speedplane

> many variables and factors also influence how things happen, but the fundamental idea that people actually do limit themselves for no good reason is also frequently seen.

There are a ton of reasons why many "average" people don't become "exceptional". But the idea that many folks make an affirmative choice not to seems pretty far down the totem pole.

> look at the proliferation of desktop GUIs in the late 80s and into the 90s. Everybody was throwing in gratuitous differences in the hopes of making their look and feel "different enough" to avoid a lawsuit. So we ended up with a mess: swapping the location of "OK" and "Cancel" buttons, every platform's scroll bars behaved differently

I don't see this as a mess at all. I see this as very positive experimentation and eventual consolidation. Would it really be better if one company came up with a GUI and everyone latched on to it?

> suggesting it'll be back to normal in 6 months implies you don't understand the scale of the problem

No one knows the scale of the problem. It's the uncertainty that's driving the volatility.

> I hope that whoever created int max(int a, int b) is benevolent because just about every programmer has reinvented that at some point. What about Response get(String url) which returns an HTTP GET response. We have probably all written that at some point and most HTTP libraries implement it.

FUD. You're using extreme arguments that traditional copyright law handles them well. API functions like "max" or "get" are so basic and general that they would not be protected by copyright law because they are not original "creative" works... a "max" function can only be written in a few ways that don't really rise to the level of creativity.

However, a massive amalgamation of functions and classes, could be protected. I don't see any theoretical reason why they shouldn't, just practical ones based on what the software industry has expected as standard behavior.

> The idea that giving people an effectively eternal copyright interest in making interoperable software would improve software strains credulity.

Why would it? Giving a company the right to prevent interoperability does not necessarily mean they will invoke that right. It also might promote alternative APIs potentially fragmenting the market, but also inventivizing various approaches. It's not clear that this is the case, but it's not clear that it isn't either.

> When I WFH I just slack off.

I've worked in an office for years, and then transitioned to working from home for years. The initial transition was rough: snacking, lack of motivation, lack of structure.

But it only took about a month to get past that. You start building your own routine and structure, optimized to your life, not a mandated 9-5. Not only am I more efficient and less stressed at home, I'm pretty certain I actually "work" more hours than sitting at an office.

And I'm a pretty extroverted person, that thrives with other human contact. When working from home, I get to choose when to socialize/collaborate, it isn't hoisted on me.

> Run Matlab Production Server on AWS as a microservice. But the licensing cost of Matlab Production Server is "contact us". Scary.

Starting a business is scary. Contact them, figure out the cost, and figure out if it's worth it to rewrite it in a freely licensed language.

> I wonder what would happen if the api had the text "oracle" in the function names?

Wouldn't affect copyright law too much, but Oracle could probably raise a trademark infringement claim too.

> everyone in the industry is saddled with huge potential liabilities until a massive multi-year relicensing project can be completed to confirm who is committed to never trying Oracle's tactics when they fall on hard times. That is a doom and gloom scenario for anyone who takes legal threats seriously and doesn't have an IBM-class mutually assured destruction IP portfolio.

This multi-year cross licensing project wouldn't be a big impediment. It happens all the time in standards setting organizations, and wouldn't slow down progress significantly.

The worst case scenario would be trolls somehow obtaining the copyright to a foundational API and collecting money from everyone. That would be a pretty big annoyance, but that too would't be a doomsday scenario. Patent trolls have been active for decades and have had minimal impact on overall progress.

> I think by "Copying a functional spec" he meant to say implementing someone else's functional spec, rather than just re-publishing it. So that what's being copied is not the copyrightable text of the spec, but the non-copyrightable abstract ideas described by the spec.

Implementing an API spec is not just using the "abstract ideas" in the spec. It requires copying the specific text of the API: a function named DoSomething will incompatible with one named do_something.

I don't think that's a valid way to distinguish copying APIs and implementation.

On a purely theoretical basis, I do think APIs could be copyrightable, I don't think there is a valid way to distinguish them from implementation. The main argument against copyrighting APIs is practical: everyone has been doing it for decades, and changing the status-quo will be disruptive.

Another practical reason is that copyrighting APIs will decrease competition by impeding companies from creating better drop-in competitor products to established players. But this is really an argument against all software copyright, not just API copyrights.

> I agree, and that's precisely the sort of software I've seen using the WTFPL license. I don't think it's right to characterize this as reckless.

"Reckless" is too strong, but shortsighted or poor judgment might be more appropriate. If you're using a software license for anything, whether it's a hobby, a helpful library, or a potential business venture, that means you're distributing your work to the world.

What benefit do you gain by using a poorly understood license that is effectively the same as widely used permissive licenses?

> Copying a functional spec - like for SQL - is fine. But copying implementation code is not (unless that's the only way it can be implemented).

Why are specs fundamentally different than implementations?

> The project for some compilers courses is implementing a compiler for a subset for Java. Would the current ruling mean that doing the project is copyright infringement?

Fair use would probably protect you because you're doing it for non-commercial educational purposes. But further, this lawsuit is not over the Java language, but it's libraries.

> Copyright is not some innate right. Interfaces should not be copyrightable just because they require some level of competence to design.

The purpose of copyright, according to the constitution is "[t]o promote the progress of science and useful arts". So generally, things should be copyrightable if granting the copyright results in more and higher quality work. If APIs are indeed protected, there it is plausible argument that we will have more of them and they will be of higher quality.

> The idea that so much existing infrastructure would infringe on this new kind of copyright is tough to accept, but at least it's very straightforward in a way, with brutal direct consequences.

I don't anticipate a doom-and-gloom scenario if APIs were all-of-a-sudden copyrightable. Today, open source software is backed by powerful companies, and there is far less lock-in to any particular set of software functionality. The likely outcome is that big tech companies would just cross-license their basic APIs like Win32, SQL, NTFS, POSIX-like functionality, and other basic interface layers.

Today in 2020, the value is not in the interface, but data. Facebook probably wouldn't care if you created a clone that used the same API structure. But if you started imported their user data, you could expect a lawsuit.

> I think if Oracle wins, the best thing that could happen is IBM immediately suing for infringment on SQL.

IBM's potential claim on SQL wouldn't be a threat to Oracle.

IBM uses Java heavily. The most likely outcome is that the two companies reach a deal to cross-license with maybe a modest amount of money exchanged, freeing them each to go after everyone else.

> I believe that's a fair price to pay for breaking the software industry.

There is a theoretical legal question of whether APIs should be copyrightable, and then there are the practical issues.

As a purely legal matter, there is a strong (but not slam-dunk) case that an API is copyrightable. As a practical matter however, everyone in the software industry has been operating as if APIs were free to copy for decades, and enforcing such a copyright would break a ton of things.

Practical effects of a legal ruling are generally not "officially" considered by the judge, but more-often-than-not, they're operating behind the scenes and judges craft their opinions to support an established status-quo.

> We lost the chance at containment weeks ago. It's in the community. We need to stop all flights, close all schools, and discourage travel. Our best chance now is in flattening the curve so our healthcare system isn't overburdened.

If it's already out, how will stopping flights and closing schools really help? How long will you stop them? At best, this will just slow the spread, not stop it.

> There are a two options: first is to do social distancing properly and the virus will naturally die out, the other is to "go on as normal" and eventually most people will be infected.

Will social distancing really work over the long term though? We can't live in caves forever, eventually we have to come out.

> The sort of software you see using this license is not the sort of software anybody is likely to get sued over anyway. ... I think a lot of people forget that not all software needs to be aerospace grade shit that with licenses corporate suits think are sensible.

Generally, lawsuits arise under two conditions:

- You start making lots of money.

- You're doing something that causes someone else to lose lots of money.

The same is true of software licenses. You won't get sued for hobby projects with low impact. But if you start making money, others will want a piece. If you start impeding on someone else's revenue, they will want to protect it. If you're in either of these situations, software licenses matter.

> The issue I see is that it limits the usage to those associated with Academic Institutions. What if you're a data scientist, or an interested person, not working in Academia? Any research you'd want to do and publish isn't good enough, unrelated to the research itself? Seems unfortunate.

Today, data is gold. Companies may give it to academic institutions for free, but that's mostly because they hope the academics will publish their work and cite to the original source data, effectively free marketing.

Here is Trial Exhibit 980:

https://www.docketalarm.com/cases/California_Northern_Distri...

> it's a simplification to point out that there aren't as many doctors, without noting all the other doctor-esque roles with significant overlap.

Comparing the number of doctors in the US to other countries is not a good measure of anything. But noting that americans spend more per capita and get worse health outcomes is pretty significant.

> What a completely different world these people live in.

- No Wikipedia.

- No user generated yelp reviews.

- No non-government approved news articles.

- Every message you write online can affect your credit-worthiness and your children's access to schools.

- Buggy face recognition technology that routinely implicates the innocent

- Secret detentions if you are "deemed" a scofflaw, with no clear process to challenge it.

- Non-existent property rights unless you have connections to power.

I love the Chinese people and culture, but the Chinese government is one of the worst ever. It doesn't just effect the way you live, it effects your ability to even think.

> You definitely can, most of the times you can’t collect all the hours you put in. Client pays what it pays and the rest is written off. It’s the senior’s job to manage the ratio of billed hours to collected hours.

I am telling you --from experience, not theory-- that many lawyers are resistant to time-saving tools. Not all of them, but many of them. They rarely voice out-loud that their concern is about reduced billables, and will instead make absurd arguments that the time-saving tools decrease quality.

Simple real life example: we were selling a very simple bulk download tool to a law firm. Instead of clicking a link and downloading a document many times, this tool would download many in batch and put them in a zip folder. They raised the objection saying "how do we know it downloaded everything", even though the zip file also had an excel listing all the documents that were downloaded, the source of where they came from, and any errors in downloading them.

> As a counterpoint, I’d like to state that being able to raise efficiency when you need it could be a huge selling point. On slow days, I don’t want to raise my efficiency that much , I take my time and review more thorougly.

I don't think you're really talking about "efficiency" here. On slow days, you may want to spend more time to do a more thorough job, but you still wouldn't want to be less efficient.

Simple automation example: renaming files into a new format. If there was a tool that could rename a large number of files for you quickly, you would use it on slow days and busy days. There is nothing to be gained to doing it manually.

I think you're referring to tools that speed you up but sacrifice quality. That isn't a pure efficiency tool, it's tool that allows you to adjust balance your time and quality of work.

> If Microsoft had given us a clean C++ API for Windows, the world of programming would be very different today.

I mean, Win32 was a relatively clean C library. Not beautiful by any means, but it worked and was well documented. At the time it was huge, but it's pretty irrelevant today. If they did it in C++ instead of C, how could it have been different.

> What was the difference between the rich and the poor family? Who is the parasite? What is it exactly that the rich family does better or gives to this world that they deserve the exceptionally better lifestyle?

If you're looking for answers, this movie won't answer them. However, if you're asking the questions than the movie already did it's work.

> What struck me is that the main family has a ton of talent. They're excellent actors and planners. In a healthy society, they could use those talents to do something productive

You got it both right and wrong. In "Parasite", the family did indeed have talents, and they were often morally wrong: for most of the movie, they're bad-guys. But the movie is successful for the questions it raises:

- why should the poor always be "good" and yet if the rich are just a little bit good, they are considered saints.

- why assume that talent has anything to do with it. The poor family seemed smarter than the rich family. But how much of success is really based on "talent" rather than knowing the right people at the right time?

The movie was good because it didn't really take sides on these issues, while throwing the question directly at your face. The very fact that you're asking the question means the effect was successful.

> Anonymous people over the web have become guides to personal finance, reddit just facilitates that. The same advice was available during the "blogging/RSS era".

Every generation needs their own form. Before blogging/RSS it was cable financial news on TV, before that magazines, and before that I don't know.

Basic financial literacy (creating a budget, tracking it, adjusting) is sorely lacking.

Today, you may be adept at trading $10k of stocks on Robinhood using money that you're parents gave you hoping over the year for a big 20% win, but you'll equally forget that you have $10k of credit card debt with interest accruing at 30%.