Hacker News Reader

Comment by mrkstu | Hacker News Reader

Yep. This case was an existential threat to multitudes of industries and the assumptions they were built on.

The weird thing is it would of hurt Oracle as much as anyone. I have no clue how anyone w/any technical merit didn't understand that this was a footgun of the largest possible magnitude for them.

View on HN

I had the opportunity once to talk to an IP lawyer for Oracle and brought this up. I specifically brought up the S3 compatibility of their cloud storage among other instances.

His reply was “without admitting anything specific, how do you know we haven’t purchased private licenses for anything you just mentioned?”

It's still silly. Imagine if you needed to purchase a license for the shape of plug that fits inside a standard plug socket - to build any appliance.

Imagine if you had to pay a software developer 300K a year to design that API that you think it’s cool to steal.

Someone had to design plug sockets too.

Oh yeah he and I still fundamentally disagreed, but it gave me some insight into Oracle’s position.

Plenty of good, cheap DACs built in China (e.g. Topping) have an HDMI-shaped plug (IIS) that supports PCM-over-not-HDMI which happens to be compatible with HDMI sources, but don't dare mention HDMI because they don't want to pull in an interlocking, price-gouging nonsense from the US entertainment industry.

So you don't quite need a license for the shape of the plug, but you do need to pretend it's not something that it is.

Isn’t S3 under the Apache license?

In my own mind, when CentOS died Oracle was saying you should move to "Oracle Unbreakable Linux"... which is a downstream clone of RHEL, just like CentOS was. Just one example of the hypocrisy.

Even more egregiously, Oracle's whole existence is based off of copying the SQL API from IBM.

It is uncontested that Oracle cloning RHEL is allowed by the license that RHEL is released under. They don't need a fair use ruling from the Supreme Court because they literally have a license that allows exactly what they did. The same could not be said for Google's actions in this case.

I'd really like it if we could kill Oracle somehow. They are easily the worst player in the technology industry.

Based on what?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com