White House Finally Stands Up To Google

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Can someone explain to me why the White House is even involved in this case? I don't care one way or the other about this case, I just think the US Supreme Court should be able to make its own decision based on the merits of the case without outside influence from the White House.

The Department of Justice filed a brief Wednesday recommending that the US Supreme Court reject Google’s appeal in Oracle’s lawsuit against the company over its use of elements of the Java programming language. This doesn’t mean that the Supreme Court won’t hear the case. But the White House’s opposition does cast doubt on whether it will wind up on the docket.
 
"White House Finally Stands Up to Google" with regards to the frivolous Oracle lawsuit? You can't copyright APIs and that's exactly what Oracle is trying to push here. Letting them have it there way sets a very, very bad precedent. You should know better than this, Steve.
 
"White House Finally Stands Up to Google" with regards to the frivolous Oracle lawsuit? You can't copyright APIs and that's exactly what Oracle is trying to push here. Letting them have it there way sets a very, very bad precedent. You should know better than this, Steve.

Should know better than what? I believe the highest court in the land should be able to make this decision on its own, don't you?
 
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No different than the White House interfering when Samsung got a ban on some iPhones/iPads. Apple paid them enough to intervene, and apparently Oracle just did too.
 
<meme> This kills the software ecosystem innovation </meme>
 
In this writer's mind, every Department of the Government is the White House.
 
No it doesn't, it just means as a developer who relies on others code that you'll pay them or pay to write your own.

As someone else put it: It means we have to reinvent the wheel every time. And reinvent the word "wheel" as well.

giving ownership to mathematical methods would be a disaster.
 
I'm actually very disappointed the White House got involved on Oracles behalf.

Oracle is fucking evil. I hope Google crushes them.
 
A brief history:

Sun Microsystems is a great company.

Sun Microsystems freely contributes to any number of open source projects.

Along comes an evil giant named Oracle.

Oracle buys Sun Microsystems.

Oracle reverses all of Suns agreements to freely support open source projects.

Oracle tries to monetize software projects Sun already agreed to give away for free.

Oracle sues absolutely everyone.

Oracle needs to die a horrible fiery death.

The end.
 
Translation: Oracle gave a lot of donations to Democrats over the past several years, so we need to help them to keep the money flowing.
 
You're surprised the White House overextends it's power?

Wire said:
The Supreme Court asked the DOJ for an opinion on whether it should hear the case back in January. Reuters reported earlier this month that the Obama administration was torn on the issue.

How exactly is responding to a request from the court "over extending it's power"?

That said, their opinion is wrong. an API is an interface, not an implementation.

That's the entire purpose of an API is to allow code changes without affecting software that uses the API.
 
U.S. Supreme Court should tell DOJ to stick it ... sideways!
From WIRE: The Supreme Court asked the DOJ for an opinion on whether it should hear the case back in January. Reuters reported earlier this month that the Obama administration was torn on the issue.
 
Zarathustra[H];1041627689 said:
A brief history:

Sun Microsystems is a great company.

Sun Microsystems freely contributes to any number of open source projects.

Along comes an evil giant named Oracle.

Oracle buys Sun Microsystems.

Oracle reverses all of Suns agreements to freely support open source projects.

Oracle tries to monetize software projects Sun already agreed to give away for free.

Oracle sues absolutely everyone.

Oracle needs to die a horrible fiery death.

The end.

You forgot to mention the part where Sun would have gone bankrupt had they not been purchased, due largely to razor thin margins on their Wintel hardware, Microsoft's successful disruption of Java proliferation, and the well drying up for support contracts on MIPS hardware.

They did contribute a lot to the open source community but it cost them dearly.
 
You forgot to mention the part where Sun would have gone bankrupt had they not been purchased, due largely to razor thin margins on their Wintel hardware, Microsoft's successful disruption of Java proliferation, and the well drying up for support contracts on MIPS hardware.

They did contribute a lot to the open source community but it cost them dearly.

There is no doubt they were in dire financial straits, but that has less to do with the fact that they supported open source, and more to do with the fact that their original model was to sell hardware, and the software existed solely to support that hardware.

Then they failed to keep up on the hardware side, mostly got out of that SPARC fueled business, and now were trying to monetize software and service, where a solid foundation never really existed for that. That, and the fact that they never really recovered from the dot.com bubble bursting.

No company is under any obligation to support the open source community, though I will praise those who do. it's the fact that Oracle went back, after purchasing a company known for its open source contributions, tried to - using legal muscle - take back projects already released under GNU licenses that is the really shitty part.

There is an old bad racist term (which I will not use) that describes the concept of giving something and then trying to take it back. That's essentially what Oracle did, but they tried to take back things given under Sun management before they even owned the company...
 
How exactly is responding to a request from the court "over extending it's power"?

That said, their opinion is wrong. an API is an interface, not an implementation.

That's the entire purpose of an API is to allow code changes without affecting software that uses the API.

I'm sorry, you brought facts into an uninformed discussion. That's not allowed on the internet.
 
Zarathustra[H];1041628625 said:
There is no doubt they were in dire financial straits, but that has less to do with the fact that they supported open source, and more to do with the fact that their original model was to sell hardware, and the software existed solely to support that hardware.

Then they failed to keep up on the hardware side, mostly got out of that SPARC fueled business, and now were trying to monetize software and service, where a solid foundation never really existed for that. That, and the fact that they never really recovered from the dot.com bubble bursting.

No company is under any obligation to support the open source community, though I will praise those who do. it's the fact that Oracle went back, after purchasing a company known for its open source contributions, tried to - using legal muscle - take back projects already released under GNU licenses that is the really shitty part.

There is an old bad racist term (which I will not use) that describes the concept of giving something and then trying to take it back. That's essentially what Oracle did, but they tried to take back things given under Sun management before they even owned the company...

They maintained huge dev teams of highly talented developers, to develop software, for free. That's a great business model if you are killing it on sale of value added services (see: RedHat), but nobody was buying their overpriced 1U servers, much less the value-added services to support a fleet of them.

Sun tried to become a services company and failed miserably at it. Fun fact, many of their former managers and executives for datacenter infrastructure ended up managing infrastructure at Amazon.com, until the vast majority of them were fired for incompetence.
 
As someone else put it: It means we have to reinvent the wheel every time. And reinvent the word "wheel" as well.

giving ownership to mathematical methods would be a disaster.

or .... As I said, pay up. No one said that licensing the use has to be unreasonable, but some company paid their employees to develop that code and when that is the case they deserve the rights to their product.
 
Zarathustra[H];1041627683 said:
I'm actually very disappointed the White House got involved on Oracles behalf.

Oracle is fucking evil. I hope Google crushes them.

Taking lessons from Uncle?
 
Is anyone else concerned that these type of computer company involvement by the governement might have a conflict of intrest when it comes to counting votes electronically for elections?
 
Is anyone else concerned that these type of computer company involvement by the governement might have a conflict of intrest when it comes to counting votes electronically for elections?

You mean like how Dick Cheney had direct ties to Diebold, the company who makes most electronic voting machines deployed in the U.S? :p
 
They maintained huge dev teams of highly talented developers, to develop software, for free. That's a great business model if you are killing it on sale of value added services (see: RedHat), but nobody was buying their overpriced 1U servers, much less the value-added services to support a fleet of them.

Yeah, it was a business practice that made more sense in the SPARC days than it did towards the end. It would have continued to make sense - as you say - if they were reeling in the cash in support contracts, but they weren't.

The open source model CAN work very well for companies who either sell the hardware the software is deployed on, or do well selling service contracts, but when you do neither, it's not a justifiable expense.

I wouldn't have blamed them if they simply discontinued using their resources to contribute to open source projects, but then they tried to take back projects that were previously open source, that was just plain evil, especially since so much of those projects contained code from other voluntary and free contributors.
 
I don't get why a reporter hears that the DoJ did something and then says it's the White House's doing?

They are figuratively joined at the hip. Didn't the White House use Executive Privilege to hide Eric Holder's Fast and Furious documents from the public?
 
or .... As I said, pay up. No one said that licensing the use has to be unreasonable, but some company paid their employees to develop that code and when that is the case they deserve the rights to their product.

What's the model gonna be like, 1c per line of code? How much for a print()?
 
Zarathustra[H];1041628625 said:
No company is under any obligation to support the open source community, though I will praise those who do. it's the fact that Oracle went back, after purchasing a company known for its open source contributions, tried to - using legal muscle - take back projects already released under GNU licenses that is the really shitty part.
not even close to what happened between Oracle and Google

it's strange that you criticize Oracle but not Google for basically reverse engineering their Java implementation, trashing it, then monetizing what they did.
 
Zarathustra[H];1041629021 said:
Yeah, it was a business practice that made more sense in the SPARC days than it did towards the end. It would have continued to make sense - as you say - if they were reeling in the cash in support contracts, but they weren't.

The open source model CAN work very well for companies who either sell the hardware the software is deployed on, or do well selling service contracts, but when you do neither, it's not a justifiable expense.

I wouldn't have blamed them if they simply discontinued using their resources to contribute to open source projects, but then they tried to take back projects that were previously open source, that was just plain evil, especially since so much of those projects contained code from other voluntary and free contributors.

Or, you can give your stuff away and make your cash by controlling the certification action on your product.
 
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