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A comment on Oracle v. Google - Judge Alsup Rules APIs Not Protected By Copyright. Parent comment

Re:Oracle v. Google - Judge Alsup Rules APIs Not Protected B... by ajross on Thursday May 31, 2012 @06:05PM (#4050644)
No, it's a different issue. When you take a GPL (not LGPL) library (not an API, an actual piece of software) and "use it", you're creating a derivative work of that library. The only way to license such a work is under the GPL. Because if you don't, you don't get a license to use the library (not the API, the software) under copyright law. But it's the copyright on the software that is the teeth here. In principle you could distribute your code under GPL-incompatible licenses, but only as a piece of useless source code. Anyone who wants to ship useful software needs to abide by the copyright of the software they use.

What Google (really Harmony) did is mere cloning. They (very) expressly didn't use Java the software, only the "Java API".

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Re:Oracle v. Google - Judge Alsup Rules APIs Not Protected B... by perlgeek on Friday June 01, 2012 @02:24AM (#4052224)
> In principle you could distribute your code under GPL-incompatible licenses, but only as a piece of useless source code.

It's not useless. Your customers can compile it, and link it to the GPLed library. After all the GPL allows you absolute freedom of use, as long as you don't distribute the derivative work.

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Re:Oracle v. Google - Judge Alsup Rules APIs Not Protected B... by ajross on Friday June 01, 2012 @11:37AM (#4053982)
No, the point is that your code is the derivative work. If you distribute it to the customer with the intent of it being a useful integration, you can only do so legally under the GPL. The GPL library owner could sue you to stop that distribution.

Obviously there's some gray area if you, say, publish your code in the context of fair use (as an academic paper, say) and someone else does the integration work without your blessing (this is what I meant by "useless piece of source code"). But simply saying "build it yourself" is not a get out of jail free card for the GPL.

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Re:Oracle v. Google - Judge Alsup Rules APIs Not Protected B... by perlgeek on Saturday June 02, 2012 @01:34PM (#4058582)
If my code just uses APIs from a GPLed library, how is it a derivative work? APIs aren't copyrightable (yay).

In my understanding only the compiled result which links to the GPLed library is a derivative work.

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