Comments around Oracle v Google
There's been a lot of chatter about the Oracle v Google case,
sometimes putting words into my mouth. I can't go into much detail
because it is an ongoing court case where I'm likely to be a
witness. But there are a few points I feel I should restate that
have been said before:
- My "Google totally slimed Sun" comment was a personal moral
opinion. Not my guess at a legal result, or a legal opinion at
all - I am not a lawyer and would never pretend to be.
- I certainly think that the patent system is broken, but the
system is what it is. The original basic theory makes sense to
me, but what it's evolved into doesn't. At Sun we had a near
death experience after losing a case with IBM, after that we
realized we had to play the game, no matter how bogus.
- The wide implications of Oracle winning the copyright case
are pretty disturbing. But that's a practical opinion. How it
will go in the legal system is anyone's guess. It extends far
beyond Oracle: developers everywhere use APIs defined by many
other entities. I hate to think of what an emerging "copyright
troll" industry might be.
- A lot of what I've read gets really hyperbolic on the
possibilities of the industrial meltdown that Oracle could
conceivably cause. Despite my well-known opinions on Oracle, they
wouldn't do any of the nightmare scenarios that some have
imagined: such a meltdown would not be in their own self
interest. They have actually been unexpectedly good stewards of
Java (although less so of Solaris).
- The issue has always been interoperability. It's one of the
major aspects that has made the Java community thrive. The
freedom of developers to expect their programs to work has always
been at tension with the freedom of platform providers to do
whatever they please. At Sun, we always sided with
developers.
- The Java patents were used by Sun as a tool to enforce
interoperability: follow the spec, you can use them for free. A
good result for developers derived from a bogus patent
system.
