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Comment by SloopJon | Hacker News Reader

I saw one question from Gorsuch quoted in reports about the arguments that bothered me: "What do we do about the fact that the other competitors, Apple, Microsoft ... have, in fact, been able to come up with phones that work just fine without engaging in this kind of copying?"

macOS and iOS (and indeed Apple itself) would not exist as we know them today, if at all, without very liberal cross pollination of APIs. In a parallel universe where APIs are copyrighted to the extent that Oracle wants, GNU would not exist. Konqueror and Safari could not use Microsoft's XMLHttpRequest(). The list goes on and on.

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You say GNU would not exist, which is true in it’s current form. But that doesn’t mean we wouldn’t have had a Unix-like (although not strictly compatible) free system.

It’s also true that Safari couldn’t have used XMLHttpRequest unless Microsoft had licensed it. But that might have sped up the incorporation of an open standard alternative.

It would definitely have created a different history to the one we have now if APIs were assumed to be copyrighted, but it’s not reasonable to just assume that everything that has been based on them would not have been built some other way.

> Unix-like

You mean something that implements all the APIs that the Bell Labs never licensed to anybody?

No, I mean something that has the architectural qualities comparable to Unix, which has been done multiple times.

> have, in fact, been able to come up with phones that work just fine without engaging in this kind of copying?

Which, of course, is completely false. All of them have many, many reimplementations of open APIs in their many layers of software. It's just that no one was stupid enough to copyright those APIs and try to sue someone else for implementing an API before.

Oracle's actions threaten to upend the common understanding of software ecosystems and throw everything into disarray.

I thought Goldstein gave a satisfactory answer here by making the analogy to the difference between English and French.

Darwin copies Unix APIs from AT&T. They have engaged in this kind of copying. They just haven't been sued about it.

The fact that both OS X and iOS do this copying is specifically called out in the amicus brief signed by Steve Wozniak.

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