Posted on 05/27/2016 10:29:23 AM PDT by Swordmaker
A U.S. Federal Court jury finds Google didn’t need a license from Oracle for Android’s Java code, defeating Oracle's $9 billion claim. Oracle vows to appeal.
Link Only Due To Copyright Issues From Bloomberg Article.
Pinging ThunderSleeps, dayglored, and Shadow Ace for a legal decision on the Oracle v. Google (Alphabet) infringement mess decision.
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It drove Sun into bankruptcy.
Now Oracle is getting no love from having gobbled up Sun's corpse.
Ha ha!
Oracle should probably have recruited some of Apple’s attorneys and gone after Samsung instead. Smaller pockets, but those South Korean’s weren’t even able to convince a jury that a rectangle with rounded corners wasn’t an infringement. LOL
Java didn’t drive Sun into bankruptcy. Developmental waste drove Sun into a position it needed to be bought out.
Our motto at Sun became “Bigger, Slower, hotter and more expensive” after the dot com boom/bust.
Plus there was very poor acquisitions that Sun made and some very good acquisitions that Sun didn’t make after the bubble burst.
Sun was a pioneer in cloud computing as it was being conceptualized, but by then the Money was being sucked up in the huge development costs of next gen enterprise systems that were architecturally inferior to the older generation.
Oracle losing this suit has more to do with politics, both national and internationally than intellectual property rights. Google simply has more to offer to governments than Oracle does. I think it’s 50-50 on appeal myself.
“I think it’s 50-50 on appeal myself.”
There’s tremendous precedent for reverse engineering implementations based on APIs. Linux and BSD for instance... It’d be disastrous for the tech industry and innovation if that weren’t the case.
This ruling was as it should have been, I seriously doubt that it’s overturned.
Interesting. I did not know “Fair use” meant I could build my own OS (and market associated products) using someone else’s code.
If Google was in licensing negotiations with Oracle on using Java in 2010, they definitely thought there was a dollar value to using the code. In hindsight, Oracle should have taken the 2010 offer and not try to fight Google's massive legal bank account and political clout.
Yep. Dell and HP really ate Sun's lunch in the huge server space. It seemed to happen so fast.
No no no. It’s not a question of reverse engineering. Java is free to implement, but there are limitations for commercial use. Limitations that extract royalties once you start using it commercially. Even if you fork the distribution as Google has done.
And this so-called “tremendous precedent for reverse engineering implementations” was ruined and very weakened by the DMCA. But even the remnants of such precedence won’t protect you very long if you start “black boxing” API’s and hardware.
So innovation has already been stifled due to the DMCA and the precedence set through DMCA lawsuits that have been filed.
IMHO this decision has more to do with Googles influence then “reverse engineering”.
It happened in 1 iteration from Sun's very successful E10k Starfire Enterprise Server. The next server was literally Bigger, slower, hotter and much more expensive than it should have been.
The reason was simple. Sun acquired the Cray Research server division from SGI when the E10k was already in beta and set to be released in months. The E10k was not designed by sun. It was designed by Cray Research Engineers in San Diego. It was very successful and accounted for over 10B in revenue over 5 years. The next generation server E15k/25k was designed with "too much" help and "too many" architectural constraints from Sun's Legacy Engineer from the Bay area.
There was much swearing and gnashing of teeth at the San Diego development center. I think a few chairs were thrown too.
By the 2nd iteration we were buying ready made servers from Fujitsu and integrating disks and memory. It was sad and over. Then we were bought by Oracle, but I had retired by then.
The San Diego design team was great. Much better than the Sun legacy design team. Engineering graduates from Stanford are very over rated. Rensselaer engineers are very underrated. Oh well, thanks for letting me reminisce. If I had to do it all over again I would have stayed at Cray Research.
“No no no. It’s not a question of reverse engineering. Java is free to implement, but there are limitations for commercial use. Limitations that extract royalties once you start using it commercially. Even if you fork the distribution as Google has done.”
That’s across the board incorrect. The only requirement as far as licensing goes is that to call it “Java”, you must pass the compatibility tests, for which Sun/Oracle charge a pretty hefty fee. If you didn’t call it “Java”, different story and no restrictions on commercial use.
Today, there’s a fully open source JDK - “OpenJDK”.
“And this so-called “tremendous precedent for reverse engineering implementations” was ruined and very weakened by the DMCA.”
Nope. The DMCA is to protect copyrighted material. It allows entities to go after those who defeat encryption protecting copyrighted materials, like DVD rippers. It has nothing to do with reverse-engineering software.
“But even the remnants of such precedence won’t protect you very long if you start “black boxing” API’s and hardware.”
It’s “precedents”, FYI.
Copyrights on software refer to the exact implementation. Reverse engineered implementations are not covered by said copyright. That’s the entire point. Thus, the DMCA has nothing to do with it. Nor was the DMCA invoked in the Oracle/Google trial.
“So innovation has already been stifled due to the DMCA and the precedence set through DMCA lawsuits that have been filed.”
Not software innovation.
‘IMHO this decision has more to do with Googles influence then “reverse engineering”.’
It has to do with what’s acceptable “fair use” of copyrighted material, as advertised. It’s a huge win for the tech industry.
Take it to groklaw.net if it is still active that is.
But this article will probably clear up your misconceptions.
http://lwn.net/Articles/134642/
Other than that, I can’t follow your arguments, they rather incoherant.
http://lwn.net/Articles/134642/"
From the article you linked:
Both white box reverse engineering (decompiling the object code to reveal its structure and figure out the interface specifications for interoperability purposes) and black box reverse engineering (where you only look at a program's input and outputs) are legal normally in the US, if the goal is interoperability.That is precisely the issue at hand. The caveat revolves around "bypassing circumvention devices" which I addressed before.
"Other than that, I can’t follow your arguments, they rather incoherant."
Er, perhaps "they are rather incoherent"?
I don't think so, they are factually correct, but I'll leave it to other readers to decide/comment.
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