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Comment by bob33212 | Hacker News Reader

I expected this to be a " I had the idea first" post. But it is actually a copyright infringement post AND makes the offending company look like a bunch of hacks.

If they don't have the engineering chops to build an API how are going to handle the ops of it.

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I was curious if some of these docs were auto-generate or templated copy, so I double checked some of the text.

"The redirect_uri provided in Authorize User step" appears exactly once on the Internet according to Google: at smartcar.com. It looks like Otonomo did in fact copy/paste from the SmartCar website.

https://www.google.com/search?q="The+redirect_uri+provided+i...

Some people built the world's most popular operating system doing just that - copying Java's API.

But not their API documentation. They even copied the exact example UDID.

...and of course Java was somewhat open to begin with, which isn't the case for the technology the company that got copied in story. There's always the next level in douchebaggery, if Google was really wrong copying those headers to begin with.

Copying the headers make sense even if you rewrite the implementation from scratch, it gives a very basic layer of verification that your implementation matches the original (if the declarations in the prototype clash with your rewrite, there's probably something wrong in there). It doesn't sound like a particularly bad or unethical technical decision to me, at least as long as it's done otherwise completely legally (which has been a very expensive question to settle).

Copy/pasting docs and rewording everything to try and hide that fact is a lot lazier and shadier IMO.

thats...not the same.

Why do you say that? In some regards yes, and some no.

I think the intellectual property is in the APIs/"headers". That is what Android uses from Java and what this company is copying from SmartCar. Its not easy to write a good API. (But, I should say, once you have the headers it is not as tough to populate them with code.) As for coping actual documentation, that is just plain stupid but not the _worse_ crime here.

Now, what is different is that many of us don't approve the way Oracle is enforcing the rights on this information. Java is not like the SmartCar APIs in that it has been free to use for so long. All the same I think Oracle should have the legal right to do this.

Many may disagree about Oracle vs Android but I think it is devaluing the work of people like James Gosling _and_ SmartCar if you say there is not intellectual value in the code/API headers.

> Many may disagree about Oracle vs Android but I think it is devaluing the work of people like James Gosling _and_ SmartCar if you say there is not intellectual value in the code/API headers.

It is not the same simply because Java is an open-source project. SmartCar, on the other hand, is not. I would argue that, because of the nature of open-source, Google should have been able to do as they pleased to facilitate allowing java code on their OS. I know that many would disagree. But to say that there is not intellectual value in the code/API of Java would be disingenuous, and ultimately incorrect; I can say with certainty that I would never say that, so thank you for putting words in my mouth.

Sorry, I didn't mean to put words in your mouth, particularly based on a mere four words. I was talking to people who I have heard argue "it's only the headers".

I appreciate your response. I am not clear on if that particular information is open source. A quick Google search does not seem to give a good (single) answer.

What os is that?

android

They didn't copy paste API docs too, including typos, which is what we have here

The lawsuit was about copyright on headers though. I think the headers did include the same documentation as the original Java implementation.

I think that is reductionistic and misguided. I don't know the exact inside story of course, but this is how I read it, and how I honestly think this happened. They chose to have a garbage-collected, bytecode-VM-executed, OO language as the main platform for their external apps (the internal kernel is a still Linux with its regular C interface). They decided to implement their own VM from scratch (Dalvik). They decided to use Java language, including syntax and basic system APIs, which would make it very accessible for a ton of existing developers. They could as easily gone for another syntax and base API. It wouldn't have been more effort to design and implement (arguably, it could have been less). But of course it wouldn't be such an easy sell to existing Java developers. They opted to interpret Java language and API design as an open, public value, and that's what was dealt with in court.

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