I just realized - what does the Google vs Oracle ruling mean for ReactOS, and also Wine?
Android isn't fair use, is a massive commercial endeavour, and has obliterated the value of mobile Java, while breaking interoperability with Java. Oracle winning the case will not be kind to stolen platforms by tech giants.
It's not like Oracle designed Java, and then Google stole it. Java was supposed to be open. It was designed for this intent. Oracle bought it to destroy everything Java was supposed to be, and to prey on anyone who used Java for what it was designed to do.
When you can no longer innovate, you litigate.
That's not true though the reality is even worse. Patents have a limited term of 20 years.
If they win this case it is based on copyright law which has significantly longer terms. Currently that's valid until 70 years after the death of the content creator.
So, if ReactOS ever becomes useful, it will be illegal to use it for commercial purposes?
The first thing to understand about fair use is that it applies to copyright infringement, so first, someone has to complain about the infringement and then you utilize fair use as a defense. And second, that fair use has some guidelines/rules to test whether or not fair use should apply, but they are open to some interpretation.
So it wouldn't be "illegal" to commercialize ReactOS... but it'd probably make it a lot harder for ReactOS to use fair use as a shield going forward, because it would weaken their case on one of the pillars of the fair use test.
Unfortunately I think some lower courts have some messed up decisions or companies are trying to bully others with threats of suit. For example, some medical coding systems have copyrighted codes that are claimed to require a license and you can not install a system to cooperate with these. Except... this has already been decided, and you can.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_use#U.S._fair_use_factors is a really good read for the basic understanding of how fair use should be applied. Factor four is what we're discussing here, which the Supreme Court labeled the "most important" factor.
My position is that it doesn't really change things all that much, with losses by Android probably mostly picked up by Apple or Symbian or webOS or Windows Phone but the trajectory to smartphones and away from J2ME stuff largely the same. The sense of how much Android actually "mattered" in this sense goes right to the "effect on the market" prong.
As for the broader case, both the copyrightability and fair use claims have been presented to the Supreme Court here. The temptation from the outside looking in is to think/hope/dread that the court will just resolve these questions once and for all, but they often prefer to resolve cases on narrower grounds, where available. Google spent a lot of time arguing for, and would be perfectly fine with, a simple remand based on the Federal Circuit's standard of review of the jury's fair use verdict.
Assuming google did a perfect cleanroom implementation of parts of Java and they lose this case then it can be assumed that cleanroom implementations offer no protection against copyright claims.
A lot of non-commercial projects get shot down by companies for copyright infringements. Being non-commercial won't protect you either.
This is true. However, bear in mind, Google argued that 1. APIs weren't copyrightable and 2. that if they were, their usage was fair. In this ten year court nightmare, they've lost fair use and of course, are likely about to lose on copyrightability.
If the Supreme Court rules for Oracle, Android is copyright-infringing, it's already failed on the fair use claim. But most non-commercial projects would still have a fairly compelling case for fair use.
Note that your "copied a book" analogy is poor for a bunch of reasons: Chapter headlines... are copyrightable. (Though the "amount of work copied" is a fair use pillar, so it's possible to lift chapter headlines fairly.) And it fails to account for the functional nature of APIs which is under debate for copyrightability.
You mean was copyright-infringing. Harmony was dropped years ago, and Android has been rebased onto Oracle's own anointed, conflict-free codebase.
And you dodged the previous question where the commenter was asking for an honest assessment of mobile Java. You responded to a question that wasn't answered by talking about being unable to undo the past—which only makes sense if they had been pressing you for an answer to what would happen if Google called it a wrap on Android today, but that wasn't the question. Which brings us to another thing.
People who complain about Google's use of the Java APIs can't seem to get their arguments straight. That includes Gosling + the subset of the Sun/Oracle fan club who sat on the stand during trial + and the perennial commenters who parrot the same talking points on Hacker News. They (you) all complain about Android ripping off Java (to the tune of a multi-billion dollar copyright infringement lawsuit), but invariably the argument comes around to the real thing that's bothering them and which they try to wrap up in a bunch of claims about infringement—and what's actually got everyone (besides the money grubbers) fuming is the intentional incompatibility—in other words, that Android didn't copy enough! You wanna try squaring that circle? Which brings us to another another thing.
Android today is now based on the "proper" codebase, as mentioned above. How? Because it's open source. And it's been open source the whole time. It uses a different open source license, but it's open source nonetheless. Which means no one actually ever needed to get Sun or Oracle's permission to do anything. All the incompatibilities of Android? There's nothing that keeps the same breaking changes from being made in our hypothetical world where Android used the blessed license instead of the one from their preferred implementation. That difference does not suddenly force the hand of Google—or anyone—to keep dragging around Oracle/Sun's failed attempt at a mobile platform and maintaining compatibility with it.* It's GPL. Modifications are allowed. So reset from the beginning, bypass the Harmony detour, and everything still plays out exactly the same. Sun's platform still starts off where it was the whole time, in the gutter, and in that vacuum, Android becomes a thing, with incompatible APIs and all. And Oracle's infringement angle now disappears completely. Even if you're deluded enough to tell yourself that the platform Sun cooked up had a real shot (it didn't) before Google "obliterated" them, the market looks the same as it does today in favor of Android. So how much of those imaginary losses are actually the result of any infringement? I'll fill in the blank: the answer is none.
* Which is another thing...
But it seems that an Oracle win would mean you couldn't implement any interfaces compatible with another piece of software without a license.
We should introduce you to Oracle. This is exactly what they do. They audit their own customers in a very hostile way.
Never underestimate a company in decline, as they grasp for ways to increase revenues and profits for shareholders (or founders)
There's two questions up in the air with the case:
1. Whether or not you can claim copyright over the name of a function plus the combination of it's input types (an "API"). 2. Whether or not copying APIs can constitute fair use in the context of building a new platform using an existing language.
The first one is likely the case generally; you can claim ownership over "structure, sequence, and organization" just as well as Flame can claim ownership over a descending minor ostanato with a specific timbre. Imagine if Microsoft decided to do an end run around the GPL by copying all of Linux's header files and just writing new implementations. (Wait, isn't that how we got BSD?) This is sort of like the computer science equivalent of tracing over someone else's art, and we probably should have some protection to prevent that.
However, Java's APIs aren't just internal implementation details. They were made public to other developers specifically so that they would write programs that used them. Google argues that this makes them "methods of operation", which can't be copyrighted. If Microsoft makes Microsoft Excel accept macros from LibreOffice Calc by copying their menu bar shortcuts, that isn't protected and Microsoft is free to do that. (This has been adjudicated in court back in the 80s and is relevant precedent for the SCOTUS case.)
The fair use question is a fallback argument if the court rules that copyright ownership applies to API declarations. This requires application of a four-factors test. Notably, Google argued that Android needed to be compatible with Java APIs, and that such activities should be fair use. Oracle counters that Android's implementation of those APIs were out of date and incompatible, so that fair use shouldn't apply.
This also means that the Google/Oracle case might be ruled so narrowly that it doesn't affect WINE or ReactOS, or it could allow one and prohibit the other. After all, WINE is very narrowly focused on making Windows programs run on Linux, while ReactOS is trying to replace Windows entirely. One of the four fair use factors is the "market usurpation factor": what happens to the market for licenses if we allow people to do this under fair use and not pay for a license. If Win32 declarations can be considered copyrighted, then we could run into a situation where WINE using them to run Windows apps on Linux is NOT usurpation, but ReactOS using them to rewrite Windows IS.
Not to mention GNU was made in the same way as ReactOS, but against UNIX rather than Windows. I have no idea if the people who own the corpse of the people who bought out Novell would be able to assert a copyright claim, though, as most UNIX APIs were standardized under POSIX. Android also largely doesn't use those APIs (just the Linux kernel itself) and they'd be ironically safe from an SCO-style attack in this scenario.
Full disclosure: I am one of the developers of Ruffle (Free Software WASM/Rust Flash Player reimplementation) and I'm extremely paranoid of the project getting shut down by Adobe or HARMAN (the latter bought Adobe AIR). Ergo, I very much have material interest in the outcome of this case.
Same could be applied to any public interface. Header files, system calls, standard library, hardware version, language version, network interface.
Linux and WINE replaces Windows entirely. Looks like a lot of fans wait exactly that, not ReactOS.
Another API implementation is compatibility layer for authors who heavily invested in the platform. They are the reason platform is successful. Car dealerships investment is protected.