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| Authored by: Anonymous on Sunday, April 22 2012 @ 08:11 AM EDT |
http://news.cnet.com/Sun-picks-GPL-license-for-Java-code/2100-7344_3-6134584.htm
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| Authored by: Anonymous on Sunday, April 22 2012 @ 12:47 PM EDT |
You can only have legal ownership of something which has corresponding IP law.
Copyright applies not to ideas, but to experessions thereof.
What, consistent with copyright law, is the "Java language" ?
The implementation is not the language.
The specification is not the language (it's just a document describing it).
The test suite is not the language.
You can violate the copyright on the creative portions of an implementation, or
on the creative portions of a specification document.
But you cannot violate the copyright on an idea that is not fixed in a medium of
expression, because there can be no such copyright.
Oracle has (except perhaps for the nine trivial files included by oversight) so
far failed to point to a specific copyrightable creative expression which Google
has infringed by copying.
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| Authored by: hardmath on Monday, April 23 2012 @ 09:49 AM EDT |
If a programming language were fixed, then it could be
considered in that fixed form as eligible for consideration
as a work under copyright law. [Ironically the Java APIs
are the changing expression of the Java language standard.]
However names and other short identifiers (I'm thinking of
the keywords/reserved names of a programming language) are
not copyright protectable (they might be eligible for
trademark protection as used in marketing, e.g. the word
Java as the name of the programming language).
So the narrow view of the Java language as a modest list of
keywords would probably be considered in the public domain,
esp. as to use of keywords like "return" that have been part
of many other programming languages.
The syntax rules of Java are not protectable because these
are ideas and methods of operation, capable of being
expressed in numerous notations or other ways. Of course
any particular documentation of those syntax rules would be
eligible for copyright to the extent of its originality and
protectable elements. But no serious programmer would
confuse the manual with the language itself, any more than
an author would mistake Strunk and White's Elements of Style
for the English language (or Hargreaves, if you prefer; or
even Merriam-Webster's dictionary).
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Do the arithmetic or be doomed to talk nonsense. -- John McCarthy (1927-2011)[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]
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