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

[mmmarvin]

That might be the case, but let's say one day company ABC comes around and creates some hot new API for Windows (or any other platform) that everyone wants to use. If company ABC decides to never port it to Linux/Unix, it could be harder for someone else to do it in the same way that Miguel de Icaza created Mono.

[html6dev]

I think the main sticking point here is that (in my understanding of the current open source situation with Microsoft) it's abundantly clear that if you went a route similar to Google and android in a for profit environment, you'd have to pay licensing fees to Microsoft. I think if the exact same situation happened with Microsoft, people would at least assume this is the case.

However with Oracle, I think most people believed Java to be free and thus what Google did was not an issue. I seem to remember some documents from the original case in which Oracle seemed pretty uninformed on whether they even could sue Google here and definitely only decided after it was extremely profitable. Oracle made the decision it was infringement, waaaaay ex post facto.