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How is an API different than any other product specification? Why can't e.g. Panasonic sue other manufacturers for making an 18650 form factor battery cell? Why
by MertsA 9y ago
How is an API different than any other product specification? Why can't e.g. Panasonic sue other manufacturers for making an 18650 form factor battery cell? Why can't Ford license the form factor that every car uses for a gas nozzle? There's fundamentally not a way to create your own compatible implementation without using the same API.
- treis 9y agoPanasonic and Ford own copyrights on their CAD drawings for those items. So I can't just CTRL C and CTRL V and send them off to a manufacturer to get my own stuff made. I can, however, measure those things and create my own drawings without violating copyright because I am not reproducing the work.
- chii 9y agoSo google could've looked at all existing Java source code, and infer the api? But the resulting output is indistinguishable from just copying.
- UncleMeat 9y agoReflection means that you can, through automation, observe the complete set of public classes, methods, and fields in the java api without ever looking at docs. You can put together a script to do this in 15 minutes.