Quote:
Originally Posted by leebase
I mixed. I realize that I don't want "var a = min(b,c)" to be copywrighted such that every computer language must come up with novel syntax (api) for everything.
However, Sun (subsequently purchased by Oracle) spent years and money developing the computer language "java" and building up the business and ecosystem (developers who use java). They made money licensing java.
For Google to just take the language whole hog...but just writing their own implementation...allowed Google to avoid paying Sun/Oracle for their work. Rather than creating their own computer language (which they subsequently have), they copied java so that they could benefit from all the programmers who already knew and liked java.
I'm surprised the Borland Quattro Pro case wasn't brought up. Borland made a look/work-a-like of Lotus 1-2-3. They did what Google did. They didn't steal the actual code behind Lotus, just created their own version that was so much the same, that existing Lotus customers could switch. Borland lost.
Google should have lost. I'm not sure how you could distinguish "no one gets to own an api call" from "no one can whole hog copy a computer language"...but there needs to be a way.
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The issue is that we have seen that people are going to push the envelop with regards to patents and copyright and try to get patients and copyrights for anything and everything they think they can sucker a judge into giving them. Sun built java on the intellectual efforts of the various computer languages that came before them. You can see where Java stole aspects from a lot of different languages. Compiler and interpreter technology was stole from previous implementations. I have a computer degree and had a class in writing compilers. Guess what, you are taught various ways of writing based on what has been successful before.
The real issue is that computer code should not be copyrighted. Copyright was never designed for such things. It's just some lawyer came up with a novel legal approach and suckered a technologically incompetent judge to go along with it. Once the precedent was in place, everyone jumped on board. Hey, great, a new way to make money!
Copyrighting computer code and API's is a bit like copyrighting the sentence "The sun rose in the east".