What Google’s Victory In Java Case Signifies To The IT World

[steven36]

First of all, as we take note of all the rolling eyes over at the Googleplex, the May 26 federal district court decision disavowing Oracle’s Java copyright infringement claim against Google apparently will be appealed again, so let’s let that be the foundation for this perspective piece.

 

 

Oracle as a corporation truly doesn’t understand the world of open-source software, that much is pretty clear.

 

The world’s largest enterprise database supplier has never been a big proponent of FOSS (free and open-source software) at any time in the last two decades, and although it proclaims differently today, it’s still unclear on the concept.

 

Oracle v Google

Two recent events bear this out:

Point No. 1: The verdict of a San Francisco federal court on May 26 throwing out Oracle’s claim—after six years of litigation—that Google illegally copied Java open source code into its Android mobile operating system without first obtaining a license to do so. If Oracle really understood FOSS and its global community, it never would have ventured to sue Google six years ago over its use of Java application programming interfaces (APIs) in the first place.

 

Point No. 2: The recent exit of Oracle’s all-star Linux thought leader, Wim Coekaerts, its senior vice president of Linux and virtualization engineering. We’ll get back to this one shortly.

 

Expanding on Point No. 1: Open-source software is meant to be copied into applications; this is its purpose in life. It’s a pretty simple concept, but even simple ideas can be misconstrued by well-meaning but misguided people.

Oracle Lawyers Considering Another Appeal

In fact, Oracle’s statement that it will doggedly appeal the verdict again is yet another indicator that it doesn’t get FOSS. “We believe there are numerous grounds for appeal, and we plan to bring this case back to the Federal Circuit on appeal,” its lead lawyer said.

 

Good luck with that. There are no “numerous” grounds for appeal; they have been discussed ad nauseum for six years. This case is dead in the water, but key people at Oracle and its lawyers are motivated to keep it going. One cannot—repeat, cannot—obtain the hard legal opinion they want in order to control the business end of free and open-source software.

 

Other people have tried and failed to define the “fair use” and “transformational” aspects of FOSS to fit their complaints of misuse; Oracle’s only the latest. It’s like trying to nail air to a wall.

 

It’s a very good thing that free and open software is indeed free and open for developers to use. Developers need free tools and components to build, test and deploy applications without having to spend tons of licensing money doing it. This is where innovation happens. As long as its participants say please and thank you and pay forward to the community some of what they have learned, the FOSS community will continue to be among the most inventive and successful bodies of computer science knowledge on Earth.

FOSS: The Foundation of Most Useful Apps

Companies can add their own secret sauces to FOSS to come up with products they then can license. This is exactly what Google did with Android. It bought the Android startup IP in 2005, added its own code, included the open-source Java APIs that connect the device to the Internet and voila: Android was ready for prime time in a span of about two years (2007), just in time for a huge market battle with Apple’s iOS, which had come out earlier that same year.

 

Bingo. Nine years later, Android has 3 billion worldwide users and about 40 companies using it inside phones and tablets, and has brought in $42 billion (mostly in advertising fees, not licensing) to the Google’s top line because its engineers and managers knew how to get all the components in Android to work correctly.

 

Without FOSS, we would not have the world we have today, that much is certain. All companies in Silicon Valley use it in development or in their production products at one time or another. Without FOSS, we wouldn’t have the Internet as we know it; we wouldn’t have mobile devices that can track down any fact in the world in seconds; cable TV, satellite communications, and government, military and scientific systems would all be very different and probably not nearly as efficient; we could go on and on.

 

Expanding on Point No. 2: Wim Coekaerts was one of the few surviving former Sun Microsystems engineers at Oracle; last month he moved over to help move Microsoft into the 21st century. Coekaerts oversaw everything Linux at Oracle, including all that code that runs in the company’s databases, analytics machines and middleware. Last year he was instrumental in securing a new official image for Oracle Linux on the Docker Hub registry.

Oracle Dabbles in FOSS to Appease Some Customers

Remember Unbreakable Linux? That specialized Oracle kernel predated Coekaerts, but he was charged with the stewardship of that continued development for the last six years. This is a very successful initiative at Oracle, and now the company’s going to have to find another “name-brand” engineer to run it.

 

Microsoft, like Oracle, was famously anti-everything open source until it hired CEO Satya Nadella, who then hired Coekaerts to bring his reputation into the Windows and Azure picture.

 

Oracle has shown that it dabbles in FOSS only to satisfy the needs of some of its customers, which is what any company worth its salt must do to be successful. But this week’s court decision and Coekaerts’ move should be obvious red flags to the giant Redwood City, Calif.-based company that it needs to follow Microsoft and makes a large U-turn toward embracing FOSS more than it has in the past and realign its overall approach as a globally significant IT vendor.

 

Oracle famously has pooh-poohed both the cloud and FOSS in the past. It’s finally seen the light in the cloud business; the time is now to become a much bigger player in FOSS, or else it faces losing a lot of deals in the future—as well as another court case to Google if it persists.

 

The Source

[steven36]

31 minutes ago, Tanis said:

 

Source

I already posted this here

This article  here in the op is about open source  software and the fact oracle dont know nothing about it because there closed source themselves . This is not Java's 1st rodeo back when i 1st came on  the internet when you bought a PC  they came installed with Microsoft Java  and Sun sued Microsoft and won thats why  Java is not a windows update anymore for many years. Sun/ Oracle Java  has always been the exact opposite of open source  they dont want you too use it without there permission . Open source is there for anyone too use and all they ask is you share back witch Sun/ Oracle only does too make there paying costumers  happy .

[steven36]

 

Quote

 

Oracle’s API stance would be silly if it weren’t so dangerous

 

Google won the most recent battle in the war over fair use of application programming interfaces, but the fighting will go on

The good news is that Google beat Oracle in the latest fight over the right of developers to use application programming interfaces (API). The bad news is that Oracle will appeal the decision.

Does Oracle know what it’s really asking for?

You’d think that Oracle, which also uses open-source software, wouldn’t want to put barriers in the way of its use, but no! Instead, no sooner had the decision been handed down than Oracle general counsel Dorian Daley announced that the company would appeal the ruling to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit.

Daley proclaimed, “We strongly believe that Google developed Android by illegally copying core Java technology to rush into the mobile device market. Oracle brought this lawsuit to put a stop to Google’s illegal behavior.”

Give me a break.

In Android, Google uses 37 Java APIs. In case you’ve forgotten, Java, has been open source since November 2006.

Moreover, when Android first emerged a year later, Jonathan Schwartz, at the time the CEO of Sun, which was then Java’s owner, greeted the news of Android’s birth with “heartfelt congratulations.”

Last, but never least, while the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit has ruled that APIs can be copyrighted, no one with a lick of sense about programming thinks this was a smart decision. All that APIs do is specify how software components interact with one another. There’s nothing in them to copyright. As copyright expert Peter Menell, a professor at UC-Berkeley School of Law, said: “Declaring code is not poetry.”

 

The problem is that most lawyers aren’t programmers. For every Eben Moglen, co-author of GPLv3 and leading free and open-source software intellectual property attorney, there are a thousand more who don’t know the difference between a Google search and a blog.

 

I pick that example deliberately because Oracle’s lead attorney, Peter Bicks, kept asking Schwartz about his “Google blog.” Say what? It turned out that what Bicks was actually talking about was Schwartz’s Google Alert, which he uses to see what’s being said about him on the Web.

Wowser. As Electronic Frontier Foundation’s (EFF) activist Parker Higgins said, “Can you imagine prepping for this case as Oracle’s lead attorney and never knowing what a blog *is*?“

No, I can’t.

The co-lead chair for Oracle’s case, Annette Hurst, even tried to make a case for how Oracle’s losing was going to fatally damage open-source software.

Wow. Just wow.

Hurst wrote, “The developer community may be celebrating today what it perceives as a victory in Oracle v. Google. Google won a verdict that an unauthorized, commercial, competitive, harmful use of software in billions of products is fair use.” She continued, “While we don’t know what ultimately swayed the jury, Google’s narrative boiled down to this: because the Java APIs have been open, any use of them was justified and all licensing restrictions should be disregarded. In other words, if you offer your software on an open and free basis, any use is fair use. If that narrative becomes the law of the land, you can kiss GPL (general public license) goodbye.

I know literally hundreds of open-source software developers. Not one of them buys this theory.

It’s not just open-source software that would be endangered if Oracle had its way. Take MS-DOS for example. It’s not a CP/M clone, but it was API-compatible with some CP/M calls. By Oracle’s logic, Digital Research could sue Microsoft for MS-DOS and Windows licensing fees dating back to 1981.

Or that laptop or PC you’re reading this on? If Phoenix, which cloned the PC-BIOS APIs, hadn’t had its way, we might still be running IBM PCs with five-figure price tags.

Heck, for that matter, while Relational Software, later Oracle, created the first commercial relational database manager (RDMBS), IBM’s experimental System R preceded it. Both were based on IBM researcher E.F. Codd’s description of an RDBMS in A Relational Model of Data for Large Shared Data Banks. Codd’s work is a true creative work, not merely a description of how things plug together, a.k.a. an API. If Oracle does win when all is said and done, perhaps IBM should consider suing Oracle for 37 years of back-licensing fees.

Be careful what you wish for Oracle for. You may get it.

http://www.computerworld.com/article/3077613/java-development/oracle-s-api-stance-would-be-silly-if-it-weren-t-so-dangerous.html