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| Authored by: Anonymous on Sunday, May 13 2012 @ 01:27 AM EDT |
The problem isn't licensing. The problem is the lack of strong clear evidence to
support that he did not copy the code even though it appears that he might have
contributed the code separately.
My guess is that if they really wanted to, they could dig up a lot of stuff to
try and prove it. However, it wouldn't be worth it. It will probably end up
being just arguing over even more stuff lawyers will never understand (hence you
will find even more ridiculous arguments), and have enormous risk of digging up
more stuff that the Oracle lawyers will love to use against Google (even if they
are actually nothing but just lawyer invented crap).
I don't see any point of trying to figure out a way out of this now, just that
developers everywhere should take these issues more seriously. Even if it
appears that the companies involved are reasonable, it doesn't mean that things
won't change later. So it's always better to make things as clear and as legal
as possible, even with temporal code. I know some developers will purposely code
in a different style when at work and when at home, just to avoid bosses making
claims that they copied code from work. I guess this vindicates their paranoia.[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]
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| Authored by: Anonymous on Sunday, May 13 2012 @ 04:11 AM EDT |
He wrote this code while working at Google
I was
under the impression that he wrote RangeCheck whilst at Sun.
Google: Dr. Bloch testified that he
wrote rangecheck.
So in effect he copied his own work?
Dr.
Mitchell: While he was working for Google, he copied the work that he did at
Sun.
which means that Sun, and hence now Oracle, may actually own
that code and he may have no rights at all to it, especially to relicense it to
Google; or even to re-write it from scratch in his style as it would probably
end up at 99.9999% the same.[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]
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| Authored by: hardmath on Sunday, May 13 2012 @ 06:36 AM EDT |
What Dr. Bloch wrote at Google for Android in 2008 and
contributed to OpenJDK in 2009, is TimSort, a
drop in replacement for the
mergesort routine he'd written
for Java at Sun back in 1997.
In doing so he
created a copy of the rangeCheck exception-
throwing routine in Java that he'd
written as well at Sun.
It is this copying of rangeCheck code that constitutes
infringement, not the larger piece of TimSort contributed to
OpenJDK by
Google.
Both Dr. Bloch's works at Google and at Sun are perhaps
considered
works-for-hire, and as such the copyrights are
probably assigned to the
respective employers rather than
Dr. Bloch himself.
---
"Prolog is an
efficient programming language because it is a very stupid theorem prover." --
Richard O'Keefe [ Reply to This | Parent | # ]
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