7 ms·
Can someone give us an ELI5? Pros/Cons etc.
by nastygibbon 11y ago
Can someone give us an ELI5? Pros/Cons etc.
- hajile 11y agoPros: Oracle makes a bunch of money from Android. Cons: Kills innovation for fear of lawsuits. Feeds the patent trolls.
- runn1ng 11y agoThe case doesn't touch patent law in the slightest, if I understand it correctly, though. (I am not saying the DoJ opinion is good in any regards whatsoever, to be clear)
- mark-r 11y agoNo, but it adds copyright trolls to the mix. At least you can count on patents to expire eventually, copyrights are forever in software years.
- AnimalMuppet 11y agoPatents are forever in software years. Copyrights are longer than that.
- mark-r 11y agoI think of patents as being a lifetime, not forever.
- rayiner 11y agoThe key distinction is, of course, you can't infringe copyright by accident. If you build your platform on someone else's proprietary API, without their permission, then can you really complain when you get sued?
- ambrice 11y agoSo, wine (the windows emulator) should be illegal?
- PebblesHD 11y ago> wine (the windows emulator) Intentional humor?
- rayiner 11y agoIn the context of the parent comment: if you build a business cloning Microsoft's Win32 API, I don't think you can complain if you get sued in the same way you can for a patent troll. And yes, I think Microsoft should get to decide whether it wants clones of Win32, and also that it's a waste of time for open source developers to implement non-open source APIs.
- pcwalton 11y agoTaking that further, the following things would be illegal: - The HTML parsing specification (created by reverse engineering IE6 without Microsoft's cooperation), and by extension all non-IE Web browsers. - Except IE is also illegal, because JScript was a hostile clone of JavaScript, down to the APIs. - The x86-64 ISA, for two reasons: first, because AMD cloned x86 to start with, and second because Intel cloned AMD's work after seeing its success. - All versions of Unix in common use; thus, by extension, 95% of smartphones by market share. - VMware, by providing implementations of the proprietary x86 supervisor instructions in user mode. Reverse engineering of proprietary APIs for the purposes of interoperability has been responsible for a lot of technologies that we use all the time. I understand the argument about IP protection, but I think an absolutist position in the other direction is a bit too far. In all of the cases above, there is a specific reason why the dominant player responsible for the proprietary API was failing to capture a market need, and the legality of API cloning was what allowed a smaller player to come in, address that need, and achieve a better economic outcome. I'm having a lot of trouble imagining how a world in which all of the above things were illegal would be a better one--you could argue that the dominant player could have done each of those things, but the fact is that they didn't.
- rodgerd 11y agoCon: all the BSDs and Linux are now owned by whoever most recently picked up the POSIX APIs. ReactOS and WINE are now illegal. SQL is the private property of IBM. Pro: I guess if you hate Google because you love Steve Jobs or something it looks like a win.
- Zikes 11y agoIt's all fun and games until IBM sues Oracle for SQL royalties.
- Crito 11y agoIf I didn't think it would negatively impact the rest of the industry, I'd pay to watch that.
- rodgerd 11y agoIt would be the only possible good outcome. Unless it turned out someone owned enough of the CP/M API for it to bite Microsoft in the bum. (While we're dreaming, would HP's ownership of VMS mean anything re: NT...)
- oldmanjay 11y agoQuick question - do you feel the need to associate this to Apple because of your deep personal hatred for that company, or for your deep abiding love for Google? Or was it neither, and you just like using rhetorical devices to bolster your weak points?