If AT&T had strong copyright claims on the "APIs" that make up the system calls of UNIX, for example there goes Linux (and essentially the entire GNU and BSD projects as well), there goes modern MacOS, etc, and the reverberations would be enormous even with fully closed sourced OSes like Windows... With strong copyright on APIs there, essentially, goes the Internet as we know it when there isn't a clear path of UNIX->BSD/POSIX->sockets for everyone to copy (and thus be interoperable with each other).
And even if we shift the strong copyright event later into the 90s then consider the modern web, if Netscape (which at one point was a very different entity than today's Mozilla in terms of openness) had a strong copyright on the definition of JavaScript's APIs? Or if nobody dared implement their own XMLHttpRequest for fear of Microsoft's API copyright?
This is something developers (and anyone who cares about technology, really) should absolutely be hysterical about.
I am not aware of any significant proprietary API today that is in widespread use, and is cloned by FOSS. But I could be wrong on that. If you know of such APIs, I'd love to know which ones are in danger.
Linux is a perfect example of a proprietary API (Unix) which is in very widespread use, which was cloned by FOSS. Most of the Unix command line utilities were explicitly cloned by the FSF to be compatible with existing shell scripts on Unix.
Adobe made Flash proprietary and it became incredibly widespread, so widespread that if you turned if off, many websites would break, despite the fact that it had numerous performance and security issues. Flash made it to something like 97% penetration of all Web clients (prior to Apple iPhone) People have cloned Flash (hAXE for example), but there was really no reason to do it, because Adobe offered the player free of charge.
WINE is in widespread use. Samba is in widespread use. Lots of Website REST APIs have been cloned.
Adobe PDF was proprietary and widespread cloned until in 2008 it became an open standard.
Cloning APIs is a time honored tradition for "embrace and extend". Microsoft even cloned proprietary APIs, and DOS itself started out as an unauthorized clone of CP/M. Where would Bill Gates be today without Seattle Softworks?
I hate having to resort to the tired ole idea of rich people having gotten rich by theft, but in many cases, it's quite true, that Gates and Jobs both freely copied, cloned, and modified other people's stuff, got stupendously wealthy off of it, but somehow, it's wrong for us to want to practice their methods?
My question was about how the current ecosystem will be disrupted. Now, with WINE -- I agree, but I don't think it's in widespread use, and I don't think Microsoft will go after them. AFAIK, Samba implements a networking protocol, not an API (but I may be mistaken).
It really all comes down to Linux. If Linux is in danger, then obviously the ecosystem can be disrupted by this ruling; if not -- then probably not. I must say I don't know enough about the current legal status of Linux, and whether or not it's in real danger.
In other words, "I got mine". People who profited and got stupendously rich, get off scott free, and are free to deploy lawyers to interfere with the next wave of participants. Not unlike immigrants who settle in, and then want to slam the door on the next group of immigrants.
>Samba implements a networking protocol, not an API
Protocols and APIs are another distinction without a different. If the sequence, structure, and organization of an API can be copyrighted, then surely, the sequence, structure, and organization of a wire protocol or file format can, after all, the only real different is the invocation mechanism.
While it might be easy to analogize between an API and a wire protocol in terms of technology, that doesn't mean that analogy holds within the framework of copyright law. The Fed. Cir. opinion was expressly couched in terms of the "sequence, structure, and organization" of the names in the API. Indeed, the opinion concedes that if Google had chosen different names, then things would be fine. Putting the same bytes at the same offsets is not at all the same as naming things the same way.
We live in a world of protocols that are increasingly RPC/REST based which as others have mentioned are really just APIs you happen to access over a network connection.
If I recall correctly, the SMB networking protocol is a RPC protocol. In other words, it's an API, just invoked remotely.
On the web front, AWS APIs are significant, proprietary, arguably in widespread use, and cloned by FOSS (Eucalyptus).
In a lot of ways the situation being defined by this ruling is way worse than patents given that copyright is essentially infinite these days (pseudo-time-limited, but constantly being extended due to the lobbying efforts of Disney, et al) whereas at least patents, as harmful as they are to overall software industry progress, run out after a couple of decades.
NFS is a corporative API developed by SUN, LDAP and Kerberos were also created by a corportaion (IBM), UNIX is a set of APIs created by Bell Labs, just like C.
If you grew up writing assembly code for 8-bit computers, all your APIs were BIOS firmware calls via traps, interrupts, or jumps.
No one said copyright is the same as patents, I'm just bashing both. I don't believe in copyrights or patents as applied to software.
But copyrighting APIs goes too far.
Au contraire, I think it clearly solves the economic problem of free-riding in this particular case. Consider:
1) Sun (and now by proxy, Oracle) made a huge investment in engineering to make Java, and a big part of its success was a API for the standard lib that maintained a coherence across disparate domains ranging from file systems to networking to databases to cryptography to UIs.
2) Sun made an even more massive investment in marketing to make Java as prevalent as it is today. Without marketing a language goes nowhere, and yet Java is ubiquitous. Along with 1), this represents a massive economic investment.
3) Google had no inclination of investing its own time, money and resources to build its own ecosystem and build developer mindshare for it, not when it was trying to compete with the iPhone and wanted warm bodies to build apps for their platform. To make it worse, Google's engineers and executives knew that a) they had no better alternatives and would require a license (google "Lindholm email"), and b) that they were not going to be complying with Sun's terms (Ctrl-F "Rubin" on this page). Yet they went ahead and re-used Java for their purposes without permission or recompense to Sun.
I don't see how that's not "economic free-riding" in the most literal sense.
In fact the only thing the clean room reimplementations of the IBM PC BIOS had in common with the original was exposing the same API.