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Oracle must be concerned now | 503 comments | Create New Account
Comments belong to whoever posts them. Please notify us of inappropriate comments.
Oracle must be concerned now
Authored by: darrellb on Saturday, April 21 2012 @ 03:15 PM EDT
The fully-qualified names are the Organization.

Structure is the naming hierarchy used to group the organization into something other than a long list of names.

Sequence is the order into which the Organization is arranged other than arbitrarily.

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

Oracle must be concerned now
Authored by: Anonymous on Saturday, April 21 2012 @ 03:51 PM EDT
"Structure" and "Organization" are both technical requirements for compatibility. (i.e. which classes are in which packages, what names and parameter lists each method has... there is exactly ONE way to do this which is compatible with the Java platform programmers are used to.

"Sequence" is a little more muddy... If you have a source file with a Java class implementation in it, what order should the methods appear in? It doesn't actually matter, so if Google's code contains these methods in the exact same order as Oracle's code, then there's no technical requirement to do it that way. However, there's also not really any element of creativity in it either; its almost arbitrary. Alphabetical order would be fine for example. The most useful order is probably to put them in the same order that Oracle's documentation for that class lists them in; this makes it marginally simpler for programmers looking at Google's code to easily find the function they want. However: if they did use that order, then it might end up being the same order as what Oracle's code contains, because Oracle's documentation is javadoc generated directly from their implementation source code.

Anyway, giving this ordering any sort of protection is ridiculous, because there's nothing really creative about it.

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

Oracle must be concerned now
Authored by: Anonymous on Saturday, April 21 2012 @ 04:00 PM EDT
The sequence of an API is irrelevant. From the point of view of the programmer,
the sequence of the *documentation* of the API may be significant to help find
the information about a particular function, but from the program's point of
view, it is irrelevant if the the sequence is 'a, b, c' or 'c, b, a' or some
random order. The implementation finds the function wherever it is.

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

THERE IS NO ORDER to the methods in an API
Authored by: LouS on Sunday, April 22 2012 @ 09:06 PM EDT
There is no order to methods in an API any more than there is an order to words in the English language. There is an order to methods in the documentation of an API and in the code implementing and API (just as there is an order to the words in an English dictionary).

An API is an abstract entity which has no fixed tangible form, which is why it is not copyrightable. The judge asked what the fixed form of an API is, but the question seems to have gotten lost in the shuffle. Too bad Google did not jump up and down and make a big deal of it at that point. (There is an order to the parameters of a method in an API but that is purely functional.)

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

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