

Solicitor General Advises Supreme Court to Not Grant Cert in Google vs. Oracle - badlogic
https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B941PmRjYRpnZ2lqd09vbDlZWXM/view

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SlipperySlope
Essentially, the US Solicitor General says that the lower court ruling in
favor of Oracle should stand. And Google should pursue a "fair use" defense of
their adoption of the Java standard library APIs.

Hypothetical worse case for Google and Android: the US Supreme Court refuses
to hear the case, and then Google subsequently also loses a "fair use"
defense. Oracle then is awarded big damages and the Android ecosystem is hurt
bad.

Oracle wants smartphone vendors to use its version of Java.

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karmakaze
The worst case isn't just for Google and Android, it would mean that API's are
no longer in fair use. No more IBM PC compatible BIOS or any such industry
advances.

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tracker1
I think that interoperability might better stand if much more of the APIs were
translated verbatim, and restricted in runtime on the devices... Though that
would be only a technical work around.

That said, I think the argument is bullshit, as given conventions used in the
language (and in similar language) most of the organizational structure for
given APIs and libraries are what makes the most sense, and there are very
much in fact a fairly limited number of means of expression that can be made
in order to establish a platform with a familiar language/expression. If you
compare say, the .Net environment, you will see it is very similar, with very
similar structure... For a language whose implementation is very unique from
Java, the structure, and call patterns for common methods are in fact similar.

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karmakaze
Exactly right about .Net, just having Capitalized method names doesn't make it
vastly different. There's an issue with the even _Supreme_ court making
decisions regarding technology. We may be in need of a more specialized ruling
body that as an appreciation of the implications a decision.

