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I think if Oracle wins, the best thing that could happen is IBM immediately suing for infringment on SQL. And since Oracle built their whole business on the SQL

I think if Oracle wins, the best thing that could happen is IBM immediately suing for infringment on SQL. And since Oracle built their whole business on the SQL standard, IBM should ask for an amount high enough that it's sure to bankrupt Oracle. I believe that's a fair price to pay for breaking the software industry.

justicezyx 7y ago
That is underestimating the so-called old guards alliance. There old school IT providers are quite conscious about their imminent irrelevance giving the trend in society and tech. They know very well who are their common enemy.
- adrianN 7y ago
  IBM has a lot of money, Oracle has a lot of money. If IBM took a large chunk of Oracle's money, they could survive for decades more without selling anything.
- bhaak 7y ago
  How much of an IT provider is IBM today? They certainly don't produce hardware anymore. I thought IBM is mostly a consultant company now and the goal of a consultant company is to make money. Considering that I don't think IBM and Oracle would be on the same page on who they regard as enemy.
  - eklavya 7y ago
    "the goal of a consultant company is to make money" As opposed to which company ?
    - quaquaqua1 7y ago
      HP's hardware operation
    - bhaak 7y ago
      Don't take sentence without the context. I meant to say that IBM likely doesn't have any deterrents to sue Oracle as they are no longer on the same page with regards to their business markets. Weakening Oracle won't affect IBM's business.
      - tssva 7y ago
        Is it taking it out of context when you only provide the context after the fact? That being said Oracle and IBM still compete in many markets such as cloud computing and software platforms. Since Red Hat became part of IBM the areas where they compete has increased lately.
        pjmlp 7y ago
        They also have been seated at the table with Sun since the early days of Java.
        bhaak 7y ago
        The context was the OP I was replying to. But the information that IBM and Oracle are still competitors in many markets is explicitly what I was unsure about. Thanks for reminding me about the Red Hat acquisition, I completely forgot about that already.
AnimalMuppet 7y ago
And, since the issue is copyright instead of patents, it doesn't expire after 20 years. Oracle isn't in the clear just because SQL came out in the 1970s (IIRC). Even in the 1960s, they aren't in the clear.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
speedplane 7y ago
> I believe that's a fair price to pay for breaking the software industry. There is a theoretical legal question of whether APIs should be copyrightable, and then there are the practical issues. As a purely legal matter, there is a strong (but not slam-dunk) case that an API is copyrightable. As a practical matter however, everyone in the software industry has been operating as if APIs were free to copy for decades, and enforcing such a copyright would break a ton of things. Practical effects of a legal ruling are generally not "officially" considered by the judge, but more-often-than-not, they're operating behind the scenes and judges craft their opinions to support an established status-quo.
- m463 7y ago
  There's an interesting analogy with microprocessor architecture.. I believe the Z80 was a copy of the 8080 architecture - it used the same binary opcodes but it used an assembly language with different words. So an API is at source level, so it uses words which seem more aligned with copyright of text. I wonder what would happen if the api had the text "oracle" in the function names? p.s. and amusingly when intel did the 8086, it was source level compatible with the 8080, but not binary.
  - speedplane 7y ago
    > I wonder what would happen if the api had the text "oracle" in the function names? Wouldn't affect copyright law too much, but Oracle could probably raise a trademark infringement claim too.
    - alexis_fr 7y ago
      So Ubuntu is open-source, but if I fork it, it comes with « Ubuntu » in package names, therefore I’m infringing on their trademark?
      - bmn__ 7y ago
        Yes, but only because during your fork, you neglected to run the "white label" script that replaces the trademarked words and graphics. IOW, what you describe is not a problem in practice.
speedplane 7y ago
> I think if Oracle wins, the best thing that could happen is IBM immediately suing for infringment on SQL. IBM's potential claim on SQL wouldn't be a threat to Oracle. IBM uses Java heavily. The most likely outcome is that the two companies reach a deal to cross-license with maybe a modest amount of money exchanged, freeing them each to go after everyone else.
- wbl 7y ago
  IMB cannot be sued for using code Oracle granted a perpetual license to them for, namely OpenJDK.
  - pjmlp 7y ago
    IBM has their own implementations.
    - pulse7 7y ago
      ...and has paid license to Oracle/Sun for it...
      - pjmlp 7y ago
        That is the thing Google fanbase keeps missing out, there are plenty of JVM implementations out there, although the number has gone a little down since OpenJDK and GraalVM introductions. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Java_virtual_machines#Proprietary_implementations https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Java_virtual_machines#... Even some non-compliant like MicroEJ, https://www.microej.com/product/sdk/ https://www.microej.com/product/sdk/ None of them was ever sued, because they play by the rules, instead of playing the "I am the big boy, I follow no rules" that is Google's stance at this.
        dtech 7y ago
        What are the rules Google broke?
flomo 7y ago
The part that's missing from Ars' story is when IBM and Oracle shook hands and decided that SQL was a super-awesome standard that everyone else in the industry should be able adopt for free. Yay! So not happening, sry. Java was different because Sun was actively trying to prevent the "SQL" or "UNIX" semi-compatible fork scenario. IANAL, but bad analogy.
- nwallin 7y ago
  Sun and Google shook hands and decided Java was a super awesome standard that everyone should be able to adopt for free. Yay! Sure, Sun sold Java (and the farm) to Oracle, but what if IBM sold SQL to Google? Do the same takesie-backsies apply?
  - flomo 7y ago
    Totally untrue. Sun had all sorts of legal contracts committees and procedures and testing suites to manage java forking into different environments. Sun sued Microsoft for $1 BILLION dollars for violating their Java license. Sun and Google had negotiations about licensing Java, and they certainly did not end with shaking hands. Old post, so just saying this guy is factual-free.
pulse7 7y ago
The problem here is that US government wants to "maximize the USA IP interests" and supports Oracle in this case although they haven't studied the implications in details... So we have an "elephant in the porcelain shop" here and this elephant may destroy a lot of things...
- tssva 7y ago
  What we have is an adminstration with close ties to Oracle leadership trying to maximize Oracle profit.
  - sporkland 7y ago
    I thought I remember seeing in previous threads that this opinion and support for Oracle predated the Trump administration.
    - tssva 7y ago
      When this case previously was submitted to the Supreme Court the SG's position was that API's were copyrightable but that Google had persuasive arguments that their use may be proper under the fair use doctrine and instead of hearing the case the fair use claims should be allowed to played out in lower courts first. The current SG's opinion that Google's fair use claims aren't reasonable is new to this administration.
- rstuart4133 7y ago
  And here I was thinking it was the DOJ's way of thanking big Trump supporter.
rbanffy 7y ago
> amount high enough that it's sure to bankrupt Oracle And hopefully leave a radioactive crater large enough to dissuade anyone from ever trying this one again.
- coldpie 7y ago
  I've been wondering if it would be possible to create an Internet movement large enough to impact Oracle's bottom line. Encourage employees and managers to immediately drop their business with Oracle, both as customers and as vendors. Encourage Oracle employees to quit and find more ethical places to work. Oracle has crossed a line here, and I wonder if we can kill that beast before they kill us. Or at least take them down with us.
  - bpizzi 7y ago
    This has already beginning to happen. Almost all of $work's customers (industrial plants, all sizes) have Buying Guidelines that forbids a new solution to be bought if it needs an Oracle database.
  - rbanffy 7y ago
    > if it would be possible to create an Internet movement large enough to impact Oracle's bottom line We did that. That's why they bought and tried to kill MySQL.
    - philjohn 7y ago
      Which was amusing as Postgres is by most measures the better system (yes, I know streaming replication wasn't easy on earlier versions and that was a definite plus for MySQL). Amazon had a celebration when they turned off their last Oracle system ...
  - imglorp 7y ago
    > drop their business I doubt it. Oracle has done a great job dissuading new business by suing customers for discussing benchmarks, suing customers for discussing security, auditing customers, jacking up prices, jacking up penalties, suing everyone else, etc... Plenty of reasons to drop already. Everyone left stays because they're in deep and migration would be worse.
alberth 7y ago
Is that even possible given that SQL is an international standard (ISO/IEC 9075)? https://www.iso.org/standard/63555.html https://www.iso.org/standard/63555.html
- rtkwe 7y ago
  Check the proposal dates for that, it's 2013 well after the infringement IBM would be suing over.
- gpm 7y ago
  As far as I know "international standard" is a term that carries no legal weight in the realm of copyright, do you have any reason to believe otherwise? ISO is not some organization created by the statute with the right to take your copyrights and make them public domain...

justicezyx 7y ago

That is underestimating the so-called old guards alliance. There old school IT providers are quite conscious about their imminent irrelevance giving the trend in society and tech. They know very well who are their common enemy.

adrianN 7y ago
IBM has a lot of money, Oracle has a lot of money. If IBM took a large chunk of Oracle's money, they could survive for decades more without selling anything.
bhaak 7y ago
How much of an IT provider is IBM today? They certainly don't produce hardware anymore. I thought IBM is mostly a consultant company now and the goal of a consultant company is to make money. Considering that I don't think IBM and Oracle would be on the same page on who they regard as enemy.
- eklavya 7y ago
  "the goal of a consultant company is to make money" As opposed to which company ?
  - quaquaqua1 7y ago
    HP's hardware operation
  - bhaak 7y ago
    Don't take sentence without the context. I meant to say that IBM likely doesn't have any deterrents to sue Oracle as they are no longer on the same page with regards to their business markets. Weakening Oracle won't affect IBM's business.
    - tssva 7y ago
      Is it taking it out of context when you only provide the context after the fact? That being said Oracle and IBM still compete in many markets such as cloud computing and software platforms. Since Red Hat became part of IBM the areas where they compete has increased lately.
      - pjmlp 7y ago
        They also have been seated at the table with Sun since the early days of Java.
      - bhaak 7y ago
        The context was the OP I was replying to. But the information that IBM and Oracle are still competitors in many markets is explicitly what I was unsure about. Thanks for reminding me about the Red Hat acquisition, I completely forgot about that already.

AnimalMuppet 7y ago

And, since the issue is copyright instead of patents, it doesn't expire after 20 years. Oracle isn't in the clear just because SQL came out in the 1970s (IIRC). Even in the 1960s, they aren't in the clear.

deleted 7y ago
[deleted]

speedplane 7y ago

> I believe that's a fair price to pay for breaking the software industry. There is a theoretical legal question of whether APIs should be copyrightable, and then there are the practical issues. As a purely legal matter, there is a strong (but not slam-dunk) case that an API is copyrightable. As a practical matter however, everyone in the software industry has been operating as if APIs were free to copy for decades, and enforcing such a copyright would break a ton of things. Practical effects of a legal ruling are generally not "officially" considered by the judge, but more-often-than-not, they're operating behind the scenes and judges craft their opinions to support an established status-quo.

m463 7y ago
There's an interesting analogy with microprocessor architecture.. I believe the Z80 was a copy of the 8080 architecture - it used the same binary opcodes but it used an assembly language with different words. So an API is at source level, so it uses words which seem more aligned with copyright of text. I wonder what would happen if the api had the text "oracle" in the function names? p.s. and amusingly when intel did the 8086, it was source level compatible with the 8080, but not binary.
- speedplane 7y ago
  > I wonder what would happen if the api had the text "oracle" in the function names? Wouldn't affect copyright law too much, but Oracle could probably raise a trademark infringement claim too.
  - alexis_fr 7y ago
    So Ubuntu is open-source, but if I fork it, it comes with « Ubuntu » in package names, therefore I’m infringing on their trademark?
    - bmn__ 7y ago
      Yes, but only because during your fork, you neglected to run the "white label" script that replaces the trademarked words and graphics. IOW, what you describe is not a problem in practice.

speedplane 7y ago

> I think if Oracle wins, the best thing that could happen is IBM immediately suing for infringment on SQL. IBM's potential claim on SQL wouldn't be a threat to Oracle. IBM uses Java heavily. The most likely outcome is that the two companies reach a deal to cross-license with maybe a modest amount of money exchanged, freeing them each to go after everyone else.

wbl 7y ago
IMB cannot be sued for using code Oracle granted a perpetual license to them for, namely OpenJDK.
- pjmlp 7y ago
  IBM has their own implementations.
  - pulse7 7y ago
    ...and has paid license to Oracle/Sun for it...
    - pjmlp 7y ago
      That is the thing Google fanbase keeps missing out, there are plenty of JVM implementations out there, although the number has gone a little down since OpenJDK and GraalVM introductions. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Java_virtual_machines#Proprietary_implementations https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Java_virtual_machines#... Even some non-compliant like MicroEJ, https://www.microej.com/product/sdk/ https://www.microej.com/product/sdk/ None of them was ever sued, because they play by the rules, instead of playing the "I am the big boy, I follow no rules" that is Google's stance at this.
      - dtech 7y ago
        What are the rules Google broke?

flomo 7y ago

The part that's missing from Ars' story is when IBM and Oracle shook hands and decided that SQL was a super-awesome standard that everyone else in the industry should be able adopt for free. Yay! So not happening, sry. Java was different because Sun was actively trying to prevent the "SQL" or "UNIX" semi-compatible fork scenario. IANAL, but bad analogy.

nwallin 7y ago
Sun and Google shook hands and decided Java was a super awesome standard that everyone should be able to adopt for free. Yay! Sure, Sun sold Java (and the farm) to Oracle, but what if IBM sold SQL to Google? Do the same takesie-backsies apply?
- flomo 7y ago
  Totally untrue. Sun had all sorts of legal contracts committees and procedures and testing suites to manage java forking into different environments. Sun sued Microsoft for $1 BILLION dollars for violating their Java license. Sun and Google had negotiations about licensing Java, and they certainly did not end with shaking hands. Old post, so just saying this guy is factual-free.

pulse7 7y ago

The problem here is that US government wants to "maximize the USA IP interests" and supports Oracle in this case although they haven't studied the implications in details... So we have an "elephant in the porcelain shop" here and this elephant may destroy a lot of things...

tssva 7y ago
What we have is an adminstration with close ties to Oracle leadership trying to maximize Oracle profit.
- sporkland 7y ago
  I thought I remember seeing in previous threads that this opinion and support for Oracle predated the Trump administration.
  - tssva 7y ago
    When this case previously was submitted to the Supreme Court the SG's position was that API's were copyrightable but that Google had persuasive arguments that their use may be proper under the fair use doctrine and instead of hearing the case the fair use claims should be allowed to played out in lower courts first. The current SG's opinion that Google's fair use claims aren't reasonable is new to this administration.
rstuart4133 7y ago
And here I was thinking it was the DOJ's way of thanking big Trump supporter.

rbanffy 7y ago

> amount high enough that it's sure to bankrupt Oracle And hopefully leave a radioactive crater large enough to dissuade anyone from ever trying this one again.

coldpie 7y ago
I've been wondering if it would be possible to create an Internet movement large enough to impact Oracle's bottom line. Encourage employees and managers to immediately drop their business with Oracle, both as customers and as vendors. Encourage Oracle employees to quit and find more ethical places to work. Oracle has crossed a line here, and I wonder if we can kill that beast before they kill us. Or at least take them down with us.
- bpizzi 7y ago
  This has already beginning to happen. Almost all of $work's customers (industrial plants, all sizes) have Buying Guidelines that forbids a new solution to be bought if it needs an Oracle database.
- rbanffy 7y ago
  > if it would be possible to create an Internet movement large enough to impact Oracle's bottom line We did that. That's why they bought and tried to kill MySQL.
  - philjohn 7y ago
    Which was amusing as Postgres is by most measures the better system (yes, I know streaming replication wasn't easy on earlier versions and that was a definite plus for MySQL). Amazon had a celebration when they turned off their last Oracle system ...
- imglorp 7y ago
  > drop their business I doubt it. Oracle has done a great job dissuading new business by suing customers for discussing benchmarks, suing customers for discussing security, auditing customers, jacking up prices, jacking up penalties, suing everyone else, etc... Plenty of reasons to drop already. Everyone left stays because they're in deep and migration would be worse.

alberth 7y ago

Is that even possible given that SQL is an international standard (ISO/IEC 9075)? https://www.iso.org/standard/63555.html https://www.iso.org/standard/63555.html

rtkwe 7y ago
Check the proposal dates for that, it's 2013 well after the infringement IBM would be suing over.
gpm 7y ago
As far as I know "international standard" is a term that carries no legal weight in the realm of copyright, do you have any reason to believe otherwise? ISO is not some organization created by the statute with the right to take your copyrights and make them public domain...