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| Authored by: Anonymous on Monday, April 23 2012 @ 05:27 PM EDT |
It maybe doesn't matter how google got the APIs. If the APIs are defacto
public-domain using the reflection-over-icedTea technique then how can Oracle
claim copyright infringment. If I read and copy all the play-titles into a list
from 'Penguins Complete Works of Shakespeare' can Penguin claim copyright? They
don't have copyright. Sun gave up the copyright of the APIs with OpenJDK - they
are not even covered by GPL (by logical induction).[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]
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| Authored by: Anonymous on Monday, April 23 2012 @ 07:06 PM EDT |
Also I wouldn't call Reflection reverse engineering.
Byte-code decompilation would be reverse engineering.
In order to be useful to 3rd party code at runtime java class has to advertise
its API through the virtual-machine. The reflection mechanism is like asking an
magician what tricks they can do - and then saying please do
'clearly-impossible' - note the magician does not tell you the secret of the
tricks only a list of names to request.
Taking bad-analogy further...
If a magician will tell anyone the list of tricks they can perform. Another
Magician can perform a similar list of tricks when requested by name -
especially when they have never seen the originals and use their own alternative
technique - the magician infers what the trick should achieve from the name and
context "Parts sawInHalf(Person a)"
If your list is secret - don't advertise it!
When icedTea/openJDK binaries advertise their APIs the user hasn't agreed to any
EULA - they just asked icedTea "give me a list of your trick names, hey
tell me more about AWTWindow.class - who is its parent class? What interfaces is
it implementing? Any abstract methods?"
Java is so chatty. It likes to talk about its APIs to strange programs.
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