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AFAIK the issue is not using the API, it's reimplementing it verbatim. For example, AWS has done this a lot - many of AWS's services are 'drop in' for open sou
by staticassertion 7y ago
AFAIK the issue is not using the API, it's reimplementing it verbatim.
For example, AWS has done this a lot - many of AWS's services are 'drop in' for open source projects, making it easy to migrate off of, say, RabbitMQ, or Cassandra, or Mongo, and over to SQS or one of their databases.
If Google loses those open source projects could protect themselves against this by copyrighting their APIs.
- hackerbabz 7y agoNow I’m even more confused. That sounds completely different from copyrighting an API. Why shouldn’t a company be able to copyright the implementation? That’s the work they did.
- staticassertion 7y agoWell perhaps I'm the one that's confused then. > Why shouldn’t a company be able to copyright the implementation? This is what a software license is - software licenses are, to my knowledge, just a form of copyright. The question here is if the API is copyrightable, not just the implementation. In my opinion it is, the API is, as you say, part of the work they did. Honestly I feel like I have to be missing something. Articles like this exclaim that there is a consensus among programmers that I'm wrong, so I feel like I've got to have misunderstood.