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The case Google v. Oracle America, previously named Oracle America, Inc. v. Google, Inc., is being heard by the US Supreme Court. At the center of the case is whether programmers require permission to use an application programming interface (API). The outcome will determine the extent to which APIs can or should be copyrighted. If it turns out that copyright can be used to lock competitors out of using any given API, then there are severe repercussions for software development, as all programs these days rely heavily on pre-existing libararies which are then accessed via APIs.
Google: The case for open innovation:
The Court will review whether copyright should extend to nuts-and-bolts software interfaces, and if so, whether it can be fair to use those interfaces to create new technologies, as the jury in this case found. Software interfaces are the access points that allow computer programs to connect to each other, like plugs and sockets. Imagine a world in which every time you went to a different building, you needed a different plug to fit the proprietary socket, and no one was allowed to create adapters.
This case will make a difference for everyone who touches technology—from startups to major tech platforms, software developers to product manufacturers, businesses to consumers—and we're pleased that many leading representatives of those groups will be filing their own briefs to support our position.
At bottom in the case is the issue of whether copyright law bars the commonplace practice of software reimplementation, "[t]he process of writing new software to perform certain functions of a legacy product." (Google brief p.7) Here, Google had repurposed certain functional elements of Java SE (less that 0.5% of Java SE overall, according to Google's brief, p. 8) in its Android operating system for the sake of interoperability—enabling Java apps to work with Android and Android apps to work with Java, and enabling Java developers to build apps for both platforms without needing to learn the new conventions and structure of an entirely new platform.
Devclass: Google says nature of APIs under threat as Oracle case heads to US Supreme Court:
The case – ten years in making – centres on Oracle's claims that its Java patents and copyrights were infringed by Google when the search giant created its Android mobile operating system. An initial ruling in Google's favour was overturned on appeal, and the case is finally due to land in the Supreme Court this year. Google filed its opening brief for the justices this week.
When was the last time, outside of school, when you yourself have written a program entirely from scratch and not used even a single set of application programming interfaces? Yeah. Thought so.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday January 14 2020, @09:38PM (2 children)
Trump never had to beg on his website for a room, thus Trump is more right (at least on open source and free as in speech software) than Stallman! What's the reasoning here? First, it's Einstein must know a lot about socialism because he knows a lot about physics. Now, it's Stallman must be wrong because his lifestyle and abrasive personality(ies) requires him to look for a room every few months.
You are. Your cut is free web search and socializing.
(Score: 2, Disagree) by barbara hudson on Tuesday January 14 2020, @11:35PM (1 child)
As for stalman, more of us would have made more money working independently if free software hadn't given people that software should be free, forcing the monetization of software as a service in the hands of a few multinational companies that are basically monopolies. Do you like not having nearly as much choice in browsers as you did 20 years ago? Do you like being data mined because everything that we used to be able to do locally 30 years ago (speech recognition, text-to-speech, home automation) on a win3 computer with 4 meg of ram now needs a network connection the better to spy on you and collect both your data and monthly fees?
Because that's what happened. Free software got people out of the purchase of software, driving independent producers out of business. So we're stuck with either Microsoft office or libreoffice. Thanks for nothing!
Or look at how shitty every free operating system has become in just the last 5 years. Fragmentation sucks. Distro hopping was always a thing, but lately they've all gone down the tubes.
Since they're all equally shitty, this left an opening for Microsoft to make their OS crappier by forced upgrades and advertising. After all, there never will be a year of Linux on the desktop.
There's no excuse for a machine that has NO servers running to have over 200 processes running while it sits there waiting for the user to log in. No wonder performance on quad core machines with 2 threads per core is worse than a single core machine from almost 20 years ago. The hardware engineers giveth , the bloatware taketh away.
With real competition for clients purchasing dollars, there'd be more incentive to increase performance via smarter code, with knock-on benefits of less energy consumption and less hardware obsolescence because "the machine has gotten slower and slower with every update."
See what killing the market for buying software got us? What good is "free as in beer" if someone took a big dump in the keg?
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(Score: 4, Insightful) by khallow on Wednesday January 15 2020, @03:10AM
You're thus not worth $100 to them.
As to the RMS stuff, you got me. I'm stupefied by the sheer banality and irrelevance of your complaint, which is impressive even by internet standards. Now, all you have to do is show this complaint somehow has something to do with RMS. It certainly has nothing to do with his ability to get a room.