wakingrufus @wakingrufus@mastodon.technology

My thoughts on the failure of Agile software development: https://wakingrufus.neocities.org/fail-agile.html
Please give me feed back on this. I am constantly trying to synthesize new ideas into this.

https://twitter.com/WholeMarsBlog/status/1321264245674106880
to the tune of willy wonka pure imagination:

Come with me
And you'll be
In a world of pure capitalism
Take a look
And you'll see
Into your unregulated market

We'll begin
With a spin
Traveling in
The hyperloop of my creation
What we'll see
Will defy

If you want to view paradise
Simply look around with neuralink
Anything you want to, do it
Want to change the world?
Just go to Mars

There is no
Life I know
To compare with pure capitalism
Living there
You'll be free
To become my serf

I missed this when it was first posted, but it is great:
https://www.boringcactus.com/2020/08/13/post-open-source.html
Also, @giunitpod discusses it here: http://generalintellectunit.net/e/066-post-open-source/

The inclusion of the Hippocratic license in particular is so disgusting. Such a casual admission that Google violates international human rights law.

Google's justification for forbidden licenses and the list make no sense:
https://opensource.google/docs/patching/#forbidden

there are no commercial restrictions on Public Domain, AGPL, or Hippocratic licenses. There must be some other reason they forbid these... 🤔

The second part of the case is: did Google violate that copyright (in this case, Java source files under GPL) or did they stay within fair-use?

I think in the case of a single class, you could make a fair use argument, but when its the entire API of a platform, Oracle's stance that it is outside the bounds of fair use is a fair argument to make.

Overall, IANAL and think it could go either way, but either way, I don't think all the doom and gloom in the tech media about it is warranted.

They could have just implemented the Oracle interfaces, and contributed the additional functionality they needed to openjdk, but they did it this way, I think, to subvert the GPL and have total control over their own licensing of it.

This is why I am very suspicious of all the "Google is trying to save open source" reporting on this.

Of course, there is a blurry line here between copying and reverse-engineering. That should be defined.

There are 2 main parts of the case. The first is: Can you copyright an API?
This not about the _concept_ of an API, its about the literal interface code.
Can you copyright the Interface.java file, a document which has a license header and everything?

Oracle is claiming that Google copied the interfaces, and then wrote their own implementation, but by copying the interfaces, they violated copyright.

I feel like the tech community sentiment and reporting on this Oracle v Google case has been really slanted toward Google. Oracle has a much more convincing case than I initially thought, before I reading into it.

As I understand it, this isn't about if you can write
"class GoogleImpl implements OracleInterface" in your code. Its about literally copy-pasting the source code of the interfaces into your own project when the license of that source code prohibits that.
🧵