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Comment by nastygibbon | Hacker News Reader

Can someone give us an ELI5? Pros/Cons etc.

Con: all the BSDs and Linux are now owned by whoever most recently picked up the POSIX APIs. ReactOS and WINE are now illegal. SQL is the private property of IBM.

Pro: I guess if you hate Google because you love Steve Jobs or something it looks like a win.

It's all fun and games until IBM sues Oracle for SQL royalties.

If I didn't think it would negatively impact the rest of the industry, I'd pay to watch that.

It would be the only possible good outcome. Unless it turned out someone owned enough of the CP/M API for it to bite Microsoft in the bum.

(While we're dreaming, would HP's ownership of VMS mean anything re: NT...)

Quick question - do you feel the need to associate this to Apple because of your deep personal hatred for that company, or for your deep abiding love for Google?

Or was it neither, and you just like using rhetorical devices to bolster your weak points?

You're reading far too much subtext there. He's "pro" was just a flippant way of saying "there isn't any positive to come from this aside the super shallow brand-loyalty reasons"

I'm sure you had a point, but you didn't make it in an intelligible way.

None of that has happened. An amicus brief has been filed, that is all. An amicus brief is not law and the Supreme Court has not yet ruled one way or another.

The current holding comes from the Federal Circuit Court of Appeals and is in Oracle's favor. Unlike other regional Courts of Appeal, the Fed Circuit's decisions are binding nationwide because the court has subject-matter jurisdiction rather than geographic jurisdiction. The Solicitor General's amicus is in full support of the Fed Circuit's decision, and the Supreme Court has historically taken an SG amicus hugely into account when the SG is not a party to the case. Should they choose to do so here, they will not grant cert, let the decision stand, and it will be binding nationwide due to stare decisis.

So, while your statement is true, the situation is more dire than you suggest.

Thanks, I wasn't aware of all that.

Pros:

Oracle makes a bunch of money from Android.

Cons:

Kills innovation for fear of lawsuits. Feeds the patent trolls.

The case doesn't touch patent law in the slightest, if I understand it correctly, though.

(I am not saying the DoJ opinion is good in any regards whatsoever, to be clear)

No, but it adds copyright trolls to the mix. At least you can count on patents to expire eventually, copyrights are forever in software years.

Patents are forever in software years. Copyrights are longer than that.

I think of patents as being a lifetime, not forever.

The key distinction is, of course, you can't infringe copyright by accident. If you build your platform on someone else's proprietary API, without their permission, then can you really complain when you get sued?

So, wine (the windows emulator) should be illegal?

  > wine (the windows emulator)

Intentional humor?

In the context of the parent comment: if you build a business cloning Microsoft's Win32 API, I don't think you can complain if you get sued in the same way you can for a patent troll.

And yes, I think Microsoft should get to decide whether it wants clones of Win32, and also that it's a waste of time for open source developers to implement non-open source APIs.

Taking that further, the following things would be illegal:

- The HTML parsing specification (created by reverse engineering IE6 without Microsoft's cooperation), and by extension all non-IE Web browsers.

- Except IE is also illegal, because JScript was a hostile clone of JavaScript, down to the APIs.

- The x86-64 ISA, for two reasons: first, because AMD cloned x86 to start with, and second because Intel cloned AMD's work after seeing its success.

- All versions of Unix in common use; thus, by extension, 95% of smartphones by market share.

- VMware, by providing implementations of the proprietary x86 supervisor instructions in user mode.

Reverse engineering of proprietary APIs for the purposes of interoperability has been responsible for a lot of technologies that we use all the time. I understand the argument about IP protection, but I think an absolutist position in the other direction is a bit too far. In all of the cases above, there is a specific reason why the dominant player responsible for the proprietary API was failing to capture a market need, and the legality of API cloning was what allowed a smaller player to come in, address that need, and achieve a better economic outcome. I'm having a lot of trouble imagining how a world in which all of the above things were illegal would be a better one--you could argue that the dominant player could have done each of those things, but the fact is that they didn't.

It's not my position that you can copyright APIs per se. In my view, the protection in the Oracle case is a coincidence, stemming from the fact that you can't clone a Java API in Java without effectively copying the textual description of the API. So I don't think there would be a problem with reverse-engineering the operation of IE or x86 and describing it in an independently-written specification or implementing the same method of operation in another browser or CPU or in VMWare.

You're right about UNIX, but I don't think not being able to clone UNIX would've been any great loss to the world. iOS and Windows Phone would still exist, and I'm sure someone would have developed a cheap open source OS for the rest of the market.

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