Other API reimplementation is fair use

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Final verdict in Google LLC v. Oracle America, Inc. case.
Supreme Court rules API copying is fair use

Originally Posted by Timothy B. Lee

The Supreme Court has sided with Google in its decade-long legal battle with Oracle over the copyright status of application programming interfaces. The ruling means that Google will not owe Oracle billions of dollars in damages. It also has big implications for the broader software industry, since a ruling in the opposite direction could have triggered a wave of lawsuits against software companies that re-implemented other companies' APIs.

https://twitter.com/charles_duan/sta...74836073488391

Originally Posted by Charles Duan

Wow--SCOTUS doesn't just rule in favor of Google in #googlevoracle, but says that API reimplementation is fair use *as a matter of law*, meaning that the decision applies to all APIs

Changed @googlevoracle to #googlevoracle as it was clearly a mistake

[Prevet]

I think its strange we must go to people who are absolutely clueless about computers to get a ruling on them. Shouldn't we be asking actual good programmers?

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Originally Posted by Prevet

I think its strange we must go to people who are absolutely clueless about computers to get a ruling on them. Shouldn't we be asking actual good programmers?

Good programmers probably does not understand the law. Being a good programmer does not even imply that someone has any knowledge about economy, business relationships etc Rulings must make sense in the grand scheme of things (law including international treaties).

[Prevet]

Originally Posted by e1-531g

Good programmers probably does not understand the law. Being a good programmer does not even imply that someone has any knowledge about economy, business relationships etc Rulings must make sense in the grand scheme of things (law including international treaties).

I saw a very good programmer on Twitter comment on this last year. He said getting the API right is the most difficult and creative part. He said if anything is protected that should be. The rest is not creative.

Patents in software are also terrible and hold the industry back, for the reason it is impossible to know you are breaking a patent, because there is no automated way to detect it. The judges would have known this, if they knew anything about computer science.

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Originally Posted by Prevet

I saw a very good programmer on Twitter comment on this last year. He said getting the API right is the most difficult and creative part. He said if anything is protected that should be. The rest is not creative.

Patents in software are also terrible and hold the industry back, for the reason it is impossible to know you are breaking a patent, because there is no automated way to detect it. The judges would have known this, if they knew anything about computer science.

But it also leads to monopolies and lack of direct competition on the market. This means less opportunities for programmers, bigger costs for client companies etc
If some company creates big software that exposes API it takes at least many months, usually years, to create competing software providing reimplementation of the same API while providing the same reliability, security, performance and support original product is providing. It is usually enough to have an edge over competition and attract customers while not blocking rest of software industry from creating something new.

[Prevet]

Monopolies happen naturally. Google pinched someone elses API and became a monopoly. The one they pinched it from did not. The only way to deal with monopolies, is for government to break them up. But fat chance of that happening in the USA.

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Originally Posted by Prevet

Monopolies happen naturally.

Not always - it depends. Sometimes possibility is created solely by law and court rulings.

Originally Posted by Prevet

Google pinched someone elses API and became a monopoly.

When it comes to mobile OS market there is duopoly, not monopoly. Two different companies with different business models providing two different products. Not ideal situation to be in, but still better than monopoly.

Originally Posted by Prevet

The one they pinched it from did not

When it comes to Java it was quite a messy landscape, because OpenJDK have been released as Free Software (GPL2+CE) by Sun. Without that and before that verdict it could be concluded that Oracle had a monopoly over Java, because there were not other implementation of Java JDK. Every Java programmer would have to use Oracle JDK or learn another language. For Java programmers with years of commercial experience it means losing or reducing their rightly achieved advantage (experience) on the market. With Android OS on the market they could simply start writing Java programs for Android.

For thousands of software companies that write software in Java for businesses companies it would mean to be at the mercy of Oracle - their pricing policy etc. The only alternative would be to rewrite all that code in other programming language, but it is an enormous undertaking especially that they would probably opt to not use anything from Java ecosystem, so they would use completely different libraries, frameworks, IDEs they used before.

[Prevet]

A monopoly can afford to use the legal system to slant things in its favor.

Possibility is determined by the quality of people at a company.
If a company is staffed by people who are not very good,
it will never rise from obscurity to take over the world.
Only when it takes over the world,
can it afford support these kinds of people.

Everything would have been better in software
if Java had been priced out of the market and it failed.
Also businesses that trusted a big company with their future,
would have learned not to be that foolish again.
They are still making this mistake with big tech.

You know more about this case than I care to. It has two of my least favorite things. Languages like Java and mobile phones.

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Originally Posted by Prevet

You know more about this case than I care to. It has two of my least favorite things. Languages like Java

Well, there are many languages that are outdated such as C++, Java etc, but unfortunately too many things depend on them, so companies and open-source projects continue to use them.

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I don't know if it is related to court ruling, but Microsoft just released Microsoft Build of Open JDK. Even if it is not related to court ruling this is worth to post here just to show the scale at which Java is used at Microsoft (Azure Cloud etc):
https://dev.to/azure/microsoft-java-is-out-12j2

Originally Posted by Sandra Ahlgrimm

We need it anyhow for our in-house 500k+ JVMs and then thought, why not give back? Why not give back to the community? 💜

https://devblogs.microsoft.com/java/...ld-of-openjdk/

Today we are excited to announce the preview of the Microsoft Build of OpenJDK, a new no-cost Long-Term Support (LTS) distribution of OpenJDK that is open source and available for free for anyone to deploy anywhere. It includes binaries for Java 11, based on OpenJDK 11.0.10+9, on x64 server and desktop environments on macOS, Linux, and Windows. We are also publishing a new Early Access binary for Java 16 for Windows on ARM, based on the latest OpenJDK 16+36 release.

Visit microsoft.com/openjdk to download packages and installers.