On 14-10-17 09:36 AM, Ian Stirling wrote:
On 10/16/2014 07:16 AM, thufir wrote:
I cannot fathom why the FSF is on the side of letting API's get
copied, I
mean stolen. Do they not see the result this would have on the GPL? Or,
do they see a larger issue? Or, do they just think that it's not
stealing? It's remarkable that the trial judge and the appeal judge use
a word like stolen, and not "infringe" or other legal mumbo jumbo.
If APIs can't be freely copied, then that means that it is essentially
impossible to interoperate with systems without the vendors permission.
WINE is not legal.
Nor, is GCC compiling to target architectures where the vendor has not
released information with a free licence but it's been reverse
engineered.
Nor is Samba or any of the many filesystems that have been reverse
engineered.
Your ignoring:
'As the former Register of Copyrights of the United States pointed out
in his brief amicus curiae, “[h]ad Google reverse engineered the
programming packages to figure out the ideas and functionality of the
original, and then created its own structure and its own literal code,
Oracle would have no remedy under copyright whatsoever.”'
Right there, the appeals court explains how to work around copyright.
does that cover Wine? GCC?
Since Wine and Apache Harmony are both reverse engineered, they're fine
-- no different from yesterday, the sky isn't falling.
Presumably, since GCC and GCJ are under the GPL, I don't think it even
matters. However, in the context of API's, SSO and reverse engineering
I'll ask: are they reverse engineered?
I think it's moot because of reverse engineering.
-Thufir
