When Billionaires Squabble
September 22, 2013
In the Java-related battle between Google and Oracle, a court ruling has not settled the issue. Oracle is appealing the decision by the U.S. District Court of Northern California, which found that the Java APIs Google used to build Android are not copyrightable. Meanwhile, Oracle CEO Larry Ellison seems to have made the issue personal; in a recent CBS interview , Ellison painted the way in which Google CEO Larry Page approached the issue as “evil.” Writer Seth Rosenblatt reports:
“After saying in the public Google+ post published Sunday that Google doesn’t like to get into public battles with other companies, Schmidt then said that ‘Ellison’s claims that Google “took [Oracle’s] stuff”‘ are ‘simply untrue.’
‘”That’s not just my opinion,’ Schmidt wrote, ‘but the judgment of a U.S. District Court.’
“After briefly summarizing the ruling against Oracle, Schmidt placed the public spat in the context of the ongoing clashes over patent reform.
“‘Patents were designed to encourage invention, not stop the development of new ideas and technologies,’ he said.”
I have to agree with Page on the patent /copyright issue. There is a lot of work to be done to bring those systems back into alignment with their original goal—to encourage innovation. (As opposed to stifling it, which seems to be the result more often than not these days when it comes to software.)
I suppose Ellison has a right to his opinion on Page’s moral alignment, but it looks like the industry may be on Google’s side (at least this time). The Electronic Frontier Foundation has submitted to the U.S. Court of Appeals an amicus brief [PDF] outlining their support for the original ruling. At the heart of the matter is the role that the open nature of APIs play in furthering innovation, something we hope the appeals court will not take lightly.
Cynthia Murrell, September 22, 2013
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
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