On 14-10-20 07:20 AM, Luke Kenneth Casson Leighton wrote: [...]
Google found a work-around to remove the GPL, no they did _not_ find a "work-around to remove the GPL". they are NOT the copyright holders of the code that was completely clean-room re-implemented, therefore they have NO LEGAL BASIS for REMOVING any license UNDER ANY circumstances.
"...Google concedes that it copied portions of Oracle’s declaring source code verbatim." p 39
Are you claiming that the implementing code was done in a clean-room? Keep in mind the 9 lines which were, apparently, copy/pasted. Even if the methods were done in a clean-room, which was never claimed by Google, the appeals court, again and again, points out that reverse engineering would've been ok.
Only if you define clean-room in an unusual way. Please point to a single document in this legal case, anywhere, where Google makes a clean-room defense -- because, again, the appeals court goes out of its way to point out that reverse engineering would've been ok.
only companies such as google can be sufficiently pathologically insane as to *remotely* consider (hypocritically because they did not also do the same for the linux kernel itself) re-duplicating such enormous codebases.
I would suggest to you that the cost differential between reverse-engineering and what Google did here is sufficient to be a tipping point. You can take the opposing view, and you might be right, but that's the crux of my argument.
"The whole idea of a clean-room implementation of something centers around the idea that the APIs aren't copyrighted. GNU itself depends on the fact that Unix's APIs weren't copyrighted; just the code that AT&T wrote to implement Unix was."
Google did not do a clean-room implementation of OpenJDK. If you can point to Google ever, and I mean ever, making such a claim in any legal filing I'll concede all points and drop the topic. Certainly, they took from Harmony, which *was* a clean-room implementation, but that doesn't make Dalvik a clean-room implementation.
is that now clear enough? have i repeated it enough times in enough ways as to make it clear as to why the FSF, and you, and any software engineer, should be deeply concerned at even the remotest slightest possibility of APIs becoming copyrightable material through application of case-law precedent? l.
I read everything you wrote carefully, and, no, you don't address the actual topic which I raise precisely because of tangents about clean-rooms.
This has nothing to do with clean-rooms, except that this was an option which Google didn't take. Or, if they did take this option, they never made such a defense at trial. Nowhere in their appeal to the SCOTUS do Google ever claim to have reverse engineered, nor to have made a clean-room implementation. Certainly, they *discuss* reverse engineering, but don't claim to have actually reverse engineered. Since they never make such a claim, there's not really anything quote from their appeal to the SCOTUS in this context.
Perhaps someone can point me to where, in the trial, Google claimed to have done this in a clean room? Or in any legal filing? I would be very interested in such a quote.
-Thufir
