decoration decoration
Stories

GROKLAW
When you want to know more...
decoration
For layout only
Home
Archives
Site Map
Search
About Groklaw
Awards
Legal Research
Timelines
ApplevSamsung
ApplevSamsung p.2
ArchiveExplorer
Autozone
Bilski
Cases
Cast: Lawyers
Comes v. MS
Contracts/Documents
Courts
DRM
Gordon v MS
GPL
Grokdoc
HTML How To
IPI v RH
IV v. Google
Legal Docs
Lodsys
MS Litigations
MSvB&N
News Picks
Novell v. MS
Novell-MS Deal
ODF/OOXML
OOXML Appeals
OraclevGoogle
Patents
ProjectMonterey
Psystar
Quote Database
Red Hat v SCO
Salus Book
SCEA v Hotz
SCO Appeals
SCO Bankruptcy
SCO Financials
SCO Overview
SCO v IBM
SCO v Novell
SCO:Soup2Nuts
SCOsource
Sean Daly
Software Patents
Switch to Linux
Transcripts
Unix Books

Gear

Groklaw Gear

Click here to send an email to the editor of this weblog.


You won't find me on Facebook


Donate

Donate Paypal


No Legal Advice

The information on Groklaw is not intended to constitute legal advice. While Mark is a lawyer and he has asked other lawyers and law students to contribute articles, all of these articles are offered to help educate, not to provide specific legal advice. They are not your lawyers.

Here's Groklaw's comments policy.


What's New

STORIES
No new stories

COMMENTS last 48 hrs
No new comments


Sponsors

Hosting:
hosted by ibiblio

On servers donated to ibiblio by AMD.

Webmaster
| 451 comments | Create New Account
Comments belong to whoever posts them. Please notify us of inappropriate comments.
Several Points
Authored by: jbb on Thursday, May 03 2012 @ 09:42 PM EDT
Existing Code
If you look at entire applications then, sure, the amount of overlap would be zero. But 99% of the time, that is not how existing code is used. Blocks of code that perform certain tasks are what are re-used most of the time. There would be a HUGE amount of overlap with these blocks.

Auto-Translation
We discussed this weeks ago as an example of the absurdity of copyrighting APIs. The auto-translation program runs a great risk of violating the API copyrights. If it does then we are back to square zero. If it doesn't then Google could just add an auto-translator to the front end of their compile tool-chain and Oracle's API copyrights would be all but meaningless.

You also forget the elephant in the room:

Developer Head Space
Good developers hold the APIs they are using in their heads. The API calls can just stream from their fingers. Forcing them to use two different APIs to do exactly the same thing in very similar contexts would violate one of the most fundamental rules of programming. It would not make things 2x harder (because you now have to keep twice as much in your head), it would make things 100x harder or worse because of the tremendous risk of confusing a call in one set of APIs with the matching call in the other set of APIs.

If your solution to this problem is auto-translation, then let's let Google add an auto-translator to their compile tool chain and jettison the API portion of this trial.

---
Our job is to remind ourselves that there are more contexts than the one we’re in now — the one that we think is reality.
-- Alan Kay

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

On languages and APIs.
Authored by: Anonymous on Thursday, May 03 2012 @ 11:38 PM EDT
In Java the distinction isn't so clear, since EVERY object (the basic
structuring
device in the language) has to be a member of a class that inherits from
java.lang.Object , further, java.lang.Object has a host of methods that require

other classes, and these classes require other classes, and so on. Further
exceptions, iterators (java.util), and strings all have special language support

where the language spec makes reference to the API.

It is not Java without the core API, and that core API is at least several
hundred
classes.

Also, C has a small set of "standard" APIs, but things like printf and
malloc are
pretty essential. It should means something the K+R (the book) uses the C
standard library extensively. Sure, the linux kernel doesn't, but application
level C really needs these standard functions.

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

Groklaw © Copyright 2003-2013 Pamela Jones.
All trademarks and copyrights on this page are owned by their respective owners.
Comments are owned by the individual posters.

PJ's articles are licensed under a Creative Commons License. ( Details )