USA Politics

[Deleted member 7164]

What matters are the licensing terms of the Java API and whether the licensing terms are legal. My understanding is that the API license doesn’t allow you to implement subsets of it, and there are other conditions as well: https://www.oracle.com/downloads/licenses/javase8speclicense.html

Seems pretty clear that Google violated those terms. If the licensing terms specced by Oracle are illegal, then you’d have to believe that the terms of licenses like the GPL would also be illegal, and there’s precedent showing that to not be the case.

1. All statements written in license are void if not aligned with the actual consumer or business laws in the jurisdiction
2. GPL is the wrong licence, LGPL would be analogous because it's used for libraries (and hence APIs). It is permissive down to a point where you only need to repeat the copyright statement in your copyright manifests. Therefore there's little for court to take away in the first place.

Using GNU as argument for software copyrights is really novel, I can say that for sure...

I don’t think copyright means what you think it means. If the licensing terms allowed you to repurpose the code, then this sort of copyright declaration would be correct. If the licensing doesn’t allow this sort of repurposing, then you still wouldn’t have the right to do this.

I don't think you got my point. This is the main point

“Just a language runtime” is a big statement. If it does nothing smart or special, then why steal it? It would be perfectly legal to make your own API that aped the Java API one-for-one and just named things in your own way. Google specifically didn’t do that, because people’s familiarity with the Java API has intrinsic value, and they wanted to directly leverage that rather than forcing developers to learn their own clone API.

Because it isn't stealing. Google targeted the biggest open technology, made its own implementation. Oracle did not make Java, Sun made Java, Oracle is just leeching on the IP. Let's just jump here

My understanding is that tools like WINE get around this by reimplementing system APIs at a low enough level that they’re not reusing any code at all to even present the interface. This is different from literally copying another company’s higher-level code without permission and using it in your own product.

Wine implements all Microsoft specifics including PE binary format, memory layouts, and the entirety of the Windows API. This all is Microsoft's intellectual property", PE, NTFS, FAT, API specifics. Wine/ReactOS are free to implement them.

Where I fail to understand you is 'at all to even present the interface'. The interface is clonable, as attested by it being there in Wine. The implementation isn't. However, on the other end there are low level interfaces, the ones controlled by BIOS/EFI from ring0 that kernel typically manages. When you require specified interface A on the one side and specified interface B on the other side, the logic in between gets narrowed down as to what typical design and programming patterns are going to be used. Especially considering virtually all operating systems are written in C using the bulk of same design choices.

You can apply all that to Java and the domain of managed languages.

As for copyrights I know exactly what I'm talking about, and what code can be copyrighted and what code can't. There are no issues even if you have to rewrite the implementations yourself because you lost the permissive license of some code base. Software architecture is not practically patentable/copyrightable (because it relies on open engineering principles of open architectures) and it carries 90% of the weight of the good software product. Not the meat in the methods. Example : 386BSD

 

[Jer]

1. All statements written in license are void if not aligned with the actual consumer or business laws in the jurisdiction

True. And maybe this is where the confusion is coming from. I’m looking at this from the perspective of U.S. law. If interpretations are radically different in some other countries, then that may make this situation look different. Otherwise we’re having some kind of major miscommunication or one of us is horribly off base, because I’ve been dealing with these issues for decades in the U.S. and your interpretation of this doesn’t line up with my experience at all.

2. GPL is the wrong licence, LGPL would be analogous because it's used for libraries (and hence APIs). It is permissive down to a point where you only need to repeat the copyright statement in your copyright manifests. Therefore there's little for court to take away in the first place.

This is missing my point. I wasn’t trying to pick a free software license that lined up with library-level division, I was intentionally choosing the more restrictive GPL to make my point.

I can’t take an interface file from a GPLv3 project, copy it verbatim, add my own copyright statement to it, and legally incorporate it into a proprietary product. That would violate the terms of the license under which the code was made available to me. Unless all affected parts of my software product honor the terms of GPLv3, I’m not allowed to use any of that project’s software in my product. Period. There’s no “interface code” exemption.

If the GPL is an enforceable license, which it has proven to be in U.S. courts, then you are allowed to impose these sorts of restrictions in your software licensing. The Java API license is much more lax than the GPL, and yet Google still clearly violated its wording. If nothing else, they implemented only a subset of the API, which is expressly forbidden in the licensing terms. If the more restrictive GPL is legal, how is the Java API license not also legal?

Because it isn't stealing. Google targeted the biggest open technology, made its own implementation. Oracle did not make Java, Sun made Java, Oracle is just leeching on the IP.

“Open” is defined by the specific terms of the license. It doesn’t have a generic meaning.

Whether Oracle created Java or not is irrelevant. They bought Sun, and Sun owned the copyrights and defined the licensing for Java. Oracle now owns those rights. Whether they’re leeching the IP or not is also legally irrelevant.

Wine implements all Microsoft specifics including PE binary format, memory layouts, and the entirety of the Windows API. This all is Microsoft's intellectual property", PE, NTFS, FAT, API specifics. Wine/ReactOS are free to implement them.

You can mimic the binary interfaces without violating copyright, just like you can create plastic bricks that happen to be the right size and shape to connect to Lego bricks. What you’re not allowed to do is call your compatible bricks Legos, or make a molding of a Lego brick and use that to create your own Lego clone.

My understanding is that WINE provides a binary interface that mimics the Windows system calls and then maps them to POSIX calls. It does not reuse high-level code from Microsoft to accomplish this, so it gets around copyright concerns that way.

As for copyrights I know exactly what I'm talking about, and what code can be copyrighted and what code can't.

Then please explain to me why anyone would put a copyright notice in or apply a restrictive license to a source file that just defines an interface. If your assertion were true, that would serve no purpose.

Why doesn’t the GPL specifically call out interface code as exempt? Are you asserting that this is just assumed, and therefore not worth mentioning, even though legal language is by definition specific to avoid this sort of ambiguity?

Why doesn’t every operating system provide a Windows system API in a high level language that they copy-pasted from Microsoft’s development tools and keep up to date with each new update? This would allow any program written for Windows to be recompiled from source to run on any other OS and the other OS owners wouldn’t have to face any legal repercussions from Microsoft if your position on this were true. Seems like a no-brainer that someone would have already been doing this for years. (And no, WINE is not doing this.)

I just don’t see how your position on this lines up with established history on the topic in the United States.

 

[Diesel 11]

So uhhhhh... any thoughts on this?

Undercover ICE recordings reveal tactics of fake university that led to 250 students arrested

The University of Farmington, a fake school in Michigan, was the product of a four-year undercover operation by the Department of Homeland Security.

www.usatoday.com

Looks fucked up to me.

 

[Deleted member 7164]

Then please explain to me why anyone would put a copyright notice in or apply a restrictive license to a source file that just defines an interface. If your assertion were true, that would serve no purpose.

Separating the theoretical legal cases and the practical situation in the field.
No one who wants their interface reused, would protect it under GPLv3.

Whether Oracle created Java or not is irrelevant. They bought Sun, and Sun owned the copyrights and defined the licensing for Java. Oracle now owns those rights. Whether they’re leeching the IP or not is also legally irrelevant.

It is damn important and the court took it seriously, if not written down that's clear.

Google argued that cloned interfaces were the product of desire to bring Java to another platform and hence provide more opportunity for Java developers. This Google behaviour was a consequence of Sun's stance and Sun's licensing of Java. Sun wanted Java everywhere and kept permissive stance. Oracle wants to wall garden it. While all referent development was shifted to OpenJDK, GPLv2 licenced.

"The doctrine of “fair use” is flexible and takes account of changes in technology. Computer programs differ to some extent from many other copyrightable works because computer programs always serve a functional purpose. Because of these differences, fair use has an important role to play for computer programs by providing a context-based check that keeps the copyright monopoly afforded to computer programs within its lawful bounds."

My understanding is that WINE provides a binary interface that mimics the Windows system calls and then maps them to POSIX calls. It does not reuse high-level code from Microsoft to accomplish this, so it gets around copyright concerns that way.

Your understanding is incomplete. POSIX to POSIX, yes, like the Linux on FreeBSD. With Wine that's about 15% of what it does. Wine implements Microsoft specified technologies. Like the PE format

Portable Executable - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

And like Java, first come the specification, then come the APIs from it. The APIs will reflect the specification. Therefore if you had legal access to the specification, "API cloning" is out of the question because everyone who implements it, if done right, will come to similar end product. What court did here, is said, you cannot push out specifications for the technology, create a huge user base in decades, and then decide to say we're closing down.

I linked you an example of what happened, with BSD. In early 90s.
They had no problems re-implementing the interfaces with their own code, because once you can use UNIX specification, it's straight forward.

They had no obligation to "cease and desist" all work done from that specification, just because the new owner decided to impose different licensing model.

Why doesn’t every operating system provide a Windows system API in a high level language that they copy-pasted from Microsoft’s development tools and keep up to date with each new update? This would allow any program written for Windows to be recompiled from source to run on any other OS and the other OS owners wouldn’t have to face any legal repercussions from Microsoft if your position on this were true. Seems like a no-brainer that someone would have already been doing this for years. (And no, WINE is not doing this.)

Naive outlook of what it needs to be done in order to achieve that feat...Why can't you just mount some sort of an arbitrary Russian missile beneath an F-18? I can explain this in as much as detail (I have major in operating systems) in other place if you want because it's offtopic.

 

[Deleted member 7164]

Then please explain to me why anyone would put a copyright notice in or apply a restrictive license to a source file that just defines an interface. If your assertion were true, that would serve no purpose.

Good real life example popped to me right now. When I worked for international companies, I had to sign 10-15 pages contract. When I worked with domestic companies, the contract is on 1 page. In bullets, position, pay....and the last bullet containing "this contract is bound to Croatian work laws".

All the shit intl. companies wrote, about intellectual property, non competence, non disclosure, all essentially void in front of the court. I mean some of it might be aligned with work/business laws but a lot of it isn't. Non competence is essentially void for engineers, but not for sales reps.

 

[Jer]

Separating the theoretical legal cases and the practical situation in the field.
No one who wants their interface reused, would protect it under GPLv3.

You seemed to be saying that API code was by definition unprotectable. If that were true, the licensing would be irrelevant, but you seem to have acknowledged a couple of times now that licensing does matter for API code after all, which was part of the point I was making.

This Google behaviour was a consequence of Sun's stance and Sun's licensing of Java. Sun wanted Java everywhere and kept permissive stance. Oracle wants to wall garden it. While all referent development was shifted to OpenJDK, GPLv2 licenced.

There are rules around how you’re allowed to relicense code that’s based on code with a more permissive license. If it had been found that Oracle had behaved improperly on that front, that would be one thing. But as far as I’m aware, that didn’t happen. Google clearly violated the 2014 license terms after ignoring the advice of their own lawyers to license from Oracle. I find the SCOTUS ruling to be dubious on that account, as I don’t buy the fair use argument here at all. You obviously disagree.

Therefore if you had legal access to the specification, "API cloning" is out of the question because everyone who implements it, if done right, will come to similar end product. What court did here, is said, you cannot push out specifications for the technology, create a huge user base in decades, and then decide to say we're closing down.

That’s not how it read to me. SCOTUS completely sidestepped the issue of implementing a subset of the spec, which was forbidden by the license presumably to avoid fragmentation and compatibility issues. The opinion misrepresented what an API is, and in the process gave a bogus justification for fair use, IMO.

Naive outlook of what it needs to be done in order to achieve that feat...

I wasn’t claiming that you only needed the API to emulate Windows. I was using an obvious example of readily available API code that is license-protected to rebut the claim you seemed to be making that API code wasn’t legally protectable. Of course it is, at least in the U.S., and you seem to have indirectly acknowledged that in subsequent posts, so I think this was just a miscommunication.

But I stand by the assertion that if it were legal in the U.S. to cut & paste Microsoft’s API code into anything you wanted with impunity, someone would have absolutely attempted to make a Windows emulation framework for other OSes that used that very code to do it, rather than requiring it to be a binary interface.

Perhaps the laws are interpreted differently in other countries. I can only speak to my direct experience in the U.S.

 

[Jer]

Oh great, another cop in greater Minneapolis “accidentally(?)” pulled their gun instead of their taser and killed an unarmed black man, so the governor imposed a curfew for tonight.

Even if it was a legitimate brain fart, this person clearly has no business being a police officer if they’re capable of making that kind of mistake, and they’re guilty of at least involuntary manslaughter.

Jesus, when did nice old Minnesota turn into the place where cops apparently like to murder unarmed people, especially black ones?

 

[Dr. Eddies Wingman]

another cop in greater Minneapolis “accidentally(?)” pulled their gun instead of their taser

How on earth is that even possible? Are the tasers they use, shaped exactly like their standard handguns? Anyone equipped with both weapons should surely have used both enough in the training range, so that they know the difference? And if the two weapons have a similar look, feel, weight, then other routines should have to be in place, like always carrying the gun on the same side. And practicing a dedicated drill that would prevent such errors.

And if such practices are in place already, this officer needs to serve a long prison sentence.

 

[Jer]

How on earth is that even possible? Are the tasers they use, shaped exactly like their standard handguns?

Nope, and the taser is always stored on their non-dominant side and the handgun on the dominant side. In the bodycam video the cop clearly pulls the handgun and has it at the ready for a few seconds before shooting, though in fairness she was yelling “Taser! Taser!” the whole time, and seemed genuinely shocked when she realized she’d shot the guy; but negligence is no excuse when your totally avoidable error kills someone.

Bodycam video (semi-graphic):

 

[Travis The Dragon]

CNN Director Admits Network Engaged in ‘Propaganda’ to Remove Trump from Presidency

PART 1: CNN Director ADMITS Network Engaged in ‘Propaganda’ to Remove Trump from Presidency … ‘Our Focus Was to Get Trump Out of Office’ … | Project Veritas

Investigating and exposing corruption in both public and private institutions.

www.projectveritas.com

 

[LooseCannon]

Yeah Project Veritas is an expert in fake news. Their founder, James O'Keefe, makes stuff up and uses deceptive videos.

 

[Jer]

Yeah Project Veritas is an expert in fake news. Their founder, James O'Keefe, makes stuff up and uses deceptive videos.

Very true, though anyone watching CNN over the past 4 years could also see that they tacked hard left, way past MSNBC, and went full-on tabloid anti-Trump on both their website and in their primetime line-up. They became exactly what Trump accused them of being, when they could have just maintained their journalistic integrity and reported the facts, which were already damning enough to Trump without any embellishment.

 

[Onhell]

Speaking of which, anybody else notice how when Trump was segregating migrants it was reported they were put, "in cages." However, now that Biden is in office they're calling the exact same facilities, "detention centers."

 

[Jer]

Speaking of which, anybody else notice how when Trump was segregating migrants it was reported they were put, "in cages." However, now that Biden is in office they're calling the exact same facilities, "detention centers."

It was always the intentional family separation that was cruel, moreso than the accommodations.

 

[Diesel 11]

Yeah no. It’s complete horseshit that Biden is just doing the same stuff Trump is but no one is calling him out on it. He’s continuing the stupid fucking wall too. “Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.” But nicer. YAY

Fucking dumbass nations with a bunch of fucking posers fucking us over I’m going to flip my shit

 

[LooseCannon]

Significant portions of the wall are being built due to appropriations from Congress, which the President has no power over. Congress has to fix that.

 

[Onhell]

It was always the intentional family separation that was cruel, moreso than the accommodations.

It was explained to me that the reason for this, ironically, is to PROTECT children from child trafficking. People CLAIM they're family, when they're not. A recent example is the Nicaraguan boy who was found by Border Patrol after his group abandoned him in the desert. The last report I saw (couple days ago) had his mother claim he was kidnapped and ransomed.

Now, are these cases so pervasive that seperating families has to be mandatory? I don't know.

 

[LooseCannon]

Now, are these cases so pervasive that seperating families has to be mandatory? I don't know.

Are individual cases of child neglect so pervasive that we have to separate every single child from their parent? Of course not.

I guess, when it comes to migrants, I have a hard time understanding what America should do that doesn't involve building refugee camps for them. Should those camps have good conditions - of course - but letting people just walk into Texas won't work either. Where do they go, how do they find work, how do they find a place to live, etc.

 

[Onhell]

Are individual cases of child neglect so pervasive that we have to separate every single child from their parent? Of course not.

Not the same. One thing is giving your kid a key, have them microwave their dinner and them being by themselves for 3 to 4 hours while you come home or leaving them locked in a basement for years, and another is crossing several territories to reach a promised land with a kid who authorities have little to no way of knowing if it is that adult's child or not. If they're crossing illegaly, I doubt they have passports and birth certificates at the ready.

I guess, when it comes to migrants, I have a hard time understanding what America should do that doesn't involve building refugee camps for them. Should those camps have good conditions - of course - but letting people just walk into Texas won't work either. Where do they go, how do they find work, how do they find a place to live, etc.

Agreed. There is more be done on both sides of the border. While the U.S has facilities, regardless of nomenclature, Mexico has NOTHING. migrates literally camp out at the border. While in the U.S families are separated, but in a building, in Mexico they fall prey to theft, kidnapping, rape and murder.

 

[LooseCannon]

Not the same. One thing is giving your kid a key, have them microwave their dinner and them being by themselves for 3 to 4 hours while you come home or leaving them locked in a basement for years, and another is crossing several territories to reach a promised land with a kid who authorities have little to no way of knowing if it is that adult's child or not. If they're crossing illegaly, I doubt they have passports and birth certificates at the ready.

Yeah but most people are not going to be lying about that. What are you gonna do, DNA test anyone who migrates?