On 12/05/16 08:54, Rohan McLeod via luv-main wrote:
seems to be a curious silence on the question who 'owns' Android; at the heart of an $A8billion dispute between Oracle and Google; which has re-surfaced this week -To what extent can open source software be 'owned' ?
Software is 'owned' by those who create it. This applies to FOSS code as much as to any software. What that means in a legal sense depends on formulations of copyright, licensing, transfer of rights, and so on.
-To what extent can API's be 'owned' ?
That's a more interesting question. For those of us who are programmers, the intrinsic value of the API lies in the formalization of the interface between systems, not in the creativity of the surface form of the API. So although legally an API may be covered by copyright law, we would dispute how 'original' it is as a work - the surface definition of an API is formulaic, even where the underlying ideas are original. What is weird in this Oracle vs Google case is their motive in asserting copyright on an API, which in the long run works against adoption of that API. Legal tactics are not always good strategy. Were I invested in Java either as an educational tool or a tool for building large software systems, I would be quite ticked off, because Sun and now Oracle have suffocated adoption of the language. The take-home message for me is to not waste my time on software languages which have no third-party standards (such as ISO or Ecma). Glenn -- sks-keyservers.net 0x6d656d65