US Supreme Court rules for Google over Oracle [LWN.net]

US Supreme Court rules for Google over Oracle

Posted Apr 15, 2021 21:23 UTC (Thu) by clicea (guest, #75492)
Parent article: US Supreme Court rules for Google over Oracle

I'm all for allowing re-implementations but I do not know how to square it with the fact that good, intuitive APIs are hard to design and we're, with this ruling, setting their value to 0. No idea how to balance this.

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US Supreme Court rules for Google over Oracle

Posted Apr 15, 2021 22:47 UTC (Thu) by mathstuf (subscriber, #69389) [Link]

How is their value 0? A good API still requires a usable implementation to stand behind it. As an example, the Windows API is quite valuable, but look at how fast WINE has to move just to stand still to try and keep up. Or Microsoft with the Linux API in WSL1.

Also note that this ruling was decided on fair use. It doesn't say APIs are protected by copyright. Also doesn't say that they aren't. It says that *regardless* of the status, *Google* is protected by fair use for its use in *Android*. Not for use in GCS, not Amazon for AWS.

US Supreme Court rules for Google over Oracle

Posted Apr 16, 2021 0:30 UTC (Fri) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link]

I can design a very beautiful API to run a quantum computer. But it would be totally worthless without the said quantum computer.