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| Authored by: Anonymous on Wednesday, April 18 2012 @ 12:17 PM EDT |
> by GPL'ing the APIs, Sun
> (subsequently Oracle) opened the door to studying and
> learning the API naming structure (one of the Four Freedoms)
> for use in one's own implementation.
Unfortunately, the Four Freedoms are not actually codified in the GPL (at least
not in v2). It's clear that studying *should* be permitted - that's what GNU
claims as part of its mission - but the words don't actually appear to be in the
licence document :-(
I have a fear that harping on the OpenJDK too much opens us up to a circularity
of argument: if we presume that Oracle's claim of the APIs being copyrighted to
be true - yes, yes, I know it's nonsense, but that's the claim - then any use of
the APIs derived from studying the GPLed OpenJDK would only be permissible if
the resultant were also GPLed. Thus Android would still be a copyright
violation, since it is not GPL. This is essentially the same argument we use
against GPL violators.
Now, of course, we all know that the APIs are not copyrightable, and so the
above is cobblers. But that point needs proving to the satisfaction of either
Judge Alsup or the jury (depending on who eventually takes this decision). And
if it is so proven, then the OpenJDK is irrelevant, as Harmony would then be a
perfectly acceptable clean-room reimplementation of a set of APIs that are
legitimately used without copyright violation...
> In any case Judge
> Alsup has already ruled there is no copyright protection for
> the Java API class and method names per se
Has he? That would seem to be "game over" for Oracle's copyright
claims, then.
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