

What if Oracle Wins?   - gherlein
http://blog.herlein.com/2010/11/what-if-oracle-wins/

======
kls
_A fast look at that does indicate that some Oracle copyrighted code may have
been copied verbatim. As a long-time open source advocate this is clearly
wrong. All the open source licenses are based on the fundamental copyright
laws._

The sad part about it is that, in the court of public opinion none of this
matters and that is the court that will in the end decide the direction of the
tech industry. It is becoming increasingly obvious the days of the corps
playing nice is over. We are going back to the verticals and developers will
have to chose their vertical.

What I think Oracle, Apple and the other underestimate is the mindshare that
Google, Apache and Redhat have. They may force more developers than they think
onto a vertical provided by the Open Source community. The problem is going to
be Java and Oracle knows that, they think if they can pull Java out from under
them that it will set them back to the point that developers will have no
choice but to go onto a corporate vertical provides stack. Time will tell, but
it is a high stakes game that is being played right now that is for sure.

------
rbanffy
_> A fast look at that does indicate that some Oracle copyrighted code may
have been copied verbatim_

That's not really meaningful unless the code lifted is a non-obvious
implementation of something. For as much as I know, it could be part of the
only possible implementation of a public specification. I can copyright a
document where I say 2 plus 2 is 4, yet, I cannot sue you for copyright
infringement of you repeat this.

But that's not the point. The worse that could happen would be a version of
Dalvik derived from the GPL'ed code in OpenJDK. As long as the don't step on
Oracle's patents doing this in code that is not derived from Oracle GPL'ed
code. It would have to be licensed under GPL, but the code that sits on top of
it could be licensed under BSD-ish licenses just like Dalvik is now. What
would happen is the GPL/BSD-ish divide would move up and encompass the VM and
base classes.

