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Oracle Rejects Argument That Before Suing Google, It Got Rich By Copying IBM's SQL (arstechnica.com) 85

Posted by EditorDavid from the not-me dept.
Ars Technica's senior tech reporter took a long long at Google's reimplementation of Java in Android -- and the lawsuit filed against it by Oracle in 2010. And he discovers "a possible downside" to Oracle's stance on API copyrights. If anyone should understand the importance of such copying, it's Oracle. After all, Oracle got its start in the 1970s selling a database product based on the then-new structured query language (SQL). SQL was invented by IBM. And Oracle doesn't seem to have gotten a license to use it...

Oracle's copying of SQL seems pretty similar to Google's copying of Java. But an Oracle spokeswoman disagrees. "It's an incorrect premise, comparing apples with broccoli, and being completely divorced from the facts of the case," she wrote in a Tuesday email.
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Oracle Rejects Argument That Before Suing Google, It Got Rich By Copying IBM's SQL More

Oracle Rejects Argument That Before Suing Google, It Got Rich By Copying IBM's SQL

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  • "It's an incorrect premise, comparing apples with broccoli, and being completely divorced from the facts of the case," she wrote in a Tuesday email.

    Comparing apples to bananas is the operant distinction.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by msauve ( 701917 )
      Comparing apples and broccoli seems apt. They're both food plants built from a common DNA based API/language, but are different enough to be readily distinguishable.
    • Ah, yes. The Banana Jr 9000. Ahead of its time.

  • Comparing apples with broccoli? (Score:4, Funny)

    by DontBeAMoran ( 4843879 ) on Sunday March 15, 2020 @05:43AM (#59831842)

    Oracle's copying of SQL seems pretty similar to Google's copying of Java. But an Oracle spokeswoman disagrees. "It's an incorrect premise, comparing apples with broccoli, and being completely divorced from the facts of the case," she wrote in a Tuesday email.

    Comparing apples with broccoli, eh? Why not the regular "apples and oranges?" What does she expect?

    Oracle spokeswoman: "It's an incorrect premise, comparing apples with broccoli, and being completely divorced from the facts of the case."

    Judge: "Ewww, I hate broccoli! Case dismissed!"

    • Re:Comparing apples with broccoli? (Score:5, Funny)

      by OpenSourced ( 323149 ) on Sunday March 15, 2020 @05:50AM (#59831856) Journal

      Comparing apples with broccoli, eh? Why not the regular "apples and oranges?" What does she expect?

      Obviouly she expected "apples and oranges" to be copyrighted by previous users of the expression, and so slyly invented a new expression. You cannot be too careful these days.

    • Re: Comparing apples with broccoli? (Score:5, Funny)

      by BAReFO0t ( 6240524 ) on Sunday March 15, 2020 @06:22AM (#59831910)

      Obviously, she meant that this is so insane, it isn't even just apples to oranges (both round fruits), but to broccoli! (neither round nor a fruit)

      One step further would probably be comparing apples to windows. Oh, wait!

      • Indeed. Mentioning Windows in an intellectual property lawsuit is likely to muddy the waters, since the theft and abuse were were so rampant in the creation of different parts of MS Windows.

        • Re: Comparing apples with broccoli? (Score:5, Informative)

          by The123king ( 2395060 ) on Sunday March 15, 2020 @08:21AM (#59832108)
          Well yes, but actually, no.

          From my (very limited) understanding, the windows API was pretty much home-grown and has little similarity to the Macintosh API, or other contemporary UI toolkits, such as Amiga Workbench, GEM or the X window system. This is the predominant reason Windows applications are quite hard to port to other OSes today and why WINE and ReactOS have struggled to gain compatibility. From a user perspective, all these systems did indeed do a lot of copying and "borrowing" from each other, which is why the Apple Vs Microsoft [wikipedia.org] lawsuit was brought. That, strictly speaking, was about interface layout and the general metaphors of a WIMP user interface. No-one was claiming (or trying) API compatibility at this point.

          A more apt comparison would be DOS. MS-DOS grew from a clone of CP/M called QDOS, later called 86-DOS. The directory layout, file naming, and API were almost identical to CP/M, and it was mostly source compatible. This was ideal for Microsoft, as they wanted to offer a direct competitor to CP/M on IBM's entry to the home/personal computer market. The success of MS-DOS is the reason Digital Research failed, as Digital Research created CP/M and later a DOS-compatible competitor called DR-DOS. DR-DOS was forced out of Windows compatibility by proprietary API changes within MS-DOS.

          Another prime example of such copying is UNIX and UNIX-likes. There are dozens of UNIX systems that copy the general directory structure and API of UNIX. BSD has its roots in the early 80's as a complete API copy of UNIX, using source compatibility as a selling point. For the most part, despite SCO's protesting, UNIX API compatibility is seen as normal and completely acceptable by most people today.

          API copying is nothing new. It's been going on for years, and for about as long as the computer has been a thing. It can be argued that instruction set copying is pretty much the same thing, with many chip makers heavily enforcing copyrights of compatible parts. The Motorola Vs MOS [wikipedia.org] lawsuit was for exactly this case. However, such copying was happening [wikipedia.org] much [wikipedia.org] earlier [wikipedia.org] with The IBM system/360. DEC machines like the PDP-8 and PDP-11 were also widely copied.

          There's so many prior examples of copying that API copyrights can't reasonably be accepted. There's been many cases of cease-and-desists and other lawsuits, but there's also many more cases of API copying being largely shrugged off. It's a real grey area and varies depending on who you ask, but the fact is much of modern computing has been built off of copying others and being compatible, legal or not.

          • Mod up. What this history tells us is that copyright and patent laws are not well suited to technology. Ostensibly the goal of these systems is to encourage innovation by protecting inventors but the reality is that few inventions are an island. Most technology - and especially computing - is building blocks. Innovations upon innovations. Copying to some degree is part of the process. Itâ(TM)s no wonder the gray areas such as APIs are so... well, gray.

          • The reason that Windows applications are difficult to port, and the reason that it's difficult to create a compatibility layer to support them on other operating systems (e.g. Wine) is that Windows is full of inconsistencies and special cases to support old Windows applications which are out of maintenance.

          • This is the predominant reason Windows applications are quite hard to port to other OSes today and why WINE and ReactOS have struggled to gain compatibility.

            Wine has trouble because the Windows API is huge, especially with graphics APIs. Microsoft has thousands of people working on it, whereas WINE is just a few people.

            But the basic outlines of Windows are not hard to re-implement, and there are plenty of toolkits that work on all major platforms, like wxWidgets, TclTk, Java Swing, etc. You do need to make decisions like, "What will be the default color of a button on this platform?" or "How will resizing windows work?" but once you've made the decisions, imp

          • The Windows NT kernel involved wholesale theft of significant parts of the VMS kernel, including patents and copyrighted code, by hiring David Cutler, one of its authors, and selected members of team from DEC when the new "Prism" project cutler was working on didn't get the funding or political support he demanded. The core of that new OS was the VMS that David Cutler had helped publish and which he presented to Microsoft for their new server class OS. There are other examples since then. Though there have

          • ... from your comment, lets me tell that you missed the point entirely, without even having to read your comment. :)

            Nice arguing in the wrong direction though. Five stars! :D

            • Hurr Durr Apple stole the Alto.

              That's neither new, nor relevant to the discussion at hand. The person i was replying too mentioned Microsoft's lawsuit with Apple, so i briefly covered it, and pointed out how it wasn't really relevant. UI design and UI metaphors aren't relevant to the discussion, so i chose not to discuss it.

      • you mean they are not both edible plants?

    • As if ... they feared the expression might be used against themselves ... ? Or could it be some sort of internal technical admission of certain fact for the purpose of potential settlement for hypothetical lawsuits ... ?

  • Oracle is racing to the bottom.

    https://www.networkworld.com/a... [networkworld.com]

    Every company I'm associated with uses MariaDB. None use Oracle. Read the article to find out why.
    (no, not clickbait, just someone else said it better than I).

    E

    • Last time I looked, PostgreSQL was so. much. nicer!
      And MySQL/MariaDB was as pathetic and shitty as it always was.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by znrt ( 2424692 )

      Oracle is racing to the bottom.

      then it's going to be a "long long" way down.

      the oracle(suite)/java combo is the new cobol and oracle(company) will be around milking quite a few big companies for presumably a decade or even two, no matter what. which is their business, they haven't actually contributed anything to information technology besides an attractive sounding (and imo pretty much overrated) all-included product package for big/medium business. they did play a role in the mass transition to client-server architectures back in the 9

  • When somebody starts some evil behavior, it is a very bad idea to show him how wrong that is, by doing the same thing to him.

    Because not only are you becoming that evil person too, by lowering yourself to that level.
    you are also validating that behavior to them, and establishing is as the new acceptable behavior. They already think it is right. So you doing it only shows them that you think it is alright to be like that too, and so give them justification for it, affirming their stance.

    It is analogous to th

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by znrt ( 2424692 )

      When somebody starts some evil behavior, it is a very bad idea to show him how wrong that is, by doing the same thing to him.

      Because not only are you becoming that evil person too, by lowering yourself to that level.
      you are also validating that behavior to them, and establishing is as the new acceptable behavior. They already think it is right. So you doing it only shows them that you think it is alright to be like that too, and so give them justification for it, affirming their stance.

      It is analogous to that old saying:
      Never argue with an idiot. He'll drag you down to his level, and then beat you with experience.
      Only replace stupid with evil.

      i don't really get the point you were trying to make but i'm not going to argue with you :)

      • He is describing the mechanism of hypocrisy. And indeed its like watching a couple of 3-yr-olds flailing away at each other ":But its OK when I do it!!!"

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by PPH ( 736903 )

      Because not only are you becoming that evil person too, by lowering yourself to that level. you are also validating that behavior to them, and establishing is as the new acceptable behavior.

      I don't think Google set out to demonstrate Oracle's evil-doing by copying the Java API. I think they figured Oracle validated that behavior by themselves years ago. And simply proceeded along the same path.

      They already think it is right.

      And it may very well be. It is still an unsettled issue of IP. Making Oracle revisit past actions just undermines their credibility in court which can help Google's position.

  • Why Broccoli? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by magusxxx ( 751600 ) <{moc.oohay} {ta} {0002_xxxsugam}> on Sunday March 15, 2020 @06:26AM (#59831924)

    Because a company has a development tool for Oracle called Orange.

    http://www.orafaq.com/tools/or... [orafaq.com]

    I think someone didn't want to muddy the waters.

  • Oracle's Hypocritical Argument (Score:3)

    by TheReaperD ( 937405 ) on Sunday March 15, 2020 @06:33AM (#59831940)

    Oracle's answer to everybody is the following: Everything that goes against our arguments that makes us the most money is invalid. Period. Especially if it shows them as being hypocritical. Oracle argument: API copyrights are absolute and unbreakable... unless their for IBM and SQL, then they can be copied for free (by Oracle only). Oracle bought Sun Microsystems for two reasons. #1: Claim the copyright of MySQL and try to stop it from eating away at their racket... umm... customer base. #2: Sue Google for billions of dollars. If the lawsuit fails, Larry Ellison pissed away millions for nothing.

  • ... that argument, although probably less so because it would have been a different matter, but rather because the illegalities of one wouldn't justify the illegalities of the other (if any of them were illegalities in the first place, which is not what I claim here)...

  • So what she's saying is that both are very similar and only really differ in flavor and minor details.

    Apples and broccoli are both food, nature grown, plants, healthy, commonly green, somewhat similar in size and mechanical properties.

    At least they are a lot closer to each other than, say, apples and nuclear submarines.

  • Yeah... bollocks (Score:3)

    by kot-begemot-uk ( 6104030 ) on Sunday March 15, 2020 @07:33AM (#59832032) Homepage
    select all from greenery where name = 'orange' or name = 'apple' or name = 'broccoli' order by pr_stupidity;

    The comparison is quite sound. SQL defines an API. If an API is copyrightable, then so should be SQL.

    It is not limited to SQL itself either. Oracle forms, etc all have their roots in "reinventing" similar IBM products.

  • Apples to broccoli? (Score:3)

    by Revek ( 133289 ) on Sunday March 15, 2020 @10:11AM (#59832334)
    Is that the 'that was then, this is now' argument?

  • The Oracle guy says that Google copied 11,000 lines of code "verbatim" that were copyright. Assuming that's true, then I'd have to side with Oracle.

    The counter argument, in effect, is "but everyone including Oracle does it too" ... but, to me, that just says that things need to change.

    The most recent example is SQL that Oracle used that IBM wrote and presumably copyrighted. The question is, why didn't IBM sue Oracle over copyright infringement back in the 1970s. The answer, I would assume, is IBM wou

    • Unless the lines are #include "stdlib.h" or int main (int argc, char **argv). Some lines are inherently public domain. It is possible that both codebases share public domain code from a prior source.
    • Oracle brought its first SQL based product to market in 1979, before IBM's SQL/DS in 1981. Before the product, IBM and its employees had published research papers on the relational model and the SQL syntax. Copyright prohibited others from plagiarizing the text of the articles and presentations, Nothing prohibited others from implementing in code what the articles described in print.

  • In othe news, Al Capone says he is just a business man.

    This is just another example of successful entities pulling the ladder up behind them.

    If Sun didn't want others to implement Java, how do you explain OpenJDK?

    This is just Oracle going over things with a fine toothed comb looking for an excuse to not honor the license that they got stuck with.

    For the inevitable car analogy, this is like GM claiming that the exact layout of bolts on their water pump is protected by copyright so a retrofit higher performan

  • Oracle seems to be quite the troll attacking anyone near their pile of crap. I had friend who worked at Oracle, but perhaps working in Oracle is in bad taste.
  • Uncle Ben said so! SQL will go the way of the dodo bird with the upcoming upswing in NAND production and Cloud migrating to SSDs.

  • Well one key difference is that SQL is an ANSI standard. I donâ(TM)t recall if that occurred after Oracle or before. But certainly once published as an official standard (indeed even during deliberations) suits to prevent other implementations wouldnâ(TM)t be for game.

    • SQL became a standard of the American National Standards Institute (ANSI) in 1986, and of the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) in 1987. (Wikipedia entry for SQL).

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