7 ms·

Developer Freedom At Stake As Oracle Clings To Java API Copyrights

77 points by mitmads 14y ago

brown9-2 14y ago
While Oracle is hard to sympathize with, the actual article never elaborates on it's inflammatory statement as how "developer freedom" is at stake (or what that phrase even means).
- delinka 14y ago
  I can't tell if this is criticism alone, or if you're also asking the question. It seems these articles and discussions assume that the reader is all-knowing when it comes to the IP issues developers could face in their careers. Allow me to attempt to fill in the gaps. When you write code, in the U.S. you hold a copyright to it at the moment you put the characters onto disk. In the case of work-for-hire (i.e. you are employed as a software author by your company), the company holds that copyright. No one else has permission to use, copy or distribute the software without the express permission of the copyright owner. Licenses are the mechanism used to bestow rights upon other users (or, in the case of Open Source Software, potentially other developers) of the software. Switch gears a bit: other companies (vendors) providing interesting systems (those that you or your company are interested in using) also provide information on how to interoperate with their systems and libraries. When using the C family of languages, this information is provided in a machine-readable format known as a "header" - the header file is source code that describes the procedures made available inside the vendor's code libraries. You include this header in your own project so the compiler can validate that you're calling the library code correctly. They've given you a binary library and not the source to the library to help in protecting their rights to their original code. Now, after years of offering a particular product on the market, a vendor (Vendor A) decides to discontinue offering this particular product regardless of the fact there are numerous client who still use this product and are willing to continue to pay for support. They are not willing, for whatever reasons, to completely overhaul their own systems and incur the immense expense in changing to this vendor's completely new and different product. Company B steps in offering an interoperable replacement to that old system that's been discontinued by Vendor A. Company B created a completely legal replacement for this system because they did not use Vendor A's source code. They created a "clean room" implementation of the system. As far as the client's systems are concerned, the interfaces into Company B's solution look exactly like Vendor A's system, to the clients network, employees and customers carry on with business as usual. Courts have ruled that creating systems for such interoperability is legal and necessary. Without such recognition, vendors have the opportunity to lock their customers into the vendor's products. Interoperability is defined by interfaces to systems and libraries. The interface into a library is an Application Programming Interface, or API. The API has pretty much been declared to not be of the expressive type required to obtain copyright protection. If API's become completely protectable by copyright (and thus require a license to use), companies can then limit the ability for others to provide interoperable systems thus limiting competition. In this case, the legal freedom of developers to create tools and apps around an existing system is severely limited and perhaps even eliminated, regardless of the fact that these developers didn't use any code from the vendor in the process.
cft 14y ago
Choosing Java and Dalvic was probably a mistake for Android.
- blinkingled 14y ago
  Not buying Sun was the mistake. $7B is all that would've taken (less if they sold the os and hardware division) to make the computing world a better place.
  - smrtinsert 14y ago
    7B is pocket change to them, completely agree. I was shocked to hear they let it pass iirc. I figured they were playing hardball and it just blew up in their face.
    - MichaelApproved 14y ago
      Or did they make the right decision? Just because they have the money doesn't mean they need to spend it. Did litigating cost them 7 billion? The legal win shows they made the right choice in not spending 7 billion on what they are allowed to use for "free".
  - trust-me 14y ago
    IMHO you're over simplifying. Oracle was better positioned to capitalize on Sun assets, so they were likely to pay more than Google. Microsoft or Apple may have decided to bid to prevent Google from acquisition. Merging with a huge enterprise is always painful.
    - protomyth 14y ago
      I'm not so sure given the results. Google (with selling the hardware / chip division to Fujitsu) would have done pretty well given all the tech projects Sun had. If Apple had bid to prevent (patents I suppose), I wonder if ZFS would have finally been on OS X. Java would have been the truly odd man out in that acquisition. I could see Java being sold to IBM.
ceautery 14y ago
What a bunch of jackasses. Sometimes I think the only difference between Oracle and SCO is scale.
- deleted 14y ago
  [deleted]
- jacquesm 14y ago
  > Sometimes I think the only difference between Oracle and SCO is scale. Whenever you think that you should probably read up on both Oracle and SCO. SCO was a dying company that tried every dirty trick in the book to blackmail the world into giving it a free ride to newfound riches based on ridiculous claims. SCO was backed behind the scenes by Microsoft simply to attack Linux which Microsoft saw as a threat to its bottom line. As such SCO was really nothing but a proxy for Microsoft in the dirtiest fight that the IT industry has ever seen. Oracle is a very successful company that bought the assets of another dying company (SUN) in order to safeguard a line of business and in order to buy the IP rights of that dying company, which included Java. Note that I'm not defending what Oracle is doing here but the differences between SCO and Oracle are enormous, and are certainly not limited to scale. In many ways the Oracle case is much more dangerous because it now openly attacks a well established principle (interoperability) and Oracle actually has the resources to do real damage. For now that damage is limited to Oracle shooting in its own foot (Damaging the Java brand in a very clear and concrete way) but that could easily change. Google has a very long standing habit of doing or buying things that are illegal (youtube, books, caching the web, images) and getting away with them because they have deeper pockets than the copyright owners or because they strike a deal when cornered. SCO's claims aginst linux ('10's of thousands of lines') were absolutely unfounded, Oracle's claims against Dalvik seem to have at the surface at least some merit. And Oracle is not simply going to give up on what it perceives to be its right simply because the party they believe is infringing is Google. Still, I'm rooting for Google to win this one and for Oracle to lose this one, the consequences of the fall-out of an Oracle win would be pretty disastrous.
  - danieldk 14y ago
    SCO was a dying company that tried every dirty trick in the book to blackmail the world into giving it a free ride to newfound riches based on ridiculous claims. Actually, ironically, it's not SCO that tried to sue every Linux vendor, but the Linux company formerly known as Caldera Systems (of Caldera OpenLinux). They purchased SCO's UNIX business and renamed themselves to The SCO Group. The real SCO was renamed to Tarantella. It's sad, not only is the name of 'old SCO' forever associated with attacks that they did not participate in, the Linux ecosystem was actually under attack by a (former) Linux company.
fruit 14y ago
oh god how could this happen im so surprised
smrtinsert 14y ago
Why didn't Google just buy Java, way to drop the ball.
- warmwaffles 14y ago
  Didn't have a big enough stake in it to justify the purchase of Sun. Oracle however, did have a lot riding on Java succeeding and removing the Sun Hardware division as a competitor.
  - fauigerzigerk 14y ago
    The Sun hardware division wasn't competing with Oracle at the time. I think they bought Sun because they thought it made sense to sell software + hardware and because they didn't want IBM to have Java. If Larry Ellison hadn't underestimated the cloud trend, the takeover probably wouldn't have happened. Oracle has been very successful with its M&A activities, but this one is clearly a complete desaster.
bdunbar 14y ago
If Oracle gets heavy handed with Java ... doesn't that just mean it's time to use something else? Am I missing something?
- salmanapk 14y ago
  What Java alternatives do we have other than Mono/C#?
  - jrockway 14y ago
    All the other programming languages. What makes C# and Java particularly special?
    - djhworld 14y ago
      Huge communities, vast library ecosystem, widely taught, used a lot in industry
  - danieldk 14y ago
    That depends on what you think is important in Java. The language? Plenty of alternatives. The virtual machine? Not so much. Or perhaps even the class library?
- A1kmm 14y ago
  The legal precedent if the case is reversed on appeal potentially extends beyond just Java; the article is essentially about the ruling that APIs can't be copyrighted, and that numerous amicus curiae briefs argued in favour of APIs being copyrightable. If APIs can be copyrighted, it would seriously harm interoperability. For example, if the ruling holds, someone could make a payments service which replaces Paypal so seamlessly that to integrate it you can just change the 'paypal.com' string for 'competitorsbrand.com' without redoing all the work you did for Paypal integration. This would be bad for Paypal but would be great for making the market far more efficient. Similarly, if it is reversed on appeal, Wine and Mono could be considered copyright violations and sued by Microsoft. If it extended to non-software interfaces a reversal could be even worse - imagine if the idea that turning the round wheel in front of the driver causes a car to move in the corresponding direction was a copyrighted interface? In that particular case, Copyright in the US wouldn't have expired until 1985, so other manufacturers would have needed to come up with different interfaces, and switching makes would have been hard.
znowi 14y ago
I see Oracle as cancer of the corporate world. An old dinosaur who happened to slog into 2013. The new generation of young and socially responsible will hopefully put an end to their kind.
CurtMonash 14y ago
There's no way an API should be covered by copyright, for the judge's reasons. If you can get a patent on it, good luck to you; otherwise, it's not proper IP. Patenting an API would be like patenting a UI -- reasonable under the law. http://www.dbms2.com/2010/03/23/software-innovation-patent/ http://www.dbms2.com/2010/03/23/software-innovation-patent/ Whether the law should be changed -- as I think it should be -- to make such patents unreasonable is a separate issue.
- kvb 14y ago
  I don't see why. There's plenty of creative discretion involved in the writing of an API. I would have expected this to be a fair use issue rather than a copyrightability issue (though IANAL).
  - delinka 14y ago
    "Fair use" is, by definition, an issue involved in copyright. But I see your point- if APIs are copyrightable, then uses of that API may be "fair use." But then someone's got to drag all the potential uses through the courts to determine what's fair use and what's not (because apparently fair use can only be determined by the courts...) I would surmise that, in this dystopian fantasy world (and I hope it remains such), 'interoperability' would be the de facto fair use and any other use of an API would legally require a license. What a nightmare.
    - kvb 14y ago
      Well, the case isn't about the use of the API - it's about a non-interoperable reimplementation of the API (from Oracle's perspective, at least).
      - delinka 14y ago
        "...this case..." Sure, I'm just addressing your fair use comment with my own input. "...non-interoperable reimplementation of the API" I do not understand this phrase. If you implement an API that's exactly the same as the API in a library that I publish, the underlying implementation is irrelevant to your clients because your software is now an interoperable replacement for mine. If you implement some API that's not the same as my API (and thus not an interoperable replacement), you can't have infringed on my theoretical API copyright.
tosh 14y ago
Dart as a long-term replacement for Java anyone :)
- GhotiFish 14y ago
  I don't agree. I'm fine if dart kills javascript. What it's made to do. I'd also be fine if go/python/befunge kills java.
kunai 14y ago
The future of Java went downhill as soon as Oracle bought Sun. I miss Sun. Dearly. They were perhaps the only major IT company with a true heart. And now there's none left. Google? Hell no.

77 points by mitmads 14y ago

While Oracle is hard to sympathize with, the actual article never elaborates on it's inflammatory statement as how "developer freedom" is at stake (or what that phrase even means).

delinka 14y ago
I can't tell if this is criticism alone, or if you're also asking the question. It seems these articles and discussions assume that the reader is all-knowing when it comes to the IP issues developers could face in their careers. Allow me to attempt to fill in the gaps. When you write code, in the U.S. you hold a copyright to it at the moment you put the characters onto disk. In the case of work-for-hire (i.e. you are employed as a software author by your company), the company holds that copyright. No one else has permission to use, copy or distribute the software without the express permission of the copyright owner. Licenses are the mechanism used to bestow rights upon other users (or, in the case of Open Source Software, potentially other developers) of the software. Switch gears a bit: other companies (vendors) providing interesting systems (those that you or your company are interested in using) also provide information on how to interoperate with their systems and libraries. When using the C family of languages, this information is provided in a machine-readable format known as a "header" - the header file is source code that describes the procedures made available inside the vendor's code libraries. You include this header in your own project so the compiler can validate that you're calling the library code correctly. They've given you a binary library and not the source to the library to help in protecting their rights to their original code. Now, after years of offering a particular product on the market, a vendor (Vendor A) decides to discontinue offering this particular product regardless of the fact there are numerous client who still use this product and are willing to continue to pay for support. They are not willing, for whatever reasons, to completely overhaul their own systems and incur the immense expense in changing to this vendor's completely new and different product. Company B steps in offering an interoperable replacement to that old system that's been discontinued by Vendor A. Company B created a completely legal replacement for this system because they did not use Vendor A's source code. They created a "clean room" implementation of the system. As far as the client's systems are concerned, the interfaces into Company B's solution look exactly like Vendor A's system, to the clients network, employees and customers carry on with business as usual. Courts have ruled that creating systems for such interoperability is legal and necessary. Without such recognition, vendors have the opportunity to lock their customers into the vendor's products. Interoperability is defined by interfaces to systems and libraries. The interface into a library is an Application Programming Interface, or API. The API has pretty much been declared to not be of the expressive type required to obtain copyright protection. If API's become completely protectable by copyright (and thus require a license to use), companies can then limit the ability for others to provide interoperable systems thus limiting competition. In this case, the legal freedom of developers to create tools and apps around an existing system is severely limited and perhaps even eliminated, regardless of the fact that these developers didn't use any code from the vendor in the process.

cft 14y ago

Choosing Java and Dalvic was probably a mistake for Android.

blinkingled 14y ago
Not buying Sun was the mistake. $7B is all that would've taken (less if they sold the os and hardware division) to make the computing world a better place.
- smrtinsert 14y ago
  7B is pocket change to them, completely agree. I was shocked to hear they let it pass iirc. I figured they were playing hardball and it just blew up in their face.
  - MichaelApproved 14y ago
    Or did they make the right decision? Just because they have the money doesn't mean they need to spend it. Did litigating cost them 7 billion? The legal win shows they made the right choice in not spending 7 billion on what they are allowed to use for "free".
- trust-me 14y ago
  IMHO you're over simplifying. Oracle was better positioned to capitalize on Sun assets, so they were likely to pay more than Google. Microsoft or Apple may have decided to bid to prevent Google from acquisition. Merging with a huge enterprise is always painful.
  - protomyth 14y ago
    I'm not so sure given the results. Google (with selling the hardware / chip division to Fujitsu) would have done pretty well given all the tech projects Sun had. If Apple had bid to prevent (patents I suppose), I wonder if ZFS would have finally been on OS X. Java would have been the truly odd man out in that acquisition. I could see Java being sold to IBM.

ceautery 14y ago

What a bunch of jackasses. Sometimes I think the only difference between Oracle and SCO is scale.

deleted 14y ago
[deleted]
jacquesm 14y ago
> Sometimes I think the only difference between Oracle and SCO is scale. Whenever you think that you should probably read up on both Oracle and SCO. SCO was a dying company that tried every dirty trick in the book to blackmail the world into giving it a free ride to newfound riches based on ridiculous claims. SCO was backed behind the scenes by Microsoft simply to attack Linux which Microsoft saw as a threat to its bottom line. As such SCO was really nothing but a proxy for Microsoft in the dirtiest fight that the IT industry has ever seen. Oracle is a very successful company that bought the assets of another dying company (SUN) in order to safeguard a line of business and in order to buy the IP rights of that dying company, which included Java. Note that I'm not defending what Oracle is doing here but the differences between SCO and Oracle are enormous, and are certainly not limited to scale. In many ways the Oracle case is much more dangerous because it now openly attacks a well established principle (interoperability) and Oracle actually has the resources to do real damage. For now that damage is limited to Oracle shooting in its own foot (Damaging the Java brand in a very clear and concrete way) but that could easily change. Google has a very long standing habit of doing or buying things that are illegal (youtube, books, caching the web, images) and getting away with them because they have deeper pockets than the copyright owners or because they strike a deal when cornered. SCO's claims aginst linux ('10's of thousands of lines') were absolutely unfounded, Oracle's claims against Dalvik seem to have at the surface at least some merit. And Oracle is not simply going to give up on what it perceives to be its right simply because the party they believe is infringing is Google. Still, I'm rooting for Google to win this one and for Oracle to lose this one, the consequences of the fall-out of an Oracle win would be pretty disastrous.
- danieldk 14y ago
  SCO was a dying company that tried every dirty trick in the book to blackmail the world into giving it a free ride to newfound riches based on ridiculous claims. Actually, ironically, it's not SCO that tried to sue every Linux vendor, but the Linux company formerly known as Caldera Systems (of Caldera OpenLinux). They purchased SCO's UNIX business and renamed themselves to The SCO Group. The real SCO was renamed to Tarantella. It's sad, not only is the name of 'old SCO' forever associated with attacks that they did not participate in, the Linux ecosystem was actually under attack by a (former) Linux company.

fruit 14y ago

oh god how could this happen im so surprised

smrtinsert 14y ago

Why didn't Google just buy Java, way to drop the ball.

warmwaffles 14y ago
Didn't have a big enough stake in it to justify the purchase of Sun. Oracle however, did have a lot riding on Java succeeding and removing the Sun Hardware division as a competitor.
- fauigerzigerk 14y ago
  The Sun hardware division wasn't competing with Oracle at the time. I think they bought Sun because they thought it made sense to sell software + hardware and because they didn't want IBM to have Java. If Larry Ellison hadn't underestimated the cloud trend, the takeover probably wouldn't have happened. Oracle has been very successful with its M&A activities, but this one is clearly a complete desaster.

bdunbar 14y ago

If Oracle gets heavy handed with Java ... doesn't that just mean it's time to use something else? Am I missing something?

salmanapk 14y ago
What Java alternatives do we have other than Mono/C#?
- jrockway 14y ago
  All the other programming languages. What makes C# and Java particularly special?
  - djhworld 14y ago
    Huge communities, vast library ecosystem, widely taught, used a lot in industry
- danieldk 14y ago
  That depends on what you think is important in Java. The language? Plenty of alternatives. The virtual machine? Not so much. Or perhaps even the class library?
A1kmm 14y ago
The legal precedent if the case is reversed on appeal potentially extends beyond just Java; the article is essentially about the ruling that APIs can't be copyrighted, and that numerous amicus curiae briefs argued in favour of APIs being copyrightable. If APIs can be copyrighted, it would seriously harm interoperability. For example, if the ruling holds, someone could make a payments service which replaces Paypal so seamlessly that to integrate it you can just change the 'paypal.com' string for 'competitorsbrand.com' without redoing all the work you did for Paypal integration. This would be bad for Paypal but would be great for making the market far more efficient. Similarly, if it is reversed on appeal, Wine and Mono could be considered copyright violations and sued by Microsoft. If it extended to non-software interfaces a reversal could be even worse - imagine if the idea that turning the round wheel in front of the driver causes a car to move in the corresponding direction was a copyrighted interface? In that particular case, Copyright in the US wouldn't have expired until 1985, so other manufacturers would have needed to come up with different interfaces, and switching makes would have been hard.

znowi 14y ago

I see Oracle as cancer of the corporate world. An old dinosaur who happened to slog into 2013. The new generation of young and socially responsible will hopefully put an end to their kind.

CurtMonash 14y ago

There's no way an API should be covered by copyright, for the judge's reasons. If you can get a patent on it, good luck to you; otherwise, it's not proper IP. Patenting an API would be like patenting a UI -- reasonable under the law. http://www.dbms2.com/2010/03/23/software-innovation-patent/ http://www.dbms2.com/2010/03/23/software-innovation-patent/ Whether the law should be changed -- as I think it should be -- to make such patents unreasonable is a separate issue.

kvb 14y ago
I don't see why. There's plenty of creative discretion involved in the writing of an API. I would have expected this to be a fair use issue rather than a copyrightability issue (though IANAL).
- delinka 14y ago
  "Fair use" is, by definition, an issue involved in copyright. But I see your point- if APIs are copyrightable, then uses of that API may be "fair use." But then someone's got to drag all the potential uses through the courts to determine what's fair use and what's not (because apparently fair use can only be determined by the courts...) I would surmise that, in this dystopian fantasy world (and I hope it remains such), 'interoperability' would be the de facto fair use and any other use of an API would legally require a license. What a nightmare.
  - kvb 14y ago
    Well, the case isn't about the use of the API - it's about a non-interoperable reimplementation of the API (from Oracle's perspective, at least).
    - delinka 14y ago
      "...this case..." Sure, I'm just addressing your fair use comment with my own input. "...non-interoperable reimplementation of the API" I do not understand this phrase. If you implement an API that's exactly the same as the API in a library that I publish, the underlying implementation is irrelevant to your clients because your software is now an interoperable replacement for mine. If you implement some API that's not the same as my API (and thus not an interoperable replacement), you can't have infringed on my theoretical API copyright.

tosh 14y ago

Dart as a long-term replacement for Java anyone :)

GhotiFish 14y ago
I don't agree. I'm fine if dart kills javascript. What it's made to do. I'd also be fine if go/python/befunge kills java.

kunai 14y ago

The future of Java went downhill as soon as Oracle bought Sun. I miss Sun. Dearly. They were perhaps the only major IT company with a true heart. And now there's none left. Google? Hell no.