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| Authored by: reiisi on Saturday, May 12 2012 @ 10:37 AM EDT |
The Google lawyers have been coached by their engineers, at least. Maybe they
understand the tech.
(The interesting thing is that the Judge does seem to zone in on the right
points.)
Anyway, Oracle is going to claim that the symbol is there in the data (where it
should be when a symbol can be looked up at run-time) and thus the indirect
reference is symbolic. Which would might be correct for some meanings of
symbolic, but not here.
Google's lawyers have laid some of the groundwork to point out that the real
meaning of symbolic here is to go chasing after the name of the symbol at run
time.
(There are languages that do this. If I understand correctly, Objective C does
this. The reason it is not slow is that it is never going to look into a large
linear list, and I would have preferred they had spent some more time on this
subject.)
The judge gave them a freebie when he pointed out one way of optimizing the
lookup, but if Oracle complains, they will be blowing their own case out of the
water.
The reason for the symbol being there, when the optimizer is never looking at
the symbol, is that the symbol is there for other purposes, specifically, for
when the programmer wants a class to do introspection. Completely different
thing. This is when you want, for example, two apps that have never heard of
each other, to connect to each other.
One says to the other, "Do you have a class ExcellentClass?" And the
other looks in its list of symbols under classes, and finds ExcellentClass and
tells the one, "Yes, I do."
Then the one says, just to be sure, "Does your ExcellentClass have a
WonderfulMethod?"
And the other goes and does another lookup and says, "No, I don't."
And the one says, "Sorry to bother you," and they disconnect. Or maybe
it asks for the same method in another class, or an alternative method in the
same class.
Essentially, this is for negotiating for the ability to communicate. (Also for
debugging, BTW.)
Oracle is building their entire case on conflation. I wish the technique were
more rare, but, in a world that acknowledges the existence of intellectual
property, lawyers abusing conflation is, well, obviously going to happen.[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]
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