I believe that's a fair price to pay for breaking the software industry.
There is a theoretical legal question of whether APIs should be copyrightable, and then there are the practical issues.
As a purely legal matter, there is a strong (but not slam-dunk) case that an API is copyrightable. As a practical matter however, everyone in the software industry has been operating as if APIs were free to copy for decades, and enforcing such a copyright would break a ton of things.
Practical effects of a legal ruling are generally not "officially" considered by the judge, but more-often-than-not, they're operating behind the scenes and judges craft their opinions to support an established status-quo.
I believe the Z80 was a copy of the 8080 architecture - it used the same binary opcodes but it used an assembly language with different words.
So an API is at source level, so it uses words which seem more aligned with copyright of text. I wonder what would happen if the api had the text "oracle" in the function names?
p.s. and amusingly when intel did the 8086, it was source level compatible with the 8080, but not binary.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sega_v._Accolade
> As a result of the piracy and unlicensed development issues, Sega incorporated a technical protection mechanism into a new edition of the Genesis released in 1990, referred to as the Genesis III. This new variation of the Genesis included code known as the Trademark Security System (TMSS), which, when a game cartridge was inserted into the console, would check for the presence of the string "SEGA" at a particular point in the memory contained in the cartridge. If and only if the string was present, the console would run the game, and would briefly display the message: "PRODUCED BY OR UNDER LICENSE FROM SEGA ENTERPRISES LTD." This system had a twofold effect: it added extra protection against unlicensed developers and software piracy, and it forced the Sega trademark to display when the game was powered up, making a lawsuit for trademark infringement possible if unlicensed software were to be developed.
[...]
> The Ninth Circuit reversed the district court's order and ruled that Accolade's use of reverse engineering to publish Genesis titles was protected under fair use, and that its alleged violation of Sega trademarks was the fault of Sega. The case is frequently cited in matters involving reverse engineering and fair use under copyright law.
Maybe he mentioned that in his .plan file that you had to use finger to access.
Edit: Sort of correct. A bunch of details here: http://www.gamers.org/dEngine/license/quakeedit.html
In this case perhaps a gameboy cartridge could differentiate the sequence of reads for nintendo bitmap detection (which could be argued as API) and reads for the actual boot display and present different data... that's assuming they are separate reads, if the gameboy handles boot display all by itself and checks in the same step then i guess it's indefeatable.
https://dhole.github.io/post/gameboy_custom_logo/
Of course, you still have to include a copy of the Nintendo logo to get past the BIOS check, even if it's not displayed, which I think is supposed to be the trademark infringement.
> Of course, you still have to include a copy of the Nintendo logo to get past the BIOS check, even if it's not displayed, which I think is supposed to be the trademark infringement.
Yeah i think this is the bit that a brave publisher could have argued in court, I think for it to be a trademark violation it would have to be visible somewhere beyond the raw content of the ROM. That's why i'd argue it's essentially being used as an API token, and trademark definitely doesn't cover that.
Written by someone who worked on MSN Messenger. Talks about repeatedly reverse-engineering the AOL messenger protocol, and AOL's attempts to stop them.
Wouldn't affect copyright law too much, but Oracle could probably raise a trademark infringement claim too.
Yup. However, I suspect that Ubuntu gives a pretty permissive trademark license in their distribution.
This isn't a theoretical argument, the Android OS is open source, but the "Android" brand is a protected trademark. If you're a cell phone manufacturer, you can use the Android code freely, but if you want to put an Android sticker on your phone, you have to follow Google's rules.
Java was different because Sun was actively trying to prevent the "SQL" or "UNIX" semi-compatible fork scenario. IANAL, but bad analogy.
Sure, Sun sold Java (and the farm) to Oracle, but what if IBM sold SQL to Google? Do the same takesie-backsies apply?
Sun and Google had negotiations about licensing Java, and they certainly did not end with shaking hands.
Old post, so just saying this guy is factual-free.
And hopefully leave a radioactive crater large enough to dissuade anyone from ever trying this one again.
We did that. That's why they bought and tried to kill MySQL.
Amazon had a celebration when they turned off their last Oracle system ...
I doubt it. Oracle has done a great job dissuading new business by suing customers for discussing benchmarks, suing customers for discussing security, auditing customers, jacking up prices, jacking up penalties, suing everyone else, etc... Plenty of reasons to drop already.
Everyone left stays because they're in deep and migration would be worse.
Do you have some sources, or specific instances I could do my own searching for? Feel free to email me privately. I'm somewhat serious about trying to kill Oracle in retaliation for what they've done here.
Threatening benchmarkers:
* https://www.brentozar.com/archive/2018/05/the-dewitt-clause-why-you-rarely-see-database-benchmarks/
* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15886333
* https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/03/22/oracle_shoddy_service_license_denials_aimed_to_force_adoption_of_cloud_service_lawsuit_claims/
* https://outline.com/YUFYFK
* https://boingboing.net/2015/08/11/oracles-cso-demands-an-end-t.html
* https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/01/26/oracle_sues_employee_undo_arbitration_loss/
The current SG's opinion that Google's fair use claims aren't reasonable is new to this administration.
I thought IBM is mostly a consultant company now and the goal of a consultant company is to make money.
Considering that I don't think IBM and Oracle would be on the same page on who they regard as enemy.
As opposed to which company ?
I meant to say that IBM likely doesn't have any deterrents to sue Oracle as they are no longer on the same page with regards to their business markets.
Weakening Oracle won't affect IBM's business.
That being said Oracle and IBM still compete in many markets such as cloud computing and software platforms. Since Red Hat became part of IBM the areas where they compete has increased lately.
But the information that IBM and Oracle are still competitors in many markets is explicitly what I was unsure about. Thanks for reminding me about the Red Hat acquisition, I completely forgot about that already.
ISO is not some organization created by the statute with the right to take your copyrights and make them public domain...
IBM's potential claim on SQL wouldn't be a threat to Oracle.
IBM uses Java heavily. The most likely outcome is that the two companies reach a deal to cross-license with maybe a modest amount of money exchanged, freeing them each to go after everyone else.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Java_virtual_machines#...
Even some non-compliant like MicroEJ, https://www.microej.com/product/sdk/
None of them was ever sued, because they play by the rules, instead of playing the "I am the big boy, I follow no rules" that is Google's stance at this.
Java compatibility is enforced by trademarks. In order to call something Java it has to pass certain tests and there is a cost attached to it. There has been many free Java implementations before that had to call themselves something else to be in the clear, IcedTea being perhaps the most well known.
This litigation, however, was never about trademark law. Oracle knows that would be a short lived process. They instead made up argument about how function definitions under certain circumstances could be copyrighted, that could keep their lawyers busy for a long time. By throwing a lot of money at this they could sow fear about their competitor's business model. It's straight out of the Microsoft, by way of SCO, playbook.
Worse, Google cleverarly takes advantage of their Android Java fork stagnation to sell Kotlin over Java, while being fully aware that modern Java makes many of those code examples pro Kotlin worthless.
Google could be 100% tracking newer Java language features and Oracle would still have made this lawsuits. It's financial compensation or competitive advantage they are after or something, compatiblity and feature parity is very low on Oracle lawyer's list.
Sun and Oracle never sued other JVM implementations, only Microsoft and Google, aka J++ and Android Java.
If Google did not wanted a lawsuit, they could have easily made an offer to buy Sun after torpedoing their profits helping the company to close doors, no love for Google from my side on this story.
This all would have been avoided if Google wasn't a bad actor in the first place. They wanted to play by different rules than everyone else and thought they had enough weight to get their way. Now someone in their own weight class came along and we all get to live with the fallout.
I don't think it was an issue of monetary value. Sun simply wasn't going to offer terms that would allow Google to make Android with Sun's blessing, because Sun wanted to retain tight control over the feature set of different Java editions.
> This all would have been avoided if Google wasn't a bad actor in the first place. They wanted to play by different rules than everyone else
Please don't do this. The irony of making such a silly claim using a software stack that is so thoroughly built on those "different rules" is too much.
> Please don't do this. The irony of making such a silly claim using a software stack that is so thoroughly built on those "different rules" is too much.
Give me a break. You just said yourself they circumvented Sun's licensing. If software licensing and trademark usage doesn't matter, then why do even bother with them?
Please don't conflate trademark licenses with copyright licenses.
If Google doesn't get a pass on doing what the whole industry is doing - then no one will get a pass - that is a bad thing regardless of your thoughts on Google. Reimplementing interfaces is the lifeblood of compatibility, and has been for decades. A win for Oracle is a win for vendor lock-in: open source and upstarts lose.
That's because you're repeatedly failing to see the distinction between trademark law and copyright law. The Visual J++ lawsuit that was settled was a trademark infringement suit, because the Java trademarks are what Sun had locked behind license terms mandating compliance to their compatibility test suite. Google was more studious about avoiding use of Sun trademarks in Android, and chose to not seek a license for those trademarks. Now they're being sued over copyrights, not trademarks.
At the end of the day, Google wanted to use Java and not really be compatible with Java, so they tried to skirt around it and got called out for it. This was evident by pages they had that stilled referred to it as Java and by passages of code taken in whole. So, yes, I'll contend that Google tried to get away with something and hoped they were big enough to come out of it unscathed.
It's not like this was unforeseen. And it's not like Sun or Oracle has sued any compliant Java implementations. They could have just used OpenJDK, but didn't want to play by those rules either. If you don't like how this is shaping up in the courts, it's fair to say that it could have all been avoided by Google being a better actor.
OpenJDK didn't exist at the time.
And the only reason that Harmony (the base used in Android) isn't compliant is that Sun changed the terms of the TCK in a way that was in conflict with open implementations. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apache_Harmony#Difficulties_to...
Whoever is paying their salaries has the right to decide how they get used.
If this is the way to fix Android Java, or fully replace it with Flutter, then so be it.
You could say the same about the design of an electrical plug or a radio signaling protocol. That doesn't make the functional aspects of the design subject to copyright.
Even implementators of languages considered free beer like C and C++, have at the end of the day have someone paying for those 100 CHF.
Naturally there are black markets to work around those issues, then if a fire can be tracked back to a not-certified plug, the insurance can consider it isn't responsible for paying.
So then what do you need copyright for? Do the same thing for your API. Copyright is the wrong tool for this.
But in particular, notice that if your "market compliance processes" start trying to charge monopoly rents, someone will reverse engineer the thing and launch a competing compliance process which insurance companies will happily accept as long as it has reasonable quality.
Also notice that the compliance process for things like that is generally shepherded by a third party non-profit like UL or IEEE and not a competitor in the same market.