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Comment by DannyB2 | Hacker News Reader

Just to point something out.

IBM sponsored and was the primary contributor of resources to an independently developed Java work-alike called Apache Harmony. (about JDK 1.5 level, IIRC) Apache Harmony was, naturally, under the Apache license.

Google wanted something like Java for Android, so Google used Apache Harmony.

Sun was okay with Google having something like Java in Android and had said so. (perhaps reluctantly)

Oracle sees Sun for sale, and envisions a big "sue google" sign on Sun's back. Oracle buys Sun, to get Java and sue Google. Very soon after acquisition this becomes apparent. James Gosling leaves Oracle for reasons that were not quite clear at the time, but soon become clear.

Oracle claimed Google had used Java code. But Android had Apache Harmony.

So Oracle changes its argument to . . . But the APIs!!!

(Groklaw had documented all this back in the day.)

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Google explicitly calls out in its brief the fact that Sun, as the original author of the code, very explicitly did not consider Google to be infringing.

Although I do wish Google tried harder to press the point that, based on Oracle's argument that copying the API infringes copyright, Oracle itself is in violation of others' copyright. Ars Technica has an example of that (Amazon's AWS), and the brief does give a vague allusion to this fact, based on what I presume is the trial records:

> Notably, Java SE itself “reimplements” interfaces from earlier programming languages. JA154-157; see also JA211.

According to Gosling they did, just did had they money to do anything against it, and decided to make juice out of lemons.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZYw3X4RZv6Y&feature=youtu.be...

Also Google could have bought Sun and own Java, apparently they did not, as they thought they could get away with it.

This is inaccurate. According to Gosling in the video you link, Sun believed the clean room implementation probably wasn't clean. That has nothing to do with whether or not Sun believed that usage of the API was infringing.

> James Gosling leaves Oracle for reasons that were not quite clear at the time, but soon become clear.

Java Creator James Gosling: Why I Quit Oracle (2010): https://www.eweek.com/development/java-creator-james-gosling...

So thank you for giving an awesome tl;dr on this- honestly that sounds much like SCO in the 90's. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SCO%E2%80%93Linux_disputes

God I miss SUN and SGI- all those pretty computer chassis....Oracle basically is a lawyer who murdered SUN and wears their rotting flesh around pointing at people and yelling THEIF!

Apparently no one else bothered to make a bid to buy Sun, so.

Yes, IBM did one bid but they withdrawn it shortly thereafter.

> Sun was okay with Google having something like Java in Android and had said so. (perhaps reluctantly)

That isn't how things went according to Gosling.

"Triangulation 245: James Gosling on Oracle vs Sun"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZYw3X4RZv6Y&feature=youtu.be...

If Google actually cared, they could have bought Sun and own Java.

Even Gosling isn't advocating that the APIs were copyrighted. What he advocates is that he doesn't think it was actually a clean-room implementation, and that Google should have been 'nicer' about the whole process in general -- that regardless of the legal points, Google was kind of a jerk.

When it gets to the subject of APIs, Gosling is suddenly a lot less accusatory. Here's the actual conversation:

> Host: "I would hate to see a law or ruling that APIs are copyrightable, because that would have a chilling effect across the whole --"

> Gosling: "Yeah, that would be bad. But it kind of feels like the lawyers and laws and legal teams -- they do what they can."

But our laws don't punish companies for being mean, and issues around Google's actual clean-room implementation are largely irrelevant at this point in the lawsuit. It's pretty clear that Oracle bought Sun with the intention of going after Google far more aggressively and on far more legally tenuous grounds than Sun was ever interested in doing.

" issues around Google's actual clean-room implementation are largely irrelevant at this point in the lawsuit"

Are they? I am not an expert on this, but isn't the fact of actual copying (rather than successful clean-room implementation) a very relevant piece of information for copyright?

Actual copying is important, but not in this particular lawsuit.

Oracle is claiming that the organization of constants/methods in packages as well as the method signatures are copyrighted - they are arguing that it doesn't matter if you have a clean room implementation of BufferedInputReader() if you put it in java.io (like Oracle's JRE) and gave it the same signature as Oracle did, then you're infringing on their copyright.

If this SCOTUS broadly rules in Oracles favor, this would kill many projects, including WINE (which implements Microsoft's Win32 API without copying)

"At this point" is key, actual copying was important earlier in this case but is now a decided issue.

This appeal is strictly about the copyrightability of APIs. The supreme court generally doesn't address cases as a whole, but specific issues brought up to it on appeal.

If I remember the decisions on the actual copying part of the case correctly, it was decided that Google copied something like a dozen lines of uninteresting code directly (not api's, just some method implementation), and that this was de minimis copying and didn't constitute infringement. You should check if you really care though, I might be wrong.

>Even Gosling isn't advocating that the APIs were copyrighted....

And neither did the parent implied he was. He is merely stating Gosling wasn't OK with Google using Java without paying a dime, but didn't have much of a choice.

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