Oracle Google: An Interesting View

April 30, 2012

I read “My attitude on Oracle v Google.” I was confused. The “inside baseball” write up references folks by their first name. There is, therefore, some ambiguity, which in legal matters is often a quite effective rhetorical technique. I noted this passage:

Just because Sun didn’t have patent suits in our genetic code doesn’t mean we didn’t feel wronged. While I have differences with Oracle, in this case they are in the right. Google totally slimed Sun.

The post is by James Gosling, whom I associate with Sun’s rise and fall, Java, and some interesting wordsmithing.

My takeaway from the short item was that emotion, not engineering seems to be important in the Oracle Google dust up. The other value of the post is that it triggered a quite interesting comment from Bruno Lowagie, who opined:

I hope Oracle wins, not regarding the ‘copyright on APIs’, but because Google doesn’t respect copyright in general. As for Apache, ASL stands for the Apache Slavery License doesn’t it? Large corporations encourage you to use the ASL instead of the GPL so that they can make money using the code, whereas the developer can hardly make any money writing it.

Yikes, slavery. Perhaps Mr. Lowagie is angling for a project at Oracle, an outstanding employer.

Stephen E Arnold, April 30, 2012

Comments

Comments are closed.

Search the site
Subscribe to Beyond Search
Feature archive
News archive

Stephen E. Arnold monitors search, content processing, text mining and related topics from his high-tech nerve center in rural Kentucky. He tries to winnow the goose feathers from the giblets. He works with colleagues worldwide to make this Web log useful to those who want to go "beyond search". Contact him at sa [at] arnoldit.com. His Web site with additional information about search is arnoldit.com.