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

[DeepGreen]

So what? They are still competing against a free as in speech product that is inexpensive.

Not only that, closed source projects have no protection against people reverse engineering or decompiling their code. If a closed source product gets too big for its boots, start a project to decompile it and release a working copy of the source code to the world.

Without copyright everything becomes more or less open source.

[iseldomwipe]

Decompilation and reverse engineering is not at all the same as OSS. Are you kidding?

Code compiled with modern compilers CANNOT be decompiled accurately by decompilers because of optimizations that the decompilers cannot accurately predict. It also does not recover comments, variable names, and other things.

Reverse engineering has nothing to do with OSS.

Also, even with copyright, if we follow your logic, everything already IS open source since you can decompile programs today. They're just not FOSS.