It's worse than that. OpenJDK, including the java standard library, is GPL. It's open source.
Oracle is claiming that even though source code defining the API is open source, they retain copyright to the API itself.. regardless of the open source implementation of the API by themselves.
If this case goes through, you won't be able to mimic an open source project's API unless you also verify they provide the API under a similarly permissive license.
The code at issue is pre-OpenJDK, and wasn't open source when used (though much of it may now also be available in OpenJDK, not that Google uses it under the GPL, or claims to, anyhow.)
But the GPL is irrelevant, Google has never distributed under the GPL terms. That whatever it was doing was not under a Sun/Oracle license is not in dispute.
Your code is just protected if it gets re-distributed, that's why google never ever has to opensource their "Server OS/Kernel".
Also they changed GCC to GPLv3 which is just a super stupid decision for a Compiler.
Are you sure they are claiming that? A weaker claim could be that Google's usage does not conform to the GPL. Indeed if you were correct and the ruling is in Oracle's favor then the GPL is broken as designed, I haven't heard anyone express that concern in connection with this case.
At the time at issue, Java wasn't under the GPL. That Google did not have a (public offer or private) license to Java is not in dispute.
But Oracle doesn't care one bit about anything else that's not Oracle.
Though it is still to be known how many reimplemented APIs from others does Oracle have in their products
Yes if you want to be certified and want to get a copy of the standards document you'll need to pay, but it's not necessary (and I doubt that Oracle did, given that they implemented SQL before the standard existed and probably were involved in drafting it).
Then that screwdriver turns itself instead of turning the screw.
> probably were involved in drafting it
Which also isn't done for free beer, ISO processes have associated costs.
The original point being made in this thread was that Oracle copied the API of SQL from IBM and thus is guilty of the same thing that they are accusing Google of doing. The counter-point was that SQL is an ISO standard and Oracle (allegedly) licensed it, which was then followed up by my point about Oracle DB predating the ISO standard. Hence why ISO is being discussed and why I was making the point that buying a standard document from ISO or paying for certification are not really relevant to this discussion.
I understood copyright to be something you had if you had created it.
Copyright... of the top of my head, I don't recall much about copyrightability of software.
[1] As a side note, IBM may not have been the first to license software but they certainly helped make it a standard practice. When they unbundled much of the System/360 software, they felt that copyright was a weak protection (given its uncertain legal status) so they combined it with a license.
... in the US of A.
Berne convention started a little bit over a full century before that.
Impressive that the superfluous “need” for the Copyright (c) YYYY notice still persists to this day in the mind of many.
I’ve made a life long habit of collecting and archiving these in my personal documents whenever I get my hands on one. Because these are valuable guidelines as to how things are supposed to work.
That's patching and is already disallowed by licenses in USA, but allowed by law, but that law was goofed up by a court.
Says who? Oracle is claiming exactly the opposite, and if they win this will become "law" in the USA. I think you've missed the whole point of this issue here.
> For instance "Linux" is a copyright owned by Linus Torvalds…
For starters: Linux™ is a trademark, not "a copyright".
> Your understanding is incorrect here.
It seems, at least to me, that you actually missed a few core point of the whole story. ;-)
Patenting an API makes sense, since APIs are essentially ideas. Copyrighting an API does not make sense.
You cannot patent the completely generic idea of "a tool to lift people in buildings", but you can patent an elevator.
Similarly, you cannot patent "the ability to scan a database", but you can patent an api for doing so, even without a complete implementation of that api.
You should see some of the software patents that get approved nowadays to see just how often "idea on a computer" gets greenlit.
Imagine you're a company using some Oracle database, and you want to reimplement some component of that system in order to migrate and escape their vendor lock-in... You can't, not without taking a huge legal risk.
In the short term, it's a victory for huge litigious corporations like Oracle. The good thing, I hope, is that in the long term, this will make people distrust closed source software even more. What Oracle wants, and has always wanted, is to bind you in the worst possible form of vendor lock-in. Open source and open standards are the answer. Refuse anything else.