more so than it has been in the past.
How has Oracle escaped the long arm of the anti-trust laws? This is a classic example of abuse of monopoly (on the Java API) to the detriment of all but Oracle.
Perhaps the EU should reset their sights on Oracle?
Because they paid the right people. Simple. I’d bet the government runs on Oracle, for that matter.
My fancy portable api
int main(int argc, char** argv);
int main();
I have no financial interest in who wins or loses this court case. My life could change down the line based on this as I wonder about the following:
I have a question. How many of you have a job? How many of you expect to be paid for doing said job or how many of you do it for free without any expectation of getting any compensation for doing said job.
The question is whether Sun’s CEO was so stupid as to:
1) Not make products that people found compelling enough to buy
2) Not make products that people found compelling enough to buy
3) Running his buisiness into the ground for not getting properly compensated for 1) or 2).
You can’t succeed in running a business if you have a business model that doesn’t include making enough money to cover your cost of doing business and making enough money for investors, who helped you start and/or build your business.
My guess is that most of you have, LIKE ME, never owned and run a business.
My guess is that when you do work you expect to be compensated for doing the work and not instead doing it for free. You expect to make enough money to have a place to live, maybe even buy a place to live (mortgage and house), buy food, buy whatever.
If I built a platform and created APIs to use that platform I would expect to be paid for letting you use these. If the ex Sun CEO gave away too much is not a question. He was running Sun into the grave and Oracle bought them up when Google could/should have if they wanted to use Java APIs, which they CLEARLY did.
I don’t care about either company. I just know that if I owned Oracle as the person that I am and not pretending to be Larry Ellison, I would expect to make money off companies that use Java and Java’s APIs.
The fact that most/all of you don’t tells me that if I ever hire you that I should be able to expect that you work for me for free and that I keep all the patents and everything to myself.
Should patents last forever? No. Twenty years sounds very reasonable to me. But anything newer than that the company that made or is making them should get paid by the company using them.
And let me guess, you don’t really know what an API is, else you’d not be blathering about implementations instead.
20 years is 1/3 of my entire work life. Seems pretty damn long to me. Unreasonably long. Not that this API debate has anything to do with patents.
Sabon,
Meh, you are just posturing
In all seriousness, you’ll have to pay for things of value and the value of labor comes down to supply and demand.
An API is just a list of functions, it has very little intrinsic value without an implementation. The implementation is where all the work is. If someone is using your implementation, then you can make a legitimate claim that they’re using your work. But if someone invests their resources to build their own “clean room” implementation compatible to yours, what gives you the right to deny them the product of their work?
If you deny software developers the right to their own work when they implement each other’s APIs, then just like patents today, there will be downstream repercussions. In particular, new kinds of lawsuits that are a burden to legitimate developers everywhere.
Have owned and run my own business for almost 7 years now. Very successfully I might add.
Personally I think patents should have varying life depending on the type. Bleeding-edge technology patents should maybe get 10 years protection maximum while some kinds of patents could have a longer life than the current limit. Add to this a dynamic life modifier: a patent that isn’t actively used will get a reduction in life with e.g. 50%.
Remember why the patent system was created: to enable technological progress by promoting publication of new ideas in exchange of a period of exclusive use. If a patent is in an area that moves fast enough (like computer technology, medical technology) then the novel idea will be outdated when the patent expires. That means that other techniques will have to be used in parallel with the patent, potentially reducing the progress of technology as a whole.
(This is overly simplified)
“My guess is that most of you have, LIKE ME, never owned and run a business.”
I own a tech company. It really seems that you don’t have a grip on the actual subject that’s being discussed. You’re participating in a conversation about APIs, but what you’re actually saying applies to implementations. APIs & implementations aren’t the same thing. You profit from an implementation because that’s where the real work has been spent. Once you attempt to profit from an API, one of two things happen:
1). The legal system eventually rules against you, so you don’t profit from it.
2). Others stop using your API, so you don’t profit from it.
If we’re going to start charging for using API’s, then someone is owed money for the alphabet of every single spoken language that’s ever existed, because the alphabet is part of the API of every single spoken language in the world.
who thinks Oracle has at least some kind of case? Did anyone else actually read the article? The cross-examination seems pretty freaking convincing that Google knew they were on shaky legal ground.
I also don’t understand the argument for APIs not being copyrightable, period. Sure, if it’s an open specification, licensed in a way to make clear that the originator voids their claim to copyright, OK. But otherwise, think about it: every other kind of text is copyrightable, and APIs are written in the context of a programming language, for use in a programming language, in fact they are often (most of the time) defined in the programming language first (even if only as interfaces) and the documentation of the abstract definitions is generated from the source code after the fact. That’s a whole different world than any other kind of mathematical algorithm, and the fact that math is exempt from copyright is in any case more of a historical accident than anything that clearly fits into the rest of copyright law. APIs are much more akin to source code (as I said, they in fact usually originate in source code), and source code is copyrightable. Trying to argue otherwise seems counterintuitive, IMHO.
I’m not defending the copyright system as a whole, mind you, but given what it is, Oracle’s case seems perfectly legit to me.
Edited 2016-05-13 19:52 UTC
APIs have nothing to do with source code… Google’s PageRank algorithm is extremely complex, there are thousands of systems running millions of lines of source code required to implement it in it entirety.
Its public facing API, however, is exceedingly simple and can be described in one short sentence in plain English: You send data in a parameter called “q”, and you get search results back.
Just think how stupid it would be if Google sued all the other search engines because they used a parameter called “q”…
Edited 2016-05-13 20:37 UTC
Right, seems I mixed up the case against copyrighting APIs with the case against patenting software, my bad.
However I still have to take issue with your implicit statement that APIs of the scale of the Java standard library are “simple” or that they have nothing to do with source code. The API is the surface area of the source code, in this case a really enormous surface area, for which any implementation must be tested against the original implementation in order to be remotely useful. But regardless of whether you want to define this interop layer as actually being source code or not, it was written by people, for the purpose of writing software, and for me there isn’t much logical difference between that and any other copyrightable artifact a person might write for that purpose.
Really? Because the Android API is not tested against the original implementation. It is not compatible with it, they don’t even work the same way (one runs bytecode, the other is compiled – different runtimes entirely, vastly different libraries for various things, etc. etc.). It is not Java, and it does not claim to be Java. It is based on the API of Java.
However, it is still useful imo.
You seem to be missing my point – I don’t actually care about when a recipe etc is copyrightable or not, rather I find the definition and reasoning behind what is copyrightable to be arbitrary and seemingly not based in logic but rather in historical happenstance.
I am genuinely curious: how is it that you write APIs all the time without writing a line of code? Are you seriously telling me you write APIs without even using the programming language to do so? And if so, what kind of crazy place do you work at that lets one person write APIs in the abstract as plaintext, without having any idea of the code involved in implementing them, while another has to find some way of fitting their implementation to your defined API?
Your last statement, that Android APIs weren’t tested for compatibility with Java APIs, is simply wrong. The fact that the bytecode is different has absolutely nothing to do with the API, which refers to the interface available to developers using the Java programming language. Apache Harmony was created expressly for the purpose of implementing a fully source code compatible Java 1.5 implementation, and you bet your ass they tested against Oracle’s Java implementation to ensure that.
Edited 2016-05-14 07:20 UTC
Apache Harmony isn’t Android. It was the basis of a portion of the original Android API, but outside of that I don’t see why you are bringing it up. The Android API is not tested for compatibility against Oracle’s implementation of Java, because one of the design goals was to intentionally be incompatible…
Edited 2016-05-14 11:03 UTC
I think we’ll have to agree to disagree that we have different conceptions of where API “design” starts.
Maybe because it’s the foundation of the case against Oracle?
Edited 2016-05-14 12:20 UTC
No, its not wrong. Anroid APIs are not tested for compatibility with Java APIs. Apache Harmony may have been, but Android is not Apache Harmony. It was (in some part) derived from a portion of Apache Harmony.
What you are implying, that they are the same thing, is like saying that if I write a book that contains a few paragraphs quoted from another book than both books are now equivalent and we can just go around interchanging one for the other. It doesn’t work that way.
Moochman,
I find this discussion highly ironic because without intending to, Moochman has described almost exactly the process they encouraged students to pick up at university.
For anyone who’s curious, let me add the reason why it’s done this way is because this is how large software projects get divided up into teams. Each team’s job is to implement the agreed upon API(s). Consider what happens if the API(s) were to be delivered by each team at the same time as the code. A single developer might be ok with this approach, however it completely fails with large projects divided into teams because their implementations depend on each other’s APIs.
The API could be specified as a plaintext list of the function/member prototypes, or it could be something more sophisticated like a UML diagram. IMHO the representation isn’t that important as long as everyone is on board.
Back to the topic at hand: you might go to a developer and say “Our code is using this API from a 3rd party commercial product, which no longer suits our needs. Can you build us a new implementation of the API but add these new custom features for us?” This is completely reasonable and used to be permissible since copyright was never intended to block new implementations. However now this new oracle case law means that anyone who builds new implementations can be sued for copyright damages over new implementations, which is totally ridiculous and contrary to the purpose of copyright.
Edited 2016-05-14 15:56 UTC
The clue is in what APIs stand for – interfaces. Imagine if power interfaces and their use were copyrightable…… Oracle had to get into ridiculous comparisons with literature for this very reason.
We went through this in the 80s and 90s and things shook out because people realised the software industry would cease to function.
Edited 2016-05-16 14:31 UTC
.. or why mention Apple and Microsoft in a story that has nothing to do with this?
This is why I come here less and less frequent – too much politics and fanatical hypocrites ..
Edited 2016-05-13 20:05 UTC
Or, you actually read the story, and see that Apple has everything to do with this.
“Everything” sounds a little hyperbolic tbh. Everyone knows Ellison and Jobs were some kind of buddies, but I have yet to see the “flaming e-mail of proof” that Jobs somehow masterminded every attack on Android from every quarter. However close they may have been personally, Ellison owed Jobs very little professionally. My theory, which is just as easy to argue as the one you claim is fact, is that Ellison was operating in his best interests, no more and no less.
… Google, instead of Oracle, bought Sun Microsystems leading to Google having stewardship of Java (amongst other things) ?
The other prospective buyer for Sun was IBM.
Google at the time were probably unsuspecting of Oracle’s insidious plans. But they learned to prevent that from happening again. Just as Motorola started to look for patent royalties, Google bought the company, fixed some things and took away the patents, and then sold the rest to Lenovo.
There is a very simple solution. Make losers in lawsuits pay the costs – like they do here in Australia. It basically eliminates frivolous or weak lawsuits.
I wish it did. Typically the loser ends up paying in the states, too. I don’t think you could get rid of frivolous litigation in our culture without completely rewriting our legal system. We are one screwed quagmire of legal drama.
I, for one, am happy with Google’s juggernaut coming to iPhones, among other things — such as the later post to this one.
Google’s slow but steady rise to all things computing is a befitting reply to the evil nexus of Apple, Microsoft and Oracle 🙂
To all the fence-sitters out there, which side are you *really* on, in this battle? Its time to come clean 😉
I don’t think siding with an advertising company that sells your personal info for profit over a tech company is smart.
Wait a second. Aren’t you a member of the “software should be protected by copyright, not patents” crowd? Well you can’t have it both ways. The only relevant question now to be decided, as others have mentioned, is whether this is fair use to re-implement using the same function signatures, class definitions, etc.
kittynipples,
So just as with patents, the validity of copyright “fair use” will have to be determined on a case by cases with no way for software developers to know ahead of time whether or not something is infringing until after they get to court and a judge rules on it. Many developers will exist in this state of unknown legality – excellent news for companies that seek profits by suing others in court, but very bad news for software developers in general.
Edited 2016-05-15 13:17 UTC
So you are taking a position that a header file is not a creative work but the corresponding source file is. Clearly the court views them to both be creative in nature, and thus covered by current copyright law. Whether or not it is inconvenient for the software industry is probably immaterial.
kittynipples,
To the extent that you can be creative in a header file (ie with comments and whatnot), then that can be copyrighted. But to the extent that it’s impossible to be creative because sharing the same function prototypes is technically necessity to be compatible, then absolutely not – it was never the purpose of copyright to block competing implementations, which is exactly what oracle is trying to do.
It’s not just my position, prior to this expansion of copyright scope by the appellate court, it was such a legally unanimous position that lawyers themselves did not bother to explicitly license APIs. Not only did the courts themselves rule that APIs were not copyrightable, but even the creators of Java that this case is based on agree too. Let the ridiculousness of this situation sink in for a moment, because the success of this legal case will set into motion a lot more like it.
I personally think, after numerous discussions with different people, that this is where the fundamental misunderstanding always pops up. There is always this focus on details that simply do not matter. It has nothing to do with header files – header files are not APIs…
I struggle to hunt for an explanation that truly makes sense… People (understandably) want a simple analogy, one they can “get” immediately, for what makes an API special compared to source code when it comes to copyright protection.
I don’t have one of those, sorry.
This is the best I have managed so far:
Lets say you invent a new mouse trap. It is extremely effective. You decide to patent the mouse trap, so no one can copy your design.
It is rather complex and requires detailed instructions as to how it works, but you do your best to simplify its operation. You write a manual for it, explaining how to operate it. You copyright your manual so no one can make a copy of the manual without your consent.
Now someone else invents what they think is a better mousetrap. They have no idea how your mousetrap works (they never saw or read the patent), their design is quite different. It’s rather complex too, but they realize that if they try and make their mousetrap’s operation similar to yours, it will be to everyone’s benefit because most people already know how your works.
So they make the operation of their mouse trap identical to yours (not its fundamental design, not how it catches mice, simply the way users interact with it). They of course read your documentation in order to do so, but they are not copying the documentation – copyright does not affect them at all.
They did copy something though… That “thing” they copied – that is an API. It is simply a “method of operation”. It is facts contained within the documentation of the operators manual – it is neither the work itself nor the documentation and is not protected through existing IP law (at least not until this stupid appellate ruling).
No one copied the original mousetrap’s design, and no one copied the original mousetrap’s manual. The key point to understand is that the documentation (the copyrighted thing) does not describe the details of the mousetrap (the patented thing). How to operate the mousetrap is protected by neither copyright or patent, it is simply factual information about how to interact with it.
In the software world the source code is copyrighted. That is your implementation, your “desgin” per se. Copyright protects it from being copied, much like patents for methods. The implementation is your “mousetrap”. Patents are (unfortunately) something you can get as well in some situations, but imo copyright is enough. Regardless, neither has anything to do with API protection in this case.
Header files are documentation about an API, not APIs in and of themselves. You can copyright them, but they contain facts, things which are ineligible for and do not rise to the level required to be copyrighted. Things like method names and such, parameter names, types, etc. – these are all things universally agreed upon to be exempt from copyright protection – even in the Oracle vs Google case. They have nothing at all to do with your mousetrap, they are simply facts about your mousetrap.
Oracle already lost the case concerning the copying of method names and whatnot. What they won, however, was the argument that the combination of all of these individual facts together, constitutes a creative work in and of itself.
I personally think this argument is total bunk. It is both destructive to how the software industry functions and unnecessary – software is already afforded plenty of protection though the existing understanding of copyright and patents (too much even).
Anyway, Google copied the API of Java (at least in part) – no one, not even them, is claiming otherwise. As Oracle argued, they didn’t have to, but they did – because similarly to the mousetrap above, it let them leverage existing programmers familiarity with Java.
The thing is… That is a good thing. It did not hurt Sun (now Oracle). On the contrary, it helped them by promoting the use of their language. It is almost always a good thing, for both users of software products, producers of software products, and the economy in general. No one is “stealing” anyone’s work when an API is copied, what they are doing is leveraging existing learned behavior, something that may seem at odds with intellectual property rights to some, but to people in the software world leveraging learned behavior is almost second nature. Software is terribly complicated stuff – if companies don’t try and converge towards common interaction models it all degenerates into chaos.
That is why APIs should not be eligible for copyright, because it will actual encourage everyone to build stuff that works differently, instead of building stuff that works similarly. Familiarity is the only thing we have working in our favor as software developers – computers are getting more and more complex as time goes by, but because of convergent evolution it is (barely) manageable. Copyrighting APIs will start encouraging divergent evolution, and we will have chaos on our hands – hell on earth for developers. Everything will work differently, and for no good reason.
Its stupid. f–k Oracle.
Edited 2016-05-16 00:32 UTC
And handle everything via ‘messages’? A la ‘Erlang’?
“As Tim Bray, director of Web Technologies at Sun Microsystems, expressed in his keynote at OSCON in July 2008:
If somebody came to me and wanted to pay me a lot of money to build a large scale message handling system that really had to be up all the time, could never afford to go down for years at a time, I would unhesitatingly choose Erlang to build it in.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erlang_%28programming_language~*~@…
Isn’t the original WWW -as proposed by Tim- a simple and extremely resilient messaging implementation?
Where the documents [and their indexes] are the agents.
There’s something REALLY WRONG about API’s. REALLY…
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Ratatouille-remy-control-linguini…
Wouldn’t near ‘Linguini’ while ‘Remy’ ‘plugged’ to his head.
🙁
API’s turn software into multiple personality Monsters.
[And those Monsters ‘transform’ within your privacy and trust reach].
[You don’t know a lot of those Monsters].
Only purpose of a ‘tolerated’ Igor ‘Monster’ could be allowing entry con Dr. Frankenstein creatures…
Bad plugs give software [and sometimes all the platform] bad fame.
Even on a toy filled, sand-boxed environment you don’t know what brats are able to achieve.
I wonder if this could prevent 3rd party lens makers like Sigma from producing lenses for Canon’s cameras. They have reverse engineered Canon’s API. And then there’s the physical lens mount “API”.
Canon could just change a bit here, then a bit there, on the API. Cost almost nothing to Canon, and a lot to Sigma to catch up.
[This is wrong on already open Industry standards and protocols]. There the [Much Cheaper Payments -those should be already fixed-] should go to the Consortium assigned Guardian and Maintainer of the Standard.
Right approach is to approach Canon and pay a reasonable licensing. Collaborative competition [an sharing of API’ maintenance costs], instead of the aggressive kind.
Don’t even need to dance this stupid MS dance. If Canon encrypt link between body and lenses, then secondary market is over. As in any healthy ecosystem, they’ll have to contribute to development costs.
A healthy ecosystem speaks well about Canon, to consumers, to Governments, to investors…
juzzlin,
Who the hell knows what the courts today would do if this bad case law were applied to a physical domain. galvanash used a mousetrap abstraction, I’d use the car analogy again: the accelerator, breaks, blinkers, ignition, heating, even the stereo are mostly familiar to us because they’ve generally copied one another’s interfaces so that we all basically know how to use them even in a new car – being able to copy familiar interfaces is good. It would be bad and even dangerous if the law forced every manufacturer to use different interfaces that were incompatible with our muscle memory.
Agree, Alfman. Nissan vehicles are far from being the best cars at my country. But Nissan has been very well managed as to have the most healthy ecosystem here. [Allowing COPY of old ‘physical’ APIs, as just one example].
They take happily the lion share of the market, most of the years. Beloved brand here
The promise of Android ended years ago when Google bought them.
It’s just another platform now. But one pretending to be free so that it can profit from user data. Android does a lot of pretending – pretending to be like iOS while the business model is completely different – pretending to be open and free – pretending to break up the Apple/Microsoft platform duopoly.
The hippie-dippy android love for being open and independent died long ago.
Imagine if every time you launched a droid it had a huge google logo saying “collecting your personal data now…. for cutting into millions of pieces and selling to the highest bidder”.
(ahem) i mean free.
https://tech.slashdot.org/story/16/05/15/039201/890-college-students…
890 college students using Google’s Apps for Education are suing for $10k each, claiming Google harvested info from their email accounts for sale to 3rd parties without permission, and even denied they were doing it until April 2014.
This is why Android is poison, it’s owner. Not it’s code.
Google is not above the law.