Solicitor General Advises Supreme Court to Not Grant Cert in Google vs. Oracle

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7 points·badlogic··4 comments

Essentially, the US Solicitor General says that the lower court ruling in favor of Oracle should stand. And Google should pursue a "fair use" defense of their adoption of the Java standard library APIs.

Hypothetical worse case for Google and Android: the US Supreme Court refuses to hear the case, and then Google subsequently also loses a "fair use" defense. Oracle then is awarded big damages and the Android ecosystem is hurt bad.

Oracle wants smartphone vendors to use its version of Java.

The worst case isn't just for Google and Android, it would mean that API's are no longer in fair use. No more IBM PC compatible BIOS or any such industry advances.

I think that interoperability might better stand if much more of the APIs were translated verbatim, and restricted in runtime on the devices... Though that would be only a technical work around.

That said, I think the argument is bullshit, as given conventions used in the language (and in similar language) most of the organizational structure for given APIs and libraries are what makes the most sense, and there are very much in fact a fairly limited number of means of expression that can be made in order to establish a platform with a familiar language/expression. If you compare say, the .Net environment, you will see it is very similar, with very similar structure... For a language whose implementation is very unique from Java, the structure, and call patterns for common methods are in fact similar.

Exactly right about .Net, just having Capitalized method names doesn't make it vastly different. There's an issue with the even Supreme court making decisions regarding technology. We may be in need of a more specialized ruling body that as an appreciation of the implications a decision.

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