My wish is that this case be decided clearly. Either APIs can be copyrighted, or they cannot. Either outcome has potentially good consequences, for open source

My wish is that this case be decided clearly. Either APIs can be copyrighted, or they cannot. Either outcome has potentially good consequences, for open source in particular. Obviously if APIs cannot be copyrighted, then a ton of open source work geared towards making things compatible remains viable. Wine is one of the most obvious, but I can think of many others. Efforts to port CUDA code to non-Nvidia hardware. A potential effort to reimplement SwiftUI. And there are many more. On the other hand, if APIs can be copyrighted, then buyers now know that there's a single-source risk for any API that's not released under a permissive open source license. So, to continue this example, Apple has the legal right to shut down any port of code written in SwiftUI to non-Apple hardware, and similarly for CUDA. This would immediately increase interest in actually open source alternatives; Flutter already exists, a Vulkan based runtime could be developed for TensorFlow, etc. Sadly, I think this outcome is unlikely. What's more likely is that the ruling will be specific to the facts of the case. That basically means that there won't be clear guidance that you need to run away from proprietary APIs, but also not clear guidance that you can continue to rely on open source interop projects. Rather, any time any of this gets sticky, the only way through the mess will be to pay lawyers millions of dollars. That will have the effect of making it easier for the big players to dominate the market further, and harder for independent people to play. That's very much to the advantage of those in power, so I'm pretty sure that's what we'll see.