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What did Joshua Bloch Say? | 400 comments | Create New Account
Comments belong to whoever posts them. Please notify us of inappropriate comments.
What did Joshua Bloch Say?
Authored by: bugstomper on Sunday, May 13 2012 @ 06:04 PM EDT
I'm not sure about "improved version" but the timeline is something
like this:

While at Sun, he wrote the Arrays class, which contains a sort method as wella s
some others that take as arguments fromIndex and toIndex. Since all those
methods are specified to thrown the same exceptions when those arguments are out
of range, he wrote a common small private method rangeCheck to check them and
throw the exceptions.

While an employee at Google he saw timSort in the Python library and decided to
port it to Java and contribute it to OpenJDK as a faster version of the
Arrays.sort method. Since rangeCheck in Arrays was a private method, he wrote
timSort with an equivalent private method, also named rangeCheck. I seem to
recall that his testimony was that he was not sure if he looked at rangeCheck in
Arrays or did it just from memory, but that does not make a difference in
copyright law since either way it came from Sun's Arrays.java. He also testified
that he expected that once he contributed timSort to OpenJDK that the rangeCheck
method in Arrays would be made public so that it could be called directly by
timSort and the duplicate copy of rangeCheck could be removed from timSort. I
haven't checked recently, but I don't think that happened in OpenJDK.

Then he contributed timSort to Android. The contributor agreement to OpenJDK
allows the author to retain ownership of the copyright and grant a license to
the JCP to distribute the contribution under GPL with the Classpath exception.
Thus he was free to contribute timSort to Android to be distributed under the
Apache license. Unfortuntely he forgot about rangeCheck being in there and still
owned by Sun/Oracle.

In November or December 2010 the Android version of timSort was changed as he
originally planned, by the method that is in Arrays.java in Android that does
the functional equivalent of rangeCheck (but a different name and coded
differently, no question of copying) being made public, rangeCheck removed from
timSort, and calls to it replaced with calls to the now public method in
Arrays.

That was after Oracle filed suit, but I don't know if was before or after Oracle
identified rangeCheck as accused infringement. It may have been removed as part
of regular maintenance, as originally planned.

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

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