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Comment by ori_b | Hacker News Reader

> what instrument do we need to prevent the same from happening to other products too?

...We don't need such an instrument, because the outcome you mentioned is desirable.

If we had such an instrument, Linux would not have been possible, because it's compatible with the Unix APIs. OSX would not have been possible, for the same reasons.

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> If we had such an instrument, Linux would not have been possible, because it's compatible with the Unix APIs. OSX would not have been possible, for the same reasons.

Technically, OS X would be possible, because it is not merely Unix compatible. It is a Unix [1].

[1] https://www.opengroup.org/openbrand/register/brand3648.htm

They only own Unix the trademark. Unix the copyright is a much more muddy concept that'd probably lead to another trial between Novell and SCO. If SCO won they'd totally go after all the Linux and BSD variants too.

The difference between a blob storage system that implements an "S3-compatible" API, and AWS S3, is that no one is mistaking the other offering for S3. Dozens of libraries that implement the S3 API as a client, and offerings that implement it in the server aren't under pressure to diverge between fake S3 and real S3, because the API is feature-complete, and doesn't change in meaningful ways. There may be monetary harm to S3 from the competitor cloning their API and competing with them on price, but there is no reputational harm to S3.

It would be revisionist to claim that there was no reputational harm done to official Java by Android's lookalike Java -- irrespective of any mismanagement by Oracle of the Java platform. How does one prevent that?

“Reputational harm” comes from trademark infringement, not copyright.

And no, you cannot prevent this sort of scenario without losing the right to interoperate with most software.

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