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Comment by discardorama | Hacker News Reader

Google petitioned the Supreme Court to hear its case, joined by allies including Yahoo, HP, Red Hat, and open source advocates, but was rebuffed. Microsoft, EMC, and NetApp urged the high court to let the Federal Circuit ruling stand, and that's what happened.

WHY?? And here I thought Microsoft was coming around. Fuck these assholes (and EMC and NetApp too). What do these people have to gain by letting the ruling stand? It just makes interop harder. And here they are tapping into the Linux API shamelessly[1]. Shame on you fuckers.

[1] http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2016/04/why-mi...

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I haven't found their brief to the Supreme Court, but if they raise the same arguments that the raised in their earlier amicus brief to CAFC [1] where they urged CAFC to take the appeal from the district court, their objection is not to the outcome of the case (Google not infringing) but rather to how the district court got there.

Briefly, they believe that the district court went too far in declaring that APIs are not subject to copyright in general. Instead, they believe that APIs are subject to copyright under existing statutes and precedent, but that there are various doctrines (fair use, merger, and others) that can allow copying for interoperability.

[1] http://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/2013/02/MSFT-O...

I can think of a few good reasons:

- Microsoft benefits when Google's mobile platform is hurt.

- Microsoft has many APIs so why the heck would they want to overturn a decision that puts them in a position of power?

If those weren't enough, Google has poached Microsoft talent for years. Maybe there are people at Microsoft who just don't like Google and will work to screw them over. Most likely though it's more to do with the two reasons I listed above.

Plus, a little too much emotion in your post. Hard to believe you can feel any emotion about this whatsoever let along being basically pissed off. This is super boring tech news.

Microsoft also has a competing platform to Java that might benefit greatly if Java's open foundations were shaken: .NET

It's in their interest since they have an open alternative in .net core

you can't teach an old dog new tricks

Why did you think Microsoft was coming around? Their legal actions hadn't improved. They just spent more on PR.

It's not just PR. The post-Ballmer Microsoft has seen a lot of quantifiable changes regarding open source.

Microsoft is not a monolith. Microsoft is people and teams.

As visualized in their org chart: http://www.bonkersworld.net/organizational-charts/

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