Re: Very different times...
To any who have been around more than five minutes, it is obvious that a set of very large corporations have the power and the personnel and the lawyers to tie up any but the largest other corporations in such a way that they will be bankrupted. That is the way that our courts often work on the civil side. Unless there are criminal penalties for their actions, they can laugh off efforts to deflect or punish them. As long as corporations are treated as people with all the rights of individuals, we cannot win out against them.
If Google wins, we will have access to API's, but we will still be vulnerable to Google's knowledge about all of us. If Oracle wins, then any corporation that has an API can successfully sue any who use that API.
And the statement that an API is a protocol is such a simplistic definition that it may exclude many API's A protocol is all the elements that are needed to complete a conversation between two programs. It may require many API's or the two programs may discover a way to communicate by challenge and response. Of course, that requires some common set of API's for the challenge and response. for such a common standard to be reliable, it must be declared as public domain or under a license such as gnu that effectively makes it free for public use.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
