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The information on Groklaw is not intended to constitute legal advice. While Mark is a lawyer and he has asked other lawyers and law students to contribute articles, all of these articles are offered to help educate, not to provide specific legal advice. They are not your lawyers.

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And BTW... | 361 comments | Create New Account
Comments belong to whoever posts them. Please notify us of inappropriate comments.
And BTW...
Authored by: Anonymous on Sunday, May 20 2012 @ 03:37 PM EDT
Still OP here.

I would like to apologize, again, for saying you're being
dishonest. I was wrong. I thought I was being blunt, not
impolite, though :)

And on the matter of politeness, reading Groklaw's comments,
I've never thought politeness was necessarily their strong
suit, or even redeeming quality. Some are thoughtful, some
are not, but many are quite impolite. I wrote what I thought
was a relevant and sincere comment, and I was the one
getting called names like "Florian Müller". From the tone
that name was uttered in (or, rather, written) I was certain
that that Florian fellow must be some spawn of evil, but I
was nevertheless flattered to be confused with someone who I
assumed to be a native English speaker (as I'm most
certainly not). That comparison alone had made it all
worthwhile until I wikied the guy and discovered, much to my
dismay, that he's German.

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

What is this, kindergarten?
Authored by: PJ on Sunday, May 20 2012 @ 04:01 PM EDT
I think perhaps you are not paying close enough
attention. Please do this:
write Hello World in Java without using
any Java APIs.

By the way, Google got the 37 APIs from Project
Harmony.

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

What is this, kindergarten?
Authored by: PJ on Sunday, May 20 2012 @ 04:13 PM EDT
Regarding courts being used for anticompetitive
purposes, it's a fairly recent thing that courts
are being used blatantly this way. If you recall,
when SCO first sued IBM in 2003, Scott McNealy
astutely said, "Microsoft is innovating" meaning
it was using the law cynically to get what it
wanted, namely a black cloud over Linux servers.

Just the other day, both Microsoft and
Motorola were spanked verbally by the judge handling
one of their litigations, telling them that he
was aware that they were using the courts as
a way to negotiate a price more to Microsoft's
liking, which offended him. To which Motorola
accurately answered, "We
didn't file first."<P>

Judges are not used to this, and they hate it. The
courts are supposed to be about real torts, real
wrongs, not manufactured busywork to try to hold
back competition or get a leg up. That truly isn't
what they are for, but more and more we see it.

And when courts become virtual courts, you might
say, where the real issue is never even spoken
and the "dispute" is played out in an alternate
frame that isn't actually what it's really
all about, it becomes a farce. And if you then
add in lawyers willing to fib and tell tall tales,
what happens to the system of law? Who can
possibly respect it? For sure, then it can
never be about justice on even a rudimentary
level. Whoever is the most clever at manufacturing
useful issues wins.

And when folks lose respect for law, they do pretty
much whatever they think they can get away with, if
they have no real inner ethical voice, which these days
a lot of folks don't.

Now, you can argue that it's best to be pragmatic.
But then there'd be no use for Groklaw. And in reality,
Groklaw has been useful, because there is a community
left in the world, even in the software world, that
thinks that the best way to compete is by means of
your best skill, your best code, not IP trickery.
And that community bands together to find useful
materials to use against an aggressor.

You may not think this case matters, but they believe
it does. I do too. And so that is why we do what we
do, and for free, as volunteers. One of these days
your startup may even be the one needing the
community's help. If so, remember what Groklaw is for,
and stop on by. I usually am able to refrain from
saying, "I told you so."

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

What is this, kindergarten?
Authored by: Wol on Sunday, May 20 2012 @ 04:21 PM EDT
Wine has never (to my knowledge) *required* the Windows dlls to work. It has,
however, often needed them to work properly. (To implement functionality that
hadn't yet been cloned in Wine.) It is NOT an emulation of the hardware for
Windows to run on - for Win3.1 et al that would be DosBox, and for Windows 95
and NT variants that would be something like VirtualBox.

It is a re-implementation of the Windows API such that the user can choose
whether to use the Wine libraries, or the Windows dll's, whichever gives the
best results.

As such, if Oracle won, it would be killed stone dead because it is even closer
to the Windows APIs than Dalvik is to Java!

Cheers,
Wol

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

On interoperability and on WINE
Authored by: bugstomper on Sunday, May 20 2012 @ 06:45 PM EDT
Regarding WINE, it doesn't require Microsoft DLLs, it is a clean room
implementation of a portion of the Windows API, attempting to be a complete
implementation. As long as it is not yet complete, it might be necessary to use
some DLLs from Microsoft if you need some functionality not yet written into
WINE. Even after it is done in some hypothetical future, people could still use
it with DLLs from Microsoft that implement other things than just Windows API
functions.

But if APIs are copyrightable then WINE certainly could be accused of copyright
infringement.

Regarding interoperability, I think that being able to write a Java program or
library that uses only certain java.* and javax.* packages that are considered
to be core to the Java Platform, and have it be able to run unchanged on both
real Java and on Android, can be called a matter of "interoperability"
between the program or library and both Java and Android platforms. Yes, that is
not Java VM interoperability with Android VM, but it is about a program written
in the Java language being interoperable with both Java Platform and with
Android Platform.

You might accuse me of twisting the meaning of the word
"interoperable". To that I would answer that it is about the same
issues that people are talking about when they say that Microsoft should not
prevent Samba from being interoperable with Windows file sharing. The Samba
affair was not so much about Linux machines and Windows machines being able to
talk to each other, as much as it was about people being able to be owners of
both Windows machines and Linux machines and operate comfortably in that mixed
environment. Google is making it possible for Java developers to provide their
software to both the Java Platform and to the Android Platform. Microsoft tried
to make it hard for anyone to work with both systems in the same environment.
Oracle is trying to make it harder for software developers who want to work with
both environments.

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

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