Except that iOS is based on Unix, and the freedom to re-implement copyrighted Unix APIs was litigated and won. What if SCO/Novell/USL/whoever owns the Unix copyrights now, comes back and sues anyone reimplementing them? That includes OSX and iOS which are dependent on Unix compatibility.

Also, what's being litigated here is not Java-the-language but Java-the-core-API-interfaces.

You could refactor your way out of those, just provide alternate versions of java.io, java.lang, etc, new redesigned core APIs.

It would break core Java compatibility, but Android is so big, most people would port their Java libraries, and in the end, Oracle would be hurt more, since they rely far more on server-side Java, but most of the world's Java programmers would be migrating to writing mobile apps, probably with non-Java backends, or Java + new Core APIs.

Except UNIX

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unix

is owned by "The Open Group"

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Open_Group

One of its purposes is to provide Single Unix Specification (SUS) certification.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single_UNIX_Specification

Mac OS X is SUS v3 certified (I don't think iOS is) and can call itself UNIX, and there is 0 danger of anyone suing you for implementing POSIX API or SUS. You just can not claim you are providing a UNIX without getting certified. This is why Linux is UNIX-like OS and not a UNIX.

You're confusing Trademark with Copyright. The Open Group owns the Unix trademark, it does not own the API. The fact that POSIX uses the API does not mean any claims to "structure, sequence, organization" of the APIs or command line utilities are invalid.

This has never been litigated before. Past UNIX copyright wars were fought over copying actual code between Unix and clones. No one has ever tested whether API reimplementation of Unix is copyrighted. Implementing as public spec won't save you. Java has a public, open, specification and was clean-room reimplemented in much the same way that Linux is not Unix, Android Java is not Java.

Claiming there is 0 danger in being sued sounds like naively wishful thinking, especially with Apple's deep pockets, there are plenty of lawyers out there looking for ways to crack that nut.

The Open Group own both the UNIX trademark and the POSIX spec. They used to demand a lot of money for copies of the spec, but you can get it online for free nowadays ( https://www2.opengroup.org/ogsys/catalog/G101 is a good place to start). They put copyright notices on the spec, but (at least until this ruling) that was widely believed to only apply to the description of what functions needed to do, and not to the function declarations.

Is it clear that The Open Group or IEEE actually have a clear right to claim copyright of the POSIX api given this ruling? Were they assigned or licensed that copyright by AT&T or any of its successors? It seems likely enough that in the 80s this was not seen as necessary, and the old guard of UNIX implementers were still being quite belligerent towards each other at the time, afaik.

I believe the Open Group was assigned whatever copyright AT&T had when the Open Group was created.

IIRC, one of Oracle's points of contention is that Google is intentionally not being compatible with Java; they picked certain parts of the API they wanted to support, but it's not a full implementation of the Java APIs, and so conforming Java apps are not necessarily able to run.

The full Java spec includes tons of Desktop code for Desktop Widgets, CORBA APIs, and all kinds of insane stuff that makes no sense on a smart phone and isn't used by 90% of Java developers who mostly work on the server side.

Oracle's claims here are rather ridiculous, and even Oracle doesn't believe Swing or J2ME apps are appropriate for today's smartphones. It's a red herring of compatibility that no one cares about or wants to be compatible with.

A lot of the discussion in this thread is about what this sort of ruling means for people making compatible implementations of other people's APIs -- Unix, the PC BIOS, etc. But that's not what Google was intending to do here, they were using part of Oracle's Java tech to build their own, incompatible application format.

They're using Java "The Good Parts", the subset of Java that is platform neutral that most people use. By the time Android was launched, Java on the Desktop was already dead. Practically zero people write Java desktop apps not care about compatibility with them, the vast majority of Java code prior to Android lived in the cloud.

What makes Java valuable to most developers is byte-code portability, the widespread use of the language, the core APIs (not the GUI), and the developer tool chain.

The Sun licenses for Java go back to a time when they had a dream to displace Windows on the Desktop with all native desktop apps written in Java. That reality was delusional, but Java succeeded brilliantly on the server.

I don't know why you think this is relevant to the sort of precedent this sets legally. Oracle claims it is suing Google for making a deliberately incompatible set of libraries using their copyrighted material. The fact that Google's use of the APIs is deliberately incompatible is means that a ruling against Google is not necessarily a precedent that can be used against others who attempt to build compatible clean-room implementations of other systems, and that's just as true if you think that Google's lack of compatibility with Java SE was a good technical decision.

Most clones are incompatible in some way. WINE is not100% compatible with Windows, Linux is not compatible with AT&T Unix (ever looked at "cross platform" Unix source?)

My personal opinion is not about what is legal, but what I think is ethical and justified. The current system is broken and needs to be reformed.

You seem to want to defend the status quo. That's your prerogative, I think you're advocating for a world that makes everyone worse off, but we can agree to disagree.

Well, let's talk about WINE for a second. What I said wasn't "incompatible," it was "deliberately incompatible." WINE attempts to duplicate the Win32 APIs as they are implemented in various versions of Microsoft Windows. The entire point of WINE is to be interoperable, in order to allow programs that run on Windows to also run elsewhere. WINE may sometimes fail at this (man's reach must ever exceed his grasp, else what's a heaven for?), but it is certainly TRYING to be compatible. By the same token, the reason that Linux implements various APIs present in UNIX is so that it is compatible with software written for UNIX (or more accurately, to make software more portable between various types of UNIX and various types of Linux).

Google's use of the Java APIs is different; Google intentionally makes it so that Java applications do not run on Android and Android applications do not run on Sun's JVM. Google is not trying to implement those APIs for the purpose of interoperability. A finding that Google's appropriation of those APIs for their own runtime environment is not fair use is not a finding that WINE's use of Windows APIs in order to enable interoperability is not fair use. What's at stake here is more narrow than what several posters have surmised. You can argue that what's at stake here is still important, which is a discussion worth having, but posts in this thread about (for instance) how the PC compatible market wouldn't be allowed to exist under this ruling are mistaken.

Does the law make a distinction between copyright infringement based on unintentional incompatibility vs intentional incompatibility? I don't see it.

And why would it not be copyright infringement to implement a full API, but is copyright infringement to implement a subset of one?

When Phoenix cloned the PC bios, they did it on the assumption that if they reverse engineered the complete API specification, and then had a separate group of engineers perform the implementation, there would be no infringement, because no one in the history of computer science thought API interfaces could be copyrightable.

IBM was powerless to stop them, and clones flourished. With this precedent, would Phoenix have attempted the clone? Would IBM have not sued over copyright infringement of their interface?

Pretty much all clean room implementations since then have proceeded on the basis that implementing someone else's API, even against their wishes, is not an infringement. It's been the default assumption for decades.

To act like this Court decision has not flipped over decades of practice is putting way too much trust in the companies out there to show restraint and not unleash a tidal wave of copyright suits.

I don't think the deliberate making of Android incompatible with Java had much bearing in this case. Oracle might not have liked it, but it wasn't part of their claims, I don't think. It was discussed as part of the context for Google's choices.

> Except that iOS is based on Unix, and the freedom to re-implement copyrighted Unix APIs was litigated and won.

Not quite. The freedom to re-implement Unix APIs was litigated. If I recall correctly, it was settled rather than won (that is, there was not a court decision but rather a settlement agreement).

Thousands of companies "bet the jewels" on Java and will be making the same bet for the foreseeable future, for better or worse.

Blanket statements like "ObjC is 2x faster than Java" is... well, a blanket statement, and in general, wrong. It depends so much on what, precisely, you're doing, how you're doing it, the compiler and JIT implementation, etc.

Well I think we can ditch Java in favor of:

Go, Erlang, Haskell, C++, Rust

The reason for using Java is the corporate penetration and being the de-facto language for thousands of developers. I seriously think that Java as a language is old and hard to use (hello Clojure & Scala) and on the top of that owned Oracle is the biggest patent troll in the history of humanity, so even implementing the APIs can lead to lawsuits just like the example above.

Now the only question is, why the hell do we still implement new things in Java in 2014? Time to wake up, get a language that is free by every meaning free has and bury Java for good. Is this hard? Definitely is, but if we don't start it today when can we stop Oracle from suing your startups because you implemented an API. Changing US law seems harder. :)

Please be serious.

Go has about 0.0001% of the third party library base that Java does. Many of which are essential for large scale enterprise development. It's why languages like Clojure and Scala have become a lot more popular because they leverage the ecosystem.

No one will move just because of some insignificant lawsuit.

You are talking about a stall picture, a moment in time, thinking this will last forever. I am talking about how fast that 0.0001% becomes 50%. If Oracle is patent trolling the Java developer communities the developers and other enterprises are not going to take it easy. We are talking about Google not some random 3 people startup that pays whatever the patent owner is asking for just to save a lawsuit. Java is the the most resourceful ecosystem today, there is no doubt about that. It is ~20 years old Go is 5, and please have a look to this chart:

http://www.indeed.com/jobtrends?q=Go%2C+Java&l=&relative=1

It's amazing how the chart shows that go was growing faster than Java years before go was even released....

Virtually none of the 'go' job ads have anything to do with programming.

Well yes there is obviously some clean up work on that side, naming Go as go is a bit unfortunate. I guess my original idea still stands, it is not very smart to judge programming languages using their current popularity. This picture can and will change. You can dig up better evidence than that indeed url.