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| Authored by: Anonymous on Tuesday, April 24 2012 @ 06:41 AM EDT |
Would it depend on how you did the reverse engineering?
If you take the published header files or documentation it would be copyright
infringement. However if you take example programmes that are meant to work and
create the necessary calls underneath them or observe the communications on the
wire and emulate them fully reverse engineering the functionality with no
copying process you would be legal.
This approach would probably mean that Samba is safe but WINE is not.
My preference is for the API itself to be usable to better allow competition and
compatibility but I don't see any reason that at least the UK copyright law
would allow it although I believe the US law has wider and stronger fair use
rules that could potentially cover this public good.
What I really don't understand is why Google chose Java for Android rather than
any of the other possible languages. Sun were known to restrict the profiles
that could be deployed on different sorts of platforms and expected license fees
(and other restrictions such as having to use the logo) on hardware including
the JRE such as Blu-ray players and TV's supporting MHP (still used in Italy).
I guess that there were also fees for the mobile platform too. Sun were always
reluctant in opening up the development process and the platform.
If I had to guess they may have expected that they would be the ones to buy Sun
but Oracle got there first.[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]
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