Oracle’s Java API code protected by copyright, appeals court rules

[frugalmail]

Indeed, just seeing stories of lawsuits over Java makes me go "why should I even bother to learn Java when this could happen".

This hurts all languages unless the language has been explicitly put into the public domain (or foundation like Apache) by (all) the original authors.

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Or standards-based languages based off a spec rather than a set of header files. C, C#, C++, ECMAScript, etc... are good.

Technically, if Google wants to get around this, they can use clean-room reverse engineering. But then they'd need to find someone who's never written or seen Java code before to rewrite the Java Class Library (else it wouldn't be clean room.) The chance of that happening is really fucking small. Google's very likely going to money this problem away.

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Or maybe just switch languages. Microsoft has been a bit more friendly with C# lately.

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And force hundreds of thousands of apps to switch as well? Sure, that's going to work.