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API's - another analogy | 451 comments | Create New Account
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API's - another analogy
Authored by: jpvlsmv on Friday, May 04 2012 @ 02:38 PM EDT
It's probably a pretty close analogy, if you include the chapter and section
heading of the book as the "API".

The API is arranged into broad "chapters" like math, io, sql, net,
lang, etc. There are "sections" with names like "abs - Given a
number, return its absolute value" or "DBConnect - Given a string,
connect to a database and return a reference to that connection".

There's creative stuff in the paragraphs that follow those section headings
(i.e. the API implementation), but that's not what Google is accused of copying,
except for the paragraph about "rangeCheck".

--Joe

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

API's - another analogy
Authored by: Anonymous on Friday, May 04 2012 @ 03:47 PM EDT
As a professional programmer, I think that's a pretty good
analogy of a system API.

And Oracle is sueing because Google put "Introduction" on
page 1, so every reader would find it where it was expected.

It is not true either that Oracle/Sun was the first genius
to figure out Introduction should be at page 1. The Java
API's were primarily based on already commonly accepted SSO
in the industry.

I feel that is the real danger of this lawsuit: a work that
is by no means original or creative should not be
copyrightable. If Oracle wins, this means that the industry
has some massive problems when publishing an API, especially
one that aims to be recognizable to existing code and
programmers.

The lawsuit from Oracle is understandable from their point
of view. The only direct value of Java for Oracle is that
they sell the "100% proven compatible Java" sticker on the
common index to other people who want to write a compatible
book. In the Java community, there already has been a debate
for many years if it was moral to claim such high fees for
such a sticker, especially because the entire community, not
just Oracle, is developing the book and the index through
the Java Community Process (jcp.org).

Note that Sun/Oracle purposely added other restrictions in
the field of use as well that were not strictly technical
limitations at all. To stretch the analogy: the book with
the compatible index could only be used when reading in a
train (desktop/SE), you are forced to use (and pay) a
different index when reading in a car (mobile/ME).

The only good thing about this is that the industry may
finally realize that open standards for writing programs are
massively important, and that these standards should be
owned by no single company to prevent antitrust issues. No
one in their right mind will use a single vendor technology
as a basis for a new platform now.

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

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