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Judge Alsup is very thorough and wants no successful appeal of his decision | 697 comments | Create New Account
Comments belong to whoever posts them. Please notify us of inappropriate comments.
Judge Alsup is very thorough and wants no successful appeal of his decision
Authored by: Anonymous on Wednesday, May 09 2012 @ 02:42 AM EDT
I won't pick your reply apart, as I agree with almost all of it. :-)

The error in your argument is only one of omission. You persist in defending
the use of the three words independently, despite there being no issue when they
are used independently (that's why I declared a straw man). The problem that I
am highlighting arises only when "SSO" is used in court as if it were
a conceptual unit in Computing, which it is not.

When matters of law are resolved using terms which have no corresponding
conceptual basis in the relevant field, the result is at best irrelevant and at
worst various shades of harmful. That is what is happening here. No software
expert will ever find an "SSO" in his or her software system as a
relevant entity, because it simply does not exist as a concept in the field, let
alone a concept with that name.

The closest we ever come to "SSO" in computing is the API or set of
APIs, and that's not close at all. The decomposition of those APIs is not
discussed in structural terms because API operation is behavioral rather than
structural, so "Structure" is not really a useful concept in API
analysis. Behavior is much more dynamic than structure can describe.

What about Sequence? Well that's totally immaterial, since the sequence in
which the entries of an API appear makes no functional difference.

And finally, Organization ... whatever does that mean? It's not an analytic
concept at the API level of Java. It can be a very important concept in API
design at a detailed level, particularly when implementing design patterns, but
that doesn't seem to be what the court was discussing because it doesn't apply
to entire sets of APIs. My best guess is that they were referring to Sequence
again, but this time the hierarchical subclassing sequence a.b.c.d.. Who knows.
The point is, computer scientists and computing practitioners do not talk about
the subject matter this way, and therefore nor should the lawyers nor the
judge.

They're making stuff up and to do so should be outside of their jurisdiction, to
use a phrase from their vocabulary.

(PJ: The fact that they took the term from another case doesn't make it any
better. The principle is wrong.)

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

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