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Comment by tiffanyh | Hacker News Reader

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tiffanyh·

Question: so if Oracle wins, does that mean no one can create compatible APIs in general?

I know a lot of folks have created compatible APIs for Amazon S3, including Oracle themselves.

Does this become against the law if Oracle wins?

https://docs.cloud.oracle.com/en-us/iaas/Content/Object/Task...

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Sort of. Copyright is a civil matter, not criminal, so it requires two to tango. What I mean is, you can copy the API, but then the creator can choose to sue you. Or not. It turns our mostly-open computing landscape into a stand-off, exactly like the current software patent situation. The big guys have all the guns to hold each other off, but they can all take out the small guys who threaten them.

AWS SDK is under Apache 2 license, so anyone is able to use it (suppose you comply with the license - attribution etc..).

Google did a similar thing with OpenJDK (which is GPL) starting with Android N, why they didn't do it in the first place I don't know, Sun published OpenJDK under GPL in 2007, first 1.0 Android release was in 2008.

Though for the purposes of this case it is interesting to note that oracle did copy the aww api and did not comply with the apache 2 license (nothing, including distributed derivative works like their api documents, contains attribution).

And what about FFI?

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