>Oracle was clearly on the wrong side of history here. I agree insofar as that is a euphemism to mean that Oracle is not tightly aligned with the interests of

>Oracle was clearly on the wrong side of history here. I agree insofar as that is a euphemism to mean that Oracle is not tightly aligned with the interests of the left. Google is a big donor both in cash and in kind. Oracle is much less so. > The damage to the industry from allowing APIs to be copyrighted would have been immense. If I were to copy Google Sheets, offer an online service called "Google Sheets" and the only difference is that I modified a handful of implementation details so the service would run my spyware, and not Google's, then I would lose any copyright claims made by Google, hands down. You could make an identical argument that the web interface is an "API" and copying their code is a necessity of providing equivalent functionality. Google ripped off Sun and got away with it because the US legal process is a farce. Denying the right to copyright ANY code at all would be a morally defensible position, but that's not the ruling.