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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 chc on Thursday May 31, 2012 @06:05PM (#4050646)
The GPL never forbade creating a nonfree library with the same interface as a free one.
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Re:Oracle v. Google - Judge Alsup Rules APIs Not Protected B... by jrockway on Thursday May 31, 2012 @08:20PM (#4051189)
That's my reading too, though I remember someone who wrote a MySQL API layer that was not libmysql was accused of violating the GPL. Amusingly, MySQL is now an Oracle product (though I'm not sure it was at the time).
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Re:Oracle v. Google - Judge Alsup Rules APIs Not Protected B... by Sanddancer on Friday June 01, 2012 @01:11AM (#4052075)
It had been MySQL's standard MO for a while. Their point of view was you either had to completely open source your product, or you had to pay them lots of money. Using it in an in-house webapp, or as you mentioned, reverse engineering the API, would get them knocking on your door threatening to sue you.
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Re:Oracle v. Google - Judge Alsup Rules APIs Not Protected B... by chimeracoder on Friday June 01, 2012 @01:23AM (#4052099)
Which is, incidentally, not too far from how GNU/Linux came to be - a free OS with the same interface as a nonfree[1] one.

[1] AT&T was legally required to provide the source code of its OS 'for free', I'm not sure if the terms actually qualify as 'free-as-in-freedom', hence the impetus to create an alternative implementation.

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