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Authored by: Anonymous on Saturday, June 02 2012 @ 02:54 AM EDT |
There is one way for an honest creator of API's to prevent future
misuse, either
specifically dedicate the API to the public domain or issue it
under a
permissive license like Creative Commons.
You can give a
copyright license for a concrete document. An API is no such thing: it is a
list of entry points and parameters. You can, at best, indemnify users of that
API from patent claims, but that requires that "users of API" is well-defined,
and it does not help if you don't even have a patent.
In short: copyrighting
an API is nonsense, and the court has ruled as much. Issuing a copyright
license to "an API" rather than just a concrete document is likewise nonsense,
and lends credibility to nonsense. [ Reply to This | Parent | # ]
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Authored by: Anonymous on Saturday, June 02 2012 @ 03:53 AM EDT |
That's why for 5yrs, prior to Sun announcing GNU Open Source
Apache had been working to get Sun to drop FOU (Field of
Use) clause to no avail. GNU was a slap in the face to
Apache who somehow held on the misguided belief Sun was
always going to give them the TCK and FOU waiver that never
came. If any company was playing games to their own
detriment it was Sun.
By attempting to force both Google and Apache to take an
imcompatable Open Source license that would make it
impossible for them to distribute their implementations w/o
Sun grabbing control with their Catch 22 Licensing
demands.... no wonder Sun wasn't afraid of them.
Google actually did Sun/Oracle a favor by using any of the
Java Platform and preventing Java from dying back then.
Their JavaME certainly didn't save them and even Gosling
stated publically that JavaME was a fragmented mess!
Although he blamed the carriers and phone makers, obviously
Google Android has had fewer fragmentation problems than
JavaME has ever dreamed of! ....and that's the main point.
Google in Judge Alsop opinion was after compatibility of the
Java Language to make life easier for Developers. Not for
Sun, because they may have created the Java RI (release
implementation, but they were only another member of the
Java Community and that's what Java should have been all
about in the first place.
If Oracle would have really been primarily interested in the
Java Community their asinine statement claims them to be,
developers wouldn't be so paranoid about the future of their
jobs!!! ...and that's not Google's fault either! [ Reply to This | Parent | # ]
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Authored by: Anonymous on Saturday, June 02 2012 @ 02:11 PM EDT |
There is one way for an honest creator of API's to prevent
future
misuse, either
specifically dedicate the API to the public domain or issue it
under a
permissive license like Creative Commons.
No this won't
work. As I have pointed out before, there is
no way any license (open source or
no) can reach out and
force people to agree to it. If under copyright law, you
do
need a license to do a given activity, (like use an API), then
you can
ignore the license and do what you want. If you
don't need a license, and don't
agree to a license then its
terms become irrelevant.
Licenses can not
reach out and force people to
agree to them. [ Reply to This | Parent | # ]
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