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| Authored by: Anonymous on Monday, May 14 2012 @ 01:47 PM EDT |
Sweat of the Brow AKA Labor does not copyright protection warrant alone.
The variable names in Java APIs (unlike C/C++) must be the same within the
function, so there would actually be very little difference between the various
implementations.
A short phrase doesn't warrant copyright protection, neither should this code.
And, I did write my own version as a test. Working at a lazy pace with an IDE
that has autocomplete took me 57 seconds to create the guts of this function.[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]
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| Authored by: Anonymous on Monday, May 14 2012 @ 01:51 PM EDT |
It was 5 minutes work by the same programmer. Different time, different
employers.[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]
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| Authored by: Anonymous on Monday, May 14 2012 @ 03:25 PM EDT |
By somebody else, you mean Josh Bloch, right?
The one who wrote the original rangeCheck in the Arrays.java file while he
worked at Sun?
Who later moved to Google and *contributed TimSort to Sun's Java* while working
at Google?
And then ended up copying the rangeCheck function, which he originally wrote,
from Arrays.java into the TimSort code because it wasn't publically exposed, and
he anticipated the two later being merged after his contribution? He did it as
a convenience for Sun. Now Sun's successor of interest is trying to sue his
employer for bazillions of dollars because of it.
Josh Bloch should not be punished for copying 9 lines of his own code. In a
codebase of millions of lines, it is the very definition of de minimis. It's 9
lines of of 3000 in TimSort. It's high-schooler-level code, entirely
functional, with no meaningful creative elements at all.
...I think the only way we could have "justice" at this point would be
to apply the corporate death penalty to Oracle and transfer all of their assets
to Google.[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]
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| Authored by: mexaly on Monday, May 14 2012 @ 04:53 PM EDT |
I think maybe Oracle thought they could use RangeCheck as a typical sample of a
much larger codebase. They were probably ready with a few more examples.
However, Google shot that down early on, they said that Oracle had to be able to
identify the complete work, not just a portion of it. If they sue on only a
portion (as they are), they can only claim damages for that portion, not for the
whole.
Nice try, but Google is smart, and the court was thinking that day.
---
IANAL, but I watch actors play lawyers on high-definition television.
Thanks to our hosts and the legal experts that make Groklaw great.[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]
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| Authored by: softbear on Monday, May 14 2012 @ 05:29 PM EDT |
It was explained that the rangecheck was from a pre-existing
public domain Python implementation of Timsort, that was
merely re-implemented in Java.
I have not looked at the code of either one, but if the above
is true, then the variables may have been taken from the
original Python source, further diluting.
---
IANAL, etc.
[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]
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