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This just seems so redundant and off point. | 249 comments | Create New Account
Comments belong to whoever posts them. Please notify us of inappropriate comments.
Corrections here
Authored by: SpaceLifeForm on Thursday, May 30 2013 @ 09:13 PM EDT
If any.

---

You are being MICROattacked, from various angles, in a SOFT manner.

[ Reply to This | # ]

Comes here
Authored by: SpaceLifeForm on Thursday, May 30 2013 @ 09:14 PM EDT


---

You are being MICROattacked, from various angles, in a SOFT manner.

[ Reply to This | # ]

NewsPicks commentary here
Authored by: SpaceLifeForm on Thursday, May 30 2013 @ 09:15 PM EDT
Please include a link to the article you
are referencing as they will roll off the main page.

---

You are being MICROattacked, from various angles, in a SOFT manner.

[ Reply to This | # ]

OT here
Authored by: SpaceLifeForm on Thursday, May 30 2013 @ 09:16 PM EDT
Please make any links clickable.


---

You are being MICROattacked, from various angles, in a SOFT manner.

[ Reply to This | # ]

Without APIs...
Authored by: artp on Thursday, May 30 2013 @ 10:12 PM EDT
Many things would be difficult or impossible to do without
APIs. Lots of things that we take for granted would
disappear.

Every interface between programs would be a one-off effort,
and every one would be a little bit different. There would
be no many-to-many coordination between programs. It would
all be one-to-one.

Every programmer would have to dig to find out how to pass
information back and forth. Most of them would get it right.
Few of them would get it complete. As data and processing
passed from one program to another, bits and pieces would be
lost as flow continued, then pop back up again as they were
re-inserted into a later program.

Behold: the Tower of Babel. Once again, caused by mankind's
hubris and greed. But we already mentioned Oracle and Larry
Ellison, didn't we?

---
Userfriendly on WGA server outage:
When you're chained to an oar you don't think you should go down when the galley
sinks ?

[ Reply to This | # ]

Rationale and Impacts but no Law
Authored by: Anonymous on Friday, May 31 2013 @ 12:16 AM EDT
I've read the document and I think it provides many good reasons for why the
ruling in this case should be upheld, but I don't see any citations of the Law.


What are the legal arguments for upholding or overturning the district court
ruling?

[ Reply to This | # ]

Even if Oracle wins the appeal
Authored by: kawabago on Friday, May 31 2013 @ 12:52 AM EDT
Oracle has lost the war.

[ Reply to This | # ]

This just seems so redundant and off point.
Authored by: Anonymous on Friday, May 31 2013 @ 04:33 AM EDT


I don't see any yet who have argued that APIs are not copyrightable because you
cannot copyright a concept.

It is some documentation, a library, and some of your own code all working
together. There is nothing you can point at and say that is the API.

Concept: "an idea of something formed by mentally combining all its
characteristics or particulars; a construct. "

An API is the bit between the plug and the socket and it is neither the plug nor
the socket.

It is an agreement between two different bits of programming.

That it is why it is difficult for lawyers to grasp.

It is a concept only.

It really is that simple.



[ Reply to This | # ]

That's it. No more Java for me or my students.
Authored by: stegu on Friday, May 31 2013 @ 04:40 AM EDT
Goodbye, Java. We had some fun together for over a decade, but your new masters
have shown that they don't care one bit for you or for us, only for themselves,
and I'm leaving.

And, by the way, I'm taking hundreds of students with me.

[ Reply to This | # ]

And wildly innacurate....
Authored by: Anonymous on Friday, May 31 2013 @ 05:01 AM EDT


"For example, the widespread availability of diverse, cheap, and
customizable personal computers owes its existence to the lack of copyright on
the specification for IBM’s Basic Input/Output System (BIOS) for the PC. "


...is completely false...

The wide spread availability of cheap and customizable PCS (which is rapidly
diminishing) is totally down to Compaq being able to white room reverse engineer
the IBM PC,. including the BIOS and it's API..

[ Reply to This | # ]

Additionally APIs are *NOT* open and have never been open...
Authored by: Anonymous on Friday, May 31 2013 @ 05:22 AM EDT


APIs are published or unpublished.

if they are published, then the author who's code you are calling is saying
"yes, you can do this , if you do this.. like this.....then this is the
result you will get"

That does not and has never prevented anyone from just simply calling into
whatever piece of code they feel like.

Sometimes that merely causes your own program or another part of the system to
crash (how hackers get in), other times something useful might happen.

This would be an unpublished API, now you don't even have the documentation part
of the concept, you don't have any official recognition and chances are if
anything changes your new 'hidden API' call will stop working.

It doesn't mean it's not an API. in fact by the very nature of it being used
*AS* an API, then it becomes an API, that's how abstract a concept an API is.


I find the whole document a bit like this, these are the 'best of the best' and
yet this document instead of hitting the bullseye, just veers of at the last
minute on a random idea of openness and how cool it is that everyone can do it.

...and it's wrong. I am really really disappointed.

This brief essentially treats an API as a 'system' and talks about the
importance of openness.

Free market economics do not guarantee openness.

Do you really want to push the lawyers and lobbyists down the road of granting
patents on APIs?






[ Reply to This | # ]

misleading....
Authored by: Anonymous on Friday, May 31 2013 @ 05:50 AM EDT

"Because the BSD sockets API is free of copyright,"

It is not.

The BSD sockets source code and TCP/IP library is copyrighted and licensed under
a BSD license.

That means you can take the BSD source code compile it on your platform and you
can use the resulting program to make 'BSD Socket API' calls from your program.

You can also write your own source code to do the same by following much of the
TCP/IP specifications and offer up a totally incompatible API that will continue
to work on the internet.

You can even expand on that and offer a glue layer above your own API to
'enable' BSD style calls to work, you have the copyright its up to you whether
you publish or not.

The BSD Socket source code is not an API.

The Compiled library from the BSD sockets source code is not an API.

The compiled library loaded into a running kernel is not an API

Your program is not an API.

The Documentation is not an API.

When a book shows you how to make an Origami Swan, the argument is not 'the
making of an Origami Swan with paper should not be protected by copyright
because making of Origami Swans gives everyone freedom and open-ness and
entertainment'

The courts already know that you cannot copyright a telephone number, that you
cannot copyright a part number, by making the argument as above, they are
massaging the egos of those who are signatories, (look at all the cool stuff you
live and we made) and leaving a big wide open door for the lawyers and lobbyists
to drive a tank through.

The openness of the internet is not down to BSD sockets, it is down to TCP/IP
and I've yet to write a network program where I don't have to
rewrite/hack/patch/kludge the network section when ported to a new platform.

I challenge you to show me one network card provider who has just one driver
that exposes a BSD API and works on 'almost all operating systems'

[ Reply to This | # ]

Quite a few signatories based in the UK
Authored by: tiger99 on Friday, May 31 2013 @ 06:43 AM EDT
It is quite unusual, but very welcome, to see such significant action from this side of the pond. Admittedly some are US citizens, who just happen to live and work here, but others are not. Maybe out national apathy is beginning to wear off?

I also see at least one ex-M$ person of very significant status, and other very well-known luminaries, including the creator of C++ (which SCO does not own, contrary to statements by Darl many years ago).

I get the strong impression that (allowing for most people not participating in any form of active protest, as is generally the case) a considerable number of real computing professionals are really peeved by the actions of Oracle, which are potentially a serious threat to the entire industry, including Oracle themselves.

[ Reply to This | # ]

I can hear the pained cries now
Authored by: Anonymous on Friday, May 31 2013 @ 07:44 AM EDT

Oracle and Oracle's legal team will be making some interesting complaints
about the computer scientists, in their response. Exactly how they will try to
smear that many reputations I don't know, but I expect them to try.

And then wonder why no programmer with a good reputation wants to work
there.

Wayne
http://madhatter.ca

[ Reply to This | # ]

Overkill
Authored by: Gringo_ on Friday, May 31 2013 @ 08:36 AM EDT

This is overkill, as Judge Posner's original ruling was very thorough and carefully constructed to withstand any and all attacks. I do understand, however, that in these matters there is no such thing as overkill, because you never know what you might run into. You have to call in the cavalry just to be sure.

I would like to see all this firepower brought to bear on attacking the patentability of software. Will we ever see such a direct challenge? Imagine each and every one of these eminent computer scientists standing up to say "Software is math, and thereby, unpatentable", and "the notion that software makes a new machine is ridiculous in light of Computer Science."

[ Reply to This | # ]

CS101 - Intro. to Java programming
Authored by: capt.Hij on Friday, May 31 2013 @ 08:52 AM EDT

Dear CS Professors,

I know that you like to use Java in your introductory courses and to use it as basis for many of your classes. It is a good language to use in this context for many technical reasons. Unfortunately, there are many practical reasons for you to reconsider this stance.

For one, there is a dark cloud hovering over the future of the language. The organization that controls the language has made it clear that it is willing to sacrifice the language itself if they feel that they can wring more money out of it. It is not polite to bet your students' long term success on a technology that may be closed to them.

The second issue is the ethical dimension. You are a role model for your students, and you set the example. It is important that you let them know about the importance of their ethical conduct and the choices that they make. You set that example when you choose to teach them Java and your implicit support of the organization that controls it.

Sincerely,

A concerned parent.

[ Reply to This | # ]

Surely one of these people could own the API copyrights
Authored by: Anonymous on Friday, May 31 2013 @ 09:50 AM EDT
If APIs are copyrightable then we are violating the
copyrights of some of these people especially those very
similar between Java and C++! Of those people are also
violating someone's copyright that might be out of copyright
(if the author is unknown).

[ Reply to This | # ]

Do I see astroturfers?
Authored by: deck2 on Friday, May 31 2013 @ 10:09 AM EDT
I have read through a number of the pro Oracle anonymous comments. It would
appear that the astrotufers/trolls for Oracle jumped on this rather quickly with
the "the APIs are copyrightable" meme.

[ Reply to This | # ]

Great to see Fred Brooks on the list
Authored by: Anonymous on Friday, May 31 2013 @ 10:33 AM EDT
As one of the pioneers of the discipline of software engineering, and leader of
the project that delivered OS/360 (the system that sealed IBM's dominance of the
computer industry through the 1970s and 1980s) he would have been a close
observer of the way in which IBM attempted to maintain effective lock-in through
control of a system's interfaces*.

His "Mythical man-month" is still a great read for anyone who cares
about real-world software delivery.

* The interfaces in question were the mainframe-peripheral connections, and
primarily electronic.

[ Reply to This | # ]

Apple "copied" UNIX APIs!
Authored by: Anonymous on Friday, May 31 2013 @ 10:48 AM EDT
Whoa, this is mind-blowing!

"During the 1980s and 90s, Apple was known for its isolated computing
system incompatible with mainstream software development. Daniel Eran Dilger,
How CPR Saved Apple, Roughly Drafted Magazine (Oct. 23, 2006).9 Over time, the
lack of software began to choke off Apple’s user base. Id. In 1999, Apple
abandoned the OS it had developed through nine versions since 1984. Id. Its
tenth operating system, OS X, had a new base: the UNIX API. Id. By using the
UNIX API, Apple hoped to win over the UNIX user base of sophisticated
technologists and attract the UNIX developer community to write software for
Macs. See Joe Wilcox, Will OS X’s Unix Roots Help Apple Grow?, CNET.com (May 21,
2001).10 Apple is now the world’s largest computer company, and OS X the most
popular UNIX-compliant personal computer operating system. Nick Wingfield, Apple
Becomes the Most Valuable Public Company Ever, With an Asterisk, N.Y. Times
(August 20, 2012);11 Top Operating System Share Trend, Netmarketshare (April
2003).12"

So Apple copied the UNIX API in order to appeal to us geeks and become more
popular! :) Its true, though I never saw it this clearly before!

[ Reply to This | # ]

Oracle's claim is just daft.
Authored by: Anonymous on Friday, May 31 2013 @ 12:09 PM EDT
Fact: Copyright protects _my_ expression of an idea, or facts, or concepts, or whatever. What makes it protected is that _I_ wrote it, and nobody else, and that what I wrote is individual to me. Anything in my writing that _must_ be written the way I wrote it is not protected. So the names, addresses and phone numbers in a phone book are not protected by copyright, because they must be what they are for the phonebook to be correct.

An API as an abstract concept is not protected by copyright, because it isn't written down. When it is written down, the things that _must_ be written the way they are written are not protected. So up to the point where the written API describes correctly the abstract concept, and is written the way it is written because it would be incorrect otherwise, it is not protected. Anything beyond that is protected by copyright.

Therefore a document containing a written down API together with many comments couldn't be copied legally without permission, but it would completely legal to take that document, and create a new document that only contains the unprotected content (the API), which is actually what you want to copy.

That doesn't mean in any way that creating a good API isn't hard work, that some people can't do it, and that someone creating a good API doesn't deserve our praise and gratitude for it. Praise and gratitude, yes. Copyright, no. On the other hand, someone who writes down the worlds most awful drivel, no matter how boring, or annoying it is, deserves copyright (and deserves being promptly forgotten).

[ Reply to This | # ]

So, can we please get these same luminaries to weigh in on software patents?
Authored by: sgtrock on Friday, May 31 2013 @ 12:16 PM EDT
Imagine what the debate would have looked like in CAFC if these individuals
would have been heard during CLS Bank v Alice Corp? Yah think maybe we would
have FINALLY gotten some closure?

[ Reply to This | # ]

Oracle does not care about alienating the gray beards
Authored by: Anonymous on Friday, May 31 2013 @ 02:47 PM EDT
Likely, they feel they have the product and patent portfolios
needed to sustain a business model to keep shareholders
content without having to innovate anymore or do anything
ground breaking with computing and information technology.

[ Reply to This | # ]

EFF Files Amicus Brief in Oracle v. Google Appeal - Finally, Computer Scientists Speak ~pj Updated
Authored by: PolR on Sunday, June 02 2013 @ 07:57 PM EDT
Oracle responded sharply. "I guess everyone is having collective amnesia about the uncontroverted testimony that Android is not compatible with Java," said spokeswoman Deborah Hellinger.
The compatibility of Android with Java is not a justification for copyrights on APIs. Whether or not people remember this testimony is irrelevant to the points being made.

[ Reply to This | # ]

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