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| Authored by: PolR on Sunday, April 22 2012 @ 05:32 PM EDT |
I think your phone directory analogy puts the finger on an important point. How
much creative contents there is in SSO when applied to files related to APIs?
How much flexibility a programmer may have in exercising his creativity?
Is shuffling a deck of cards creative? Is the resulting arrangement of cards
copyrightable? What if we shuffle a directory of some kind? Because a file
related to APIs is exactly that, a directory. Its organization is dictated by
usefulness. It may be in alphabetical order, or ordered by topics. It is meant
to ease the task of the programmers who maintains the file. There aren't many
ways to organize this material and still have a useful file. Each individual API
signature is dictated by function, and once defined it cannot be changed without
breaking compatibility. There isn't much creativity in there but shuffling the
order of the contents and altering inessential elements such as comments which
don't break compatibility because they have no bearing of the execution of the
code.
The SSO argument is borderline on copyright misuse. There is no practical value
in the creativity allowed in the SSO of APIs. Compatibility dictates everything
that matters. The rest doesn't help make a better phone because it is not
related to the execution of the software. Google developed Android because they
have closets full of phones that don't work. Oracle were unable to make a phone
work and didn't bother to acquire the expertise. Now they ask for a fraction of
Google's revenue based on minimal creative elements which do not help make a
phone work better.
[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]
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| Authored by: PJ on Sunday, April 22 2012 @ 08:06 PM EDT |
Q: are these 37 APIs Java APIs and not
machine code APIs? Because if they are
and if all Java code can run though javadoc
to create API documentation, why wouldn't
the automatically-generated class library
API documentation also be GPL?
I mean, if I have a list of 37 things that
are GPLd, would it matter at all to the GPL
how I arranged them? They'd still be GPLd,
no, in which case, copyright doesn't matter,
because they arrive with the license.[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]
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