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The Obama administration has asked the United States Supreme Court to decline Google's appeal against a 2014 federal appeals court ruling finding copyright infringement of Oracle's Java code:
The case involves how much copyright protection should extend to the Java programing language. Oracle won a federal appeals court ruling last year that allows it to copyright parts of Java, whilst Google argues it should be free to use Java without paying a licencing fee. Google, which used Java to design its Android smartphone operating system, appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court. The high court then asked the Obama administration in January for its opinion on whether it should take the case because the federal government has a strong interest. The Federal Trade Commission, for instance, must ensure companies do not break antitrust laws when claiming software copyright protection against each other.
According to Google, an Oracle victory would obstruct "an enormous amount of innovation" because software developers would not be able to freely build on each others' work. But Oracle says effective copyright protection is the key to software innovation.
In the court filing on Tuesday, U.S. Solicitor General Donald Verrilli said Google's argument that the code is not entitled to copyright protection lacks merit and did not need to be reviewed by the Supreme Court. Verrilli added that Google had raised important concerns about the effect that enforcement of Oracle's copyright could have on software development, but said those issues could be addressed via further proceedings on Google's separate "fair use" defence in San Francisco federal court.
Google v. Oracle, U.S. Supreme Court, No. 14-410
[Editor's Comment: Original Submission]
(Score: 3, Insightful) by FatPhil on Thursday May 28 2015, @05:17PM
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 1) by Placenta on Thursday May 28 2015, @05:22PM
Java's going to be around forever, regardless of what happens in this particular case. There is more Java code out there than you could ever hope to imagine. A lot of it will be in use for many years to come.
(Score: 2, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 28 2015, @06:21PM
Hah! They said the same thing about COBOL!! And it didn't have headers either!
(Score: 2) by tangomargarine on Friday May 29 2015, @12:09AM
Are you kidding? From my brief stint in COBOL-land (a single course in college) I remember writing 5 pages of string declarations for a program with 2 pages of actual code.
Okay so maybe not really headers, but still.
"Is that really true?" "I just spent the last hour telling you to think for yourself! Didn't you hear anything I said?"
(Score: 2) by Nerdfest on Thursday May 28 2015, @07:50PM
There are many languages a lot worse than Java. It sucks that Oracle owns it, but Java and other JVM based languages are pretty good in general in my opinion. If you find Java too strictly typed or verbose, try Groovy. I recently cut the amount of source in one large package by about 50% by switching to to Groovy. It took about half an hour to switch the source to Groovy, delete a lot of the boilerplate code and do a minor change to the build process. Less code to maintain, more readability, and still works perfectly with Java.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by FatPhil on Friday May 29 2015, @09:02AM
No language apart from Java that I know of would take 5 major versions of the language to realise that the inefficiency caused by the above was horrifically stupid, and then, rather than fixing the problem, simply cache all pre-made integers between -128 and 127, so that the overhead would be a bit lower. For 256 Integers, that is.
No language apart from Java that I know of has such baroque syntax for dealing with bignums, in particular when trying to use not-an-object integers as parameters to bignum methods. ``y = x.multiply(BigInteger.valueOf(10));'' is somehow deemed superior to ``y = x*10;''
No language apart from Java that I know would first make System.in mutable, and then when people started changing it make it final, thus immutable, and then later add a setter setIn() so that you can *change the value of a final variable*.
It's a turd, there's no other word for it. And like COBOL, yes it will still be around in decades. The IT world's like that.
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 5, Insightful) by WillR on Thursday May 28 2015, @06:10PM
Software development would all move to countries where copyright is a joke... how's your Mandarin?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 28 2015, @06:43PM
I think it's bad, but I don't think it's that bad. The Regents of UC Berkeley have already placed the entire OS under the BSD license. They are not suddenly going to turn around and clamp down on syscalls.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Adamsjas on Thursday May 28 2015, @08:08PM
Not all doom and gloom.
Most of those organizations will simply declare their API interface files as open source. Not many are as short sighted as Oracle.
Trying to lock up your API definitions is like trying to charge admission to walk on the sidewalk leading to your supermarket. With three other markets across the street, and another one every 6 blocks, it won't take long for that lesson to be learned.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 28 2015, @10:47PM
> Most of those organizations will simply declare their API interface files as open source.
Great. And what about abandonware? No business will ever clone an API that they can't get official copyright permission for.
When copyright is used to change the default permissions from "allow all" to "deny allow" the result is ossification where all the oddball corner cases turn into dead-ends instead of opportunities. Unfortunately it is those odd-ball corner-cases where creativity is the most extreme.