You are conflating Oracle's claims from different contexts. SSO is
the
basis to decide if a program is copied or not. The hard work point is made
to
say that the arrangement of the java packages and classes and the specific
signatures of the methods are not out of a textbook but are a creative work
which evolved as concepts met reality. Note, creative is not the same as novel.
Of course the java platform designers and implementers were aware of
Objective-C, SmallTalk, and C++, and were cracker-jacks with regards to OS
APIs via access to the development history of Sun's Solaris product. As
a digression, the virtual machine is meant to have operating system
functionality while staying within a sandbox, i.e, its functionality is
constrained.
As to the hard work argument — not evidence — made by an
Oracle
attorney, it was to communicate that Google saved itself some work and
costs
in development and some non-trivial costs of developing and evangelizing
a
new language if the SDK was to have the benefits of java-like language. I
cannot
emphasize enough that even in 2006 java was considered deficient as a
development language. Clearly an implication to be found in Lindholm's e-mail
is that they looked for something better, which one does not do except there
are
issues with their first choice. (Were the deficiencies strictly
license-related.
Again, my recollection of the times was that java was no
longer the cool kid,
and indeed within 24 months of the 2006 time frame, a
half-dozen important
languages and frameworks were created and took off, some
of which used the
jvm, but nearly all of them were a critique-by-design on
java's verbosity. Two
years later and maybe the primary language for the SDK
would be Ruby
compiled to a byte code.
Google does
not dispute that Sun
worked hard to create and nurture java. Google does not
dispute that its costs
would have been greater had it used C++ or a new
language. Oracle says
Google copied something and claims that it is
protected under some theory of
copyright law as applied to programming
languages. Google's defense could be
that it had no access to materials, and
therefore could not have copied. Google
did not say this. They said they started
by looking at Apache Harmony. Google
instead argues that what they copied is
not protected and if it was, their
copying was de minimis, or their use is fair use
and they justify the latter
point
under a few doctrines of copyright law. SSO and hard work are not
on
point any more, if they ever were in this trial. By this I mean as you seek
to
refute Oracle's
commentaries in today's briefings, you have to argue, using
the language of the
briefs, where they made a
mistake in the law or
characterization of the points and cases for which the
Judge requested
commentary. [ Reply to This | Parent | # ]
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