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Comment by asah | Hacker News Reader

by the by... wasn't Oracle's original product a relational database management system (RDBMS) that offered a SQL API... which was invented/copyrighted by IBM ?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SQL#History

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It's the whole "Disney wants the copyright laws to prevent anyone from doing to Disney what Disney did to the Brothers Grimm" thing.

Of course.

But Oracle doesn't care one bit about anything else that's not Oracle.

Though it is still to be known how many reimplemented APIs from others does Oracle have in their products

Nope, they pay for ISO which Google hasn't done for Java.

You don't have to pay for ISO to implement an ISO standard. In addition, Oracle released their database software in 1979 but SQL only became an ANSI standard in 1986 (and an ISO standard in 1987) so they did originally reimplement an API which wasn't a public standard.

Sure you do, because the ISO documents aren't available for free nor the certification process.

I'm pretty sure that a fair number of commonly used QR libraries were not developed by people who shelled out for a copy of ISO 18004 (they probably just looked at descriptions of how it works outside of the standard document). Similarly, you can implement your own SQL dialect without needing to read the ISO standard for it.

Yes if you want to be certified and want to get a copy of the standards document you'll need to pay, but it's not necessary (and I doubt that Oracle did, given that they implemented SQL before the standard existed and probably were involved in drafting it).

Sure that is how 1€ product shops work, which doesn't mean the final product actually does what it supposed to do.

Then that screwdriver turns itself instead of turning the screw.

> probably were involved in drafting it

Which also isn't done for free beer, ISO processes have associated costs.

I'm not disagreeing with the validity of ISO or anything like that, I don't know where you got that impression.

The original point being made in this thread was that Oracle copied the API of SQL from IBM and thus is guilty of the same thing that they are accusing Google of doing. The counter-point was that SQL is an ISO standard and Oracle (allegedly) licensed it, which was then followed up by my point about Oracle DB predating the ISO standard. Hence why ISO is being discussed and why I was making the point that buying a standard document from ISO or paying for certification are not really relevant to this discussion.

Some bmc commentary on that:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-zRN7XLCRhc&t=2280s

Yes and no. Yes, Oracle was a database with a SQL API. Yes, SQL was invented by IBM. No, it wasn't copyrighted by IBM, because at the time, nobody thought you could do that.

I thought you couldn't 'copyright' something?

I understood copyright to be something you had if you had created it.

Ah, brain cramp. I was thinking of patent, not copyright. Until State Street, nobody thought you could patent software, so nobody tried.

There was still controversy about software copyrightability in 1974. That said, I expect IBM still explicitly copyrighted their implementation of SQL (and licensed it [1]) as they had first started doing with some of the System/360 software during the prior decade. Note that, in 1974, you still had to explicitly copyright something; it didn't just happen automatically like today.

[1] As a side note, IBM may not have been the first to license software but they certainly helped make it a standard practice. When they unbundled much of the System/360 software, they felt that copyright was a weak protection (given its uncertain legal status) so they combined it with a license.

> it didn't just happen automatically like today.

... in the US of A.

Berne convention started a little bit over a full century before that.

Impressive that the superfluous “need” for the Copyright (c) YYYY notice still persists to this day in the mind of many.

There can still be advantages to being explicit as I understand it to enforce copyright/collect damages. For example, most people don't actually deposit copies in circumstances where they're technically supposed to.

Pre-1976, authors had to explicitly add a copyright notice. The Copyright Act of 1976 changed all that. Creative works automatically gained copyright the moment it was created.

SQL is an ISO standard, which Oracle like everyone else also pays for.

You can make an open-source database that uses the SQL language without paying a dime to anyone or signing any contracts. You don't have to pay for the ISO standard document to implement it - you can just infer behavior based on what you already know about sql.

The state of SQL databases would be better if more people did pay for and try to actually implement the standards as written... same goes for many of these expensive standard documents.

I’ve made a life long habit of collecting and archiving these in my personal documents whenever I get my hands on one. Because these are valuable guidelines as to how things are supposed to work.

Which isn't what ISO says it should be.

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