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If I were to write an ISC licensed clean room implementation of Apple UIKit, would Apple be in the right to bury me? "The appeals court reversed the district c
by dsp1234 11y ago
If I were to write an ISC licensed clean room implementation of Apple UIKit, would Apple be in the right to bury me?
"The appeals court reversed the district court on the central issue, holding that the "structure, sequence and organization" of an API was copyrightable"[0]
That's pretty clear. Even if you re-implement every function by hand, if you keep the same API, then it can be a copyright infringement. Note that you may still have other defenses such as license agreements, or fair use. But this ruling considers copying API/function declarations the same as actual code.
[0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oracle_America,_Inc._v._Google,_Inc https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oracle_America,_Inc._v._Google....
- 0x0 11y agoHow did the original PC clones get away with reverse engineering / re-implementing the IBM BIOS? Or alternatives to MS-DOS like DR-DOS? Is it just that nobody thought to use this attack?
- debacle 11y agoI don't think anyone but Oracle would stoop so low as to use this attack.
- jhall1468 11y agoGive it some time.
- joe563323 11y agoWhat this means to me is do not use Oracle MSSQL use mariadb https://mariadb.org/ https://mariadb.org/ instead.
- crpatino 11y agoI'd be wary to use the opensource alternative that shares APIs with Oracle's. Postgress sounds like a safer bet to my ears.
- xigency 11y agoIn Halt and Catch Fire, the show on AMC, this becomes a plot point for a few episodes in the first season.
- dsp1234 11y agoA little late on the reply... This is a brand new ruling. Indeed, I'm not sure a lot of legal people thought SSO of apis was a copyrightable artifact. Otherwise, it's likely that a lot of stuff wouldn't have been created in the same way (Google's work on dalvik, all of the "aws compatiable api" cloud tools, etc). The key thing here is that even though they ruling is saying that SSO is copyrightable, that still means the normal defenses against copyright infringement are still available (ex: fair use). It also means that re-implementing a clean room compatible implementation of an API could still mean licensing fees, and thus less interoperability. Think about open source software that implements a compatibility layer to interoperate with a closed source API. Just copying that SSO could be infringement, and thus some people are likely going to be less interested in creating that software if there are possible legal repercussions.