Oracle and the End of Programming As We Know It
If Oracle prevails in its claim that APIs can be copyrighted, nearly every aspect of programming will be changed for the worse.
http://www.drdobbs.com/jvm/232901227
This is a really big deal and is the illogical extreme of allowing IP protection on source code. There is a chance, though, that the jury will award a fair use exemption and we can all go back to our lives, but it would not be shocking at all for the 12 clueless morons to like Oracle’s lawyers better than Google’s lawyers (few people know how thoroughly ‘evil’ Oracle is as they manage to stay mostly out of the press) and thus make it illegal to reproduce an API via reverse engineering. In the vast majority of the cases the API name must be identical (generally even including case) so how valuable would a competing API be if you had to rewrite your own source to make use of it? Plus, there are just so many ways to self-document an API through naming.
I never read the Java license (those things are damn near impossible to make sense of if you haven’t a law degree anyway (not to mention boring as hell)) but I do recall the point in time where Sun was basically forced to make Java open source or risk losing all the developers and as I recall they decided to make some portion open source. That Sun never complained about anything Google did before Oracle bought them makes me think that there isn’t a huge amount of evidence that Sun ever attempted to enforce any sort of infringement. Timing is everything, though, and Oracle can always state that, as new owners, they didn’t have the chance to object when the behavior was first manifest.
Personally I think that the only people who benefit from all these legal attacks are the lawyers. If Oracle wins Google will simply stop using the problematic bits, pay a fine and then move to something not quite as good and developers will have a really really good reason to get away from Java and onto the next thing. Of course I have never had a good opinion about Oracle or its CEO, so I am clearly twin fannied in this respect.
