Oracle is such a shit company. There are still some great hackers there but Larry Ellison is an asshole, and I don't envy anyone who has to work for him even indirectly. "Left Oracle's Java business in tatters" eh? Where was their mobile OS? Their Dalvik?
The wounds to Java have all been self-inflicted. If they succeed in copyrighting the API then where does this leave OpenJDK? Operating at the mercy of Larry fucking Ellison, which means not at all.
I've got 17 years of Java experience under my belt, but frankly with Docker + Kubernetes for deployment and new system languages like Rust and Go I'm thinking it's time to jump ship. Or even to C# since apparently MS got the memo on Open Source (not to mention the need for integrated platform modularization - no more Maven hell! Yay!).
It's more subtle than that. The way United States copyright law is structured is that it tends to have simple, broad rules for what is subject to copyright, and then has several exceptions that limit the copyright owner's exclusive rights.
The tendency is to put the complexity and special cases in those exceptions and to keep the basic rules for what is subject to copyright simple.
Under current law and current Supreme Court precedent, for written works (including computer programs) that standard is essentially that if it is original and it has some creativity it is subject to copyright. The level of required creativity is very low. I believe the Supreme Court used the phrase "modicum of creativity" or something similar.
Microsoft's argument was that APIs can qualify under these simple, broad rules as interpreted by current precedent, and so the district court went too far in saying that APIs cannot be subject to copyright.
They did not argue that this means that Oracle should be able to prevent Google's copying. They believed that one or more of the exceptions (fair use, the merger doctrine, and some others they mention in their brief) could apply.
Their argument on destabilizing the software industry didn't have anything to do with APIs specifically. Essentially it was that the reasons the district court used to exclude the APIs from being copyrightable would likely apply to much more, calling in question a large part of the idea of copyright for computer programs. That would undermine pretty much all software licensing, both proprietary and open source.
It's worth reading their brief, as I've done some summarizing and simplifying that probably distorts some of the arguments. The Ars article you cited links to it.
Or considering they became such a large company selling a product that targeted IBM compatible systems. In that case, they were a consumer of what was essentially an API, but one wonders whether Microsoft would be in the position it is in today if IBM had been able to prevent Compaq and other vendors from creating clean-room implementations of what was essentially the IBM PC API.
IBM would have been in a much better position to push OS/2 and supplant Microsoft's OS offerings if it would have had a monopoly on the PC's supporting it's PC interface.
I'd imagine that was a Ballmer-era policy. I would be interested to see if there's anything like that coming out of Nadella's Microsoft (keeping in mind that Nadella's Microsoft hired the guy behind Mono).
Oracle is a parasite, milking the innovations of years ago through customer lock-in and aggressive litigation.
They are a black hole in the tech ecosystem, extracting hundreds of billions of value for themselves, profiting from open source while contributing very little back to the community.
If they win this lawsuit it will be a dark day for innovation and a big loss for shared knowledge and progress.
I played with F# on Linux last weekend - using Visual Studio Code. That + the plugins makes it workable - the development experience is not as smooth as I would want it to be:
- Paket keeps checking for new version on every build request with no way to switch that off to my knowledge
- There is no easy way to run the executable without dropping to the terminal (Ctrl+Shift+P -> fsharp doesn't show a "run current" or anything similar).
- The go-to-definition functionality doesn't work; highlighting and pressing f12 doesn't do anything (though hovering pointer on a function shows a tool-tip for what its worth).
The build works fine, syntax highlighting works, linter works well too. Not very sure if I should spend more effort to develop a full application (I want to build a REST api) because my target deployment platform is Linux and I'm not sure if F# on Linux is production ready or not (genuine concern and happy to get feedback on it).
First of all this is moving the goalposts significantly and is also an impossible standard. I would say that Apple and Microsoft are more ethical than Google but the question is of course along what axis?
It's easy to hate on big companies for one or 2 publicly criticized decisions, but never know the thousands of non public decisions that made that choice the best one, or the thousands of non public stories of the good stuff they do.
Not to say companies should get of easy, but you can't project a huge multidimensional entity into a single axis of ethical or not.
TBF, GP was shifting goalposts in turn. Whenever you hear anything like, "Alice did X, but at least she's better than Bob who did unrelated thing Y" you know the goalposts are being moved (at best) or your attention is being misdirected nefariously. It doesn't add anything valuable to the discussion.
Perhaps, but I think that's closer to poisoning the well. Google don't have to be moral to deserve legal representation but since they are far, far from moral it does mean I won't count it as a moral victory when they win a court case.
Do you know any other way to personalizing search results, making the search results by analytics and even creating a search engine company without putting ads on the page?
Anonymity is one thing but there is no other way of solving this problem without collecting user's data.
Google was ethical under Brin, and it showed when they pulled out of China.
None of their units shared data, they had a solid privacy policy. And their main business was search and ads vs. profiling.
When Page took over they completely changed course.
The wounds to Java have all been self-inflicted. If they succeed in copyrighting the API then where does this leave OpenJDK? Operating at the mercy of Larry fucking Ellison, which means not at all.
I've got 17 years of Java experience under my belt, but frankly with Docker + Kubernetes for deployment and new system languages like Rust and Go I'm thinking it's time to jump ship. Or even to C# since apparently MS got the memo on Open Source (not to mention the need for integrated platform modularization - no more Maven hell! Yay!).