Someone explain to me when Supreme Court justices learned to code? It’s amazing that anyone can be deemed fit to judge a subject when they have no experience in it.
Oracle bought Sun - who agreed to let Google use the APIs and stated so in the trial - because they thought that they could make hundreds of billions of Java licenses. They didn't know - because I guess all their programmers were still using PL/1 and COBOL - that virtually none of the people who used Java paid for it
Wrong. Most of the major mobile hardware companies were licensing Java at the time (Blackberry, Nokia, etc). You're only looking at the desktop side of things.
No, that was noit Java, that was Java ME, incompatible with Java desktop
It was still Java, it still used the language which a lot of developers had experience with. Just because the APIs were slightly different doesn't change the fact that it was quite easy for developers to leverage what they knew and bring pared down versions of their apps over to mobile platforms like Blackberry and Nokia. That's why it was valuable to those licensees.
And Google didn't copied Sun, they use Apache Java implementation
Which was specifically licensed for use in open source desktop software, not mobile platforms. But obviously there was a loophole in the licensing which Google took advantage of. Not to mention the fact that it didn't give them a JVM to run on Android. So they had to go out and find a very legally questionable JVM in Dalvik.
Why are we pretending that Google didn't know what they were doing was shady? Andy Rubin's emails already prove that. They knew full well that what they were doing would likely land them in court, but they did it anyways.
"As part of an interface, the copied lines are inherently bound together with uncopyrightable ideas (the overall organization of the API) and the creation of a new creative expression (the code independently written by Google)" the ruling states. "Unlike many other computer programs, the value of the copied lines is in significant part derived from the investment of users (here computer programmers) who have learned the API's system."
"Given these differences, application of fair use here is unlikely to undermine the general protection that Congress provided for computer programs."
The court also found that the lines of code Google copied was unsubstantial, with the 11,500 lines making up 0.4% of the entire API. Google had copied the lines only to allow the creation of new code for Android, "not because of their creativity or beauty."
It wasn't even a close decision:
The 6-2 ruling had Justices Breyer, Roberts, Sotomayor, Kagan, Gorsuch, and Kavanaugh siding with Google. Justices Thomas and Alito dissented. Justice Barrett did not take part in the consideration or decision of the case.
Yay! Technology creators rejoice knowing that, no matter what license you choose for the technology you create, if you take it to court, there are no laws to protect your work once it's reduced down to the minutiae of copyright and other laws which were created a century ago!
I wish I had known this back when I graduated. I wouldn't have bothered developing anything, I would have just waited for others to do it and worked on strategies for taking their work and getting rich from it.
And this posts shows that you don't know anything about the case and that you're blinded by your sentiments
I've created apps and had them "cloned and owned" by others the same way. Have you ever spent a large amount of time/money creating something, only to have others take what you created, repackage and sell it, and pay you nothing in return? I'm guessing not.
Are you really a develeop3er when you don't know what an API is?
Are you really a developer when you can't spell developer correctly? I mean, your program wouldn't even compile with mistakes like that.
Seriously though, are we going to keep going down to the technical details here? Or are we going to call a spade a spade and acknowledge that Google willingly cloned Java to get around paying Sun for their own personal gain. I don't care which way you want to spin it with the minute details, in the bigger picture, that's what happened.
Or perhaps you think that Linux or Wine are illegal
I remember when Wine first started, and yes, those involved were very aware of the legally grey area around it (reverse engineering Windows APIs). I remember using it to port hobby apps between Windows and Linux at the time, and to run Windows-only games on Linux, but I never would have released a commercial (for profit) app using it because of that. I don't think it's illegal, but I do have a strong sense of what's right and wrong, and reverse engineering has always been wrong to me.
The SCOTUS decision in Oracle v Google is the right decision, for the right reason.
Those commenters claiming Google stole Java code from Oracle didn't read the decision, or for some reason, doesn't comprehend the decision.
Google did not copy any code. As the Court notes, Google copied the API only, not the implementation.
Put another way, Google only copied (a subset of) the function (method) signatures of certain java objects -- maybe a little more since normally the return type of a function is not considered part of a function's signature.
Claiming otherwise would be like trying to forbid use of the functions names sin(x), cos(x), tan(x) -- if computers and copyright had been around at the time.
Please recall that the original judge to rule on this case was a former programmer - as a hobby - and he called out Oracle's nonsense for what it was. Had the subsequent judges, juries etc. been required to take an online programming course Oracle's years long attempt to profit off Google's hard work would have been avoided. Keep in mind: Oracle was the same company who spent years claiming that the cloud would fail. Now Azure and Amazon both are making a mint on tools that will convert Oracle's byzantine legacy database into a much more modern cloud database for free.
Oracle bought Sun - who agreed to let Google use the APIs and stated so in the trial - because they thought that they could make hundreds of billions of Java licenses. They didn't know - because I guess all their programmers were still using PL/1 and COBOL - that virtually none of the people who used Java paid for it. Sun gave Java away to nearly everyone for free because they wanted to create a standard Internet programming platform for front end, middleware and backend. Legacy companies like Microsoft, Oracle and Apple couldn't wrap their heads around the need for such a thing at the time. Even though they wanted to get paid and licensed, they were fine with Google not paying them because Sun wanted Android to succeed too. Yes, Sun wanted Android to succeed as an open mobile platform because their alternative as an open mobile platform had already failed. If Android wasn't going to succeed then mobile would have been split between proprietary incompatible platforms by Apple, Microsoft and Nokia.
Oracle made a bad purchase and tried to sue Google in order to recoup some of their bad investment. Didn't work. Plus, software development has moved on anyway. Java is now a legacy platform. The MEAN stack - MongoDB and Javascript frameworks Express, Angular and NodeJS - has replaced the LAMP (Linux, Apache, MongoDB and Python/Perl) stack. Also the people who would have been learning Java 10 years ago are now learning Python, Golang and Rust. Even Google has essentially replaced Java on Android with Kotlin (Javascript that compiles to the JVM).
Google delayed ARM on ChromeOS because they didn't want Oracle to cite it as a talking point. Now they are moving full steam ahead, licensing ChromeOS on Qualcomm (before it was only available on MediaTek) and also designing their own ARM SOC for use with ChromeOS and Android. They knew after the Supreme Court argument that Oracle was going to lose. All Oracle did with this nonsense was enrich their lawyers. Instead of wasting 8 years suing Google they should have spent that time and money developing their own next generation cloud database and programming language platform. Instead they bought formerly open source MySQL instead, resulting in pretty much everyone who used MySQL dumping it for any alternative they could find.
Sun gave away Java because it’s design and implementation was crap.
ericthehalfbee said: Nice to know I can now steal include code for my own use as long as I claim prove it’s to be “interoperable”.
Yes, you had been mistaken when claiming Google stole it. The original judge said as much. So did Groklaw (nailing it on nearly all points, amazing), and SCOTUS has too. Now you know better and can rest easier if you do coding.
Nice to know I can now steal code for my own use as long as I claim it’s to be “interoperable”.
Let’s see. When the iPhone was released the head of the Android engineering team remarked that the iPhone blew him away and he realized they would have to start over, i.e. steal, iOS look and feel, right down to the icons. Then they appropriated, err stole, Java. Then Samsung decided to emulate, I mean copy, the iPhone hardware paradigm.
Someone explain to me when Supreme Court justices learned to code? It’s amazing that anyone can be deemed fit to judge a subject when they have no experience in it.
So they can only judge subjects they are experts on? I’m afraid the world isn’t setup they way you’d prefer. SCOTUS generally only takes up cases where multiple lower courts have had a chance to gather expert advice and opinions. Then they have a chance to ask for clarification directly to the two sides. It’s about as fair as you’re going to get. Should we have Congress only pass laws they are experts in as well, or should they have staff members prepare information for the as well?
ericthehalfbee said: Nice to know I can now steal include code for my own use as long as I claim prove it’s to be “interoperable”.
Yes, you had been mistaken when claiming Google stole it. The original judge said as much. So did Groklaw (nailing it on nearly all points, amazing), and SCOTUS has too. Now you know better and can rest easier if you do coding.
I do code. Which is why I can state the judges ruled wrong. You don’t code (painfully obvious by your post history) so I can understand why you don’t get it and have to accept what others say to form your opinion.
I’m also laughing at you trying to resurrect Groklaw. I know it’s a sore point with you and you thought this was going to be a good time to try and bring them back, as if they’re relevant.
ericthehalfbee said: Nice to know I can now steal include code for my own use as long as I claim prove it’s to be “interoperable”.
Yes, you had been mistaken when claiming Google stole it. The original judge said as much. So did Groklaw (nailing it on nearly all points, amazing), and SCOTUS has too. Now you know better and can rest easier if you do coding.
I do code. Which is why I can state the judges ruled wrong. You don’t code (painfully obvious by your post history) so I can understand why you don’t get it and have to accept what others say to form your opinion.
I’m also laughing at you trying to resurrect Groklaw. I know it’s a sore point with you and you thought this was going to be a good time to try and bring them back, as if they’re relevant.
Apparently what PJ at Groklaw had to say was relevant. The guy you were championing wasn't (Florian's FossPatents). And demonstrably you know less about the legality of coding and API's than you thought. Hey, but you still have your laughter to keep you warm.
One of the most salient points made by SCOTUS is this:
API reimplementation is fair use as a matter of law, meaning that the decision applies to all APIs
1. No one was paying Sun licensing fees. Sun was giving Java away for free to anyone and everyone who wanted it because they wanted Java to be the basis of an open Internet platform that Microsoft was desperately trying to use IIS and .Net to lock down for themselves.
That’s not true at all. In the end of the 90s beginning of 2000. If you were working on extending or improving the JVM (Hotspot) you’d pay Sun a substantial amount of licensing fees. Ostensibly it was mostly IBM, BEA Systems and Oracle paying these licenses.
So... oracle made a product. They spent a lot of money creating this product.
Everyone paid to license this product.
Except Google, who decided to just steal it and hope no one noticed.
Today’s Supreme Court says that’s “okay.”
What the...
where is the justice? How is this fair to oracle? How is it fair to competitors, who decided to “not be evil” and not steal?
It may seem like “fair use” NOW, because 10 years have gone by and such features SEEM lubiquitous, but they weren’t 10 years ago. Oracle made these things happen and they should be treated fairly.
Something stinks here. Smells like corporate influence.
The SCOTUS decision in Oracle v Google is the right decision, for the right reason.
Those commenters claiming Google stole Java code from Oracle didn't read the decision, or for some reason, doesn't comprehend the decision.
Google did not copy any code. As the Court notes, Google copied the API only, not the implementation.
Put another way, Google only copied (a subset of) the function (method) signatures of certain java objects -- maybe a little more since normally the return type of a function is not considered part of a function's signature.
Claiming otherwise would be like trying to forbid use of the functions names sin(x), cos(x), tan(x) -- if computers and copyright had been around at the time.
In other words, if oracle did not make it, Google would not have it.
So... oracle made a product. They spent a lot of money creating this product.
Everyone paid to license this product.
Except Google, who decided to just steal it and hope no one noticed.
Today’s Supreme Court says that’s “okay.”
What the...
where is the justice? How is this fair to oracle? How is it fair to competitors, who decided to “not be evil” and not steal?
It may seem like “fair use” NOW, because 10 years have gone by and such features SEEM lubiquitous, but they weren’t 10 years ago. Oracle made these things happen and they should be treated fairly.
Something stinks here. Smells like corporate influence.
That’s not even close to what happened.
Sun wrote an API. API specifications are inherently not copyrightable. Lots of things aren’t copyrightable. For example, languages (like Klingon) and game rules.
Oracle bought Sun.
Google decided to make their own API matching the specification of the API matching the specification of Sun’s. They gave their functions the same names Sun gave theirs. The function names (or technically the function signatures) are the “copied” code.
Google wrote their own implementations of those functions from scratch. The implementations used no Sun/Oracle code.
Oracle sued Google for copying Java’s API signatures.
This ruling effectively says function signatures are part of the specification of the function, as opposed to part of the creative work of meeting that specification. This is a correct interpretation of what function signatures are at a technical level.
Please recall that the original judge to rule on this case was a former programmer - as a hobby - and he called out Oracle's nonsense for what it was...
<a bunch of whataboutism>
It's not nonsense, the problem is that there are no laws to protect technology.
Nonsense. There are plenty of laws to protect technology - they are called patents. You know that thing companies that make nothing are able to sue (and win) against companies that actually did something with idea the come up with independently.
A very, very bad precedent opening the door to stealing code from anyone by anyone. Just my humble opinion.
I wonder if SCO (or whatever they are called now) will think again about their lawsuit against Linux that has just come back from the dead (again)? Personally, I wish that the SCO lawyers get disbarred and have to serve jail time. Won't happen but you can wish can't you?
There is no doubt that Google's copying of Java without paying licensing fees gave them an unfair advantage over competitors who were paying those same licensing fees at the time. It essentially gained them a mature app development platform and community of developers which Sun had invested a lot of money to build, without them paying a cent. Which, in turn, made it easy for those developers to port their existing apps to Android and build a rich app ecosystem to compete with Apple (who had actually invested in their own app development platform).
The fact that there aren't laws to protect companies which invest heavily in R&D against those which simply look for ways to work around licensing agreements is a sad state of affairs.
1. No one was paying Sun licensing fees. Sun was giving Java away for free to anyone and everyone who wanted it because they wanted Java to be the basis of an open Internet platform that Microsoft was desperately trying to use IIS and .Net to lock down for themselves.
[snip]
Had Java not been free and open from day one, no one would have used it. Everyone would have used .NET instead, which is exactly what Sun didn't want. Good grief ...
Your timing is way off. Java was released in 1995, while .NET didn’t come out until 2002.
And your claim about Microsoft wanting .NET to “lock down” the internet is wrong as well. .NET began as a framework for Microsoft platforms only. You could write business code libraries that worked with both WinForm desktop apps and ASP.NET web apps running on Windows Server. The ASP.NET model was based on WinForms ideas but with WebForms and code-behind files, and was a direct replacement for legacy ASP, which was Microsoft’s server-side web programming language. ASP had nothing to do with Java and ASP.NET was a replacement for ASP. I’ve been a .NET developer since the beta and it was never intended to lock down the internet. This is silly because the ASP.NET subset of .NET specifically only worked with with Windows web servers, which certainly were not the majority. It was created as a very good tool for MS developers to rapidly build desktop and compiled web apps with a modern language (C#) in a way that was much improved from legacy VB and legacy ASP. It completely ignored competing platforms.
It’s only very recently that Microsoft has targeted non-Windows platforms, with the introduction of .NET Core, another subset of .NET that works with Linux and macOS.
Sun gave Java away to nearly everyone for free because they wanted to create a standard Internet programming platform for front end, middleware and backend. Legacy companies like Microsoft, Oracle and Apple couldn't wrap their heads around the need for such a thing at the time.
Yeah no, Java in 1995 was for desktop apps, the idea was a cross-platform framework with a virtual machine to enable “Write once, run anywhere” which was the marketing phrase for it:
Companies like Apple didn’t share that vision and still don’t. In fact many now feel that the best apps are “native” to their platform, rather than using cross-framework kits. You can see this in non-native iOS apps with screwy UI conventions, compared to native iOS apps. Same thing on the Mac.
Comments
Are you really a developer when you can't spell developer correctly? I mean, your program wouldn't even compile with mistakes like that.
Seriously though, are we going to keep going down to the technical details here? Or are we going to call a spade a spade and acknowledge that Google willingly cloned Java to get around paying Sun for their own personal gain. I don't care which way you want to spin it with the minute details, in the bigger picture, that's what happened.
I remember when Wine first started, and yes, those involved were very aware of the legally grey area around it (reverse engineering Windows APIs). I remember using it to port hobby apps between Windows and Linux at the time, and to run Windows-only games on Linux, but I never would have released a commercial (for profit) app using it because of that. I don't think it's illegal, but I do have a strong sense of what's right and wrong, and reverse engineering has always been wrong to me.
Those commenters claiming Google stole Java code from Oracle didn't read the decision, or for some reason, doesn't comprehend the decision.
Google did not copy any code. As the Court notes, Google copied the API only, not the implementation.
Put another way, Google only copied (a subset of) the function (method) signatures of certain java objects -- maybe a little more since normally the return type of a function is not considered part of a function's signature.
Claiming otherwise would be like trying to forbid use of the functions names sin(x), cos(x), tan(x) -- if computers and copyright had been around at the time.
http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20130706091033171
One of the most salient points made by SCOTUS is this:
Cool! Now I can take anybody’s code or app and just by my GUI or process on top of it and call it the day!!! Yes!!!
where is the justice? How is this fair to oracle? How is it fair to competitors, who decided to “not be evil” and not steal?
cuz 2021 - Apparently that makes theft ok.
Sun wrote an API. API specifications are inherently not copyrightable. Lots of things aren’t copyrightable. For example, languages (like Klingon) and game rules.
Oracle bought Sun.
Google decided to make their own API matching the specification of the API matching the specification of Sun’s. They gave their functions the same names Sun gave theirs. The function names (or technically the function signatures) are the “copied” code.
Google wrote their own implementations of those functions from scratch. The implementations used no Sun/Oracle code.
Oracle sued Google for copying Java’s API signatures.
This ruling effectively says function signatures are part of the specification of the function, as opposed to part of the creative work of meeting that specification. This is a correct interpretation of what function signatures are at a technical level.
Personally, I wish that the SCO lawyers get disbarred and have to serve jail time. Won't happen but you can wish can't you?
And your claim about Microsoft wanting .NET to “lock down” the internet is wrong as well. .NET began as a framework for Microsoft platforms only. You could write business code libraries that worked with both WinForm desktop apps and ASP.NET web apps running on Windows Server. The ASP.NET model was based on WinForms ideas but with WebForms and code-behind files, and was a direct replacement for legacy ASP, which was Microsoft’s server-side web programming language. ASP had nothing to do with Java and ASP.NET was a replacement for ASP. I’ve been a .NET developer since the beta and it was never intended to lock down the internet. This is silly because the ASP.NET subset of .NET specifically only worked with with Windows web servers, which certainly were not the majority. It was created as a very good tool for MS developers to rapidly build desktop and compiled web apps with a modern language (C#) in a way that was much improved from legacy VB and legacy ASP. It completely ignored competing platforms.
It’s only very recently that Microsoft has targeted non-Windows platforms, with the introduction of .NET Core, another subset of .NET that works with Linux and macOS.
Yeah no, Java in 1995 was for desktop apps, the idea was a cross-platform framework with a virtual machine to enable “Write once, run anywhere” which was the marketing phrase for it:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Write_once,_run_anywhere
Companies like Apple didn’t share that vision and still don’t. In fact many now feel that the best apps are “native” to their platform, rather than using cross-framework kits. You can see this in non-native iOS apps with screwy UI conventions, compared to native iOS apps. Same thing on the Mac.