Developer Freedom At Stake As Oracle Clings To Java API Copyrights In Google Fight
Found on Techcrunch on Sunday, 31 March 2013
You could hear a collective sigh of relief from the software developer world when Judge William Alsup issued his ruling in the Oracle-Google lawsuit. Oracle lost on pretty much every point.
Oracle lost in their attempt to protect their position using patents. They lost in their attempt to claim Google copied anything but a few lines of code. If they succeed in claiming you need their permission to use the Java APIs that they pushed as a community standard, software developers and innovation will be the losers.
Oracle never really learns. If they manage to succceed in the next lawsuit, Java will be dropped like a hot cup of coffee. Oracle made that mistake already when it tried to force OpenOffice to behave like they wanted it; now we have LibreOffice and the percentage of OpenOffice drops constantly.