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Oracle does own copyright on the APIs (according to the Federal Circuit), but they do provide it in OpenJDK under the GPL. That means anyone is free to fork it,

Oracle does own copyright on the APIs (according to the Federal Circuit), but they do provide it in OpenJDK under the GPL. That means anyone is free to fork it, under the terms of the GPL. What Google did was copy the APIs, remove the copyright notice (arguing the APIs aren't copyrightable), and release the code under a different license. You can't do that under the GPL terms.

curt15 11y ago
Public Knowledge, an ally of the FSF, actually recommends independent implementation (like what Google did with Java and glibc) as a method for escaping the GPL: >If a developer does not want to be subject to the licensing terms of a library, he has a few options...Another option for a developer is to do what Google did when it created Android, and create replacement code libraries that are compatible with the existing code libraries, but which are new copyrighted works. Being "compatible" in this context means that the new libraries are called in the same way that the old libraries are--that is, using the same APIs. But the actual copyrighted code that is being called is a new work. https://www.publicknowledge.org/news-blog/blogs/gpl-does-not-depend-copyrightability-apis https://www.publicknowledge.org/news-blog/blogs/gpl-does-not...