I'd say almost every software engineer should be rooting for Google here. The implications of being able to claim copyright infringement on anyone implementing an Application Programming Interface are staggering - it would impact every open source project that tried to interoperate with any company's services, for instance.
The world is not going to be better for extending the protections Oracle wants here.
The appeals court fucked this up, hard. I would like to think Alsup's ruling will be upheld -- groklaw has fantastic quotes from him during the trial. At one point, he himself notes he had coded from the spec some of the functions Oracle complained about and disagreed with Oracle counsel statements. Refreshing from our judicial branch, to say the least.
The world is not going to be better for extending the protections Oracle wants here.
Alsup's ruling is sane, shows his clear understanding of coding and the history of Java and how it was licensed out to the world under Sun, and is really very simple to understand: http://www.groklaw.net/articlebasic.php?story=20120531172522...
The appeals court fucked this up, hard. I would like to think Alsup's ruling will be upheld -- groklaw has fantastic quotes from him during the trial. At one point, he himself notes he had coded from the spec some of the functions Oracle complained about and disagreed with Oracle counsel statements. Refreshing from our judicial branch, to say the least.