Wednesday, 02 May 2012 13:24
Oracle versus Google verdict could end a lot of software
Written by Nick Farrell
Why it is not a good idea if Ellison wins
While the jury mulls over the evidence in the lawsuit between Oracle and Google, many in the IT industry are really hoping that Larry Ellison will lose.
At stake is not just the $1 billion that Google will have to pay Oracle for using Java without a licence, but also the future of several other software codes. Oracle's case is that the copyrights in the headers of every file of the Java source base apply specifically to the syntax of the APIs, need a licence.
This would mean that Jython, IronPython, and PyPy for Python; JRuby, IronRuby, and Rubinius for Ruby; Mono for C# and VB; possibly C++ for C, GCC for C and C++ and Objective-C could be in trouble and all the various browsers that use JavaScript might owe royalties to Oracle. Oracle is doing nothing to reassure anyone that this is not the case.
There are some other spin offs. Linux could be at risk for all the UNIX APIs it recreated. Either way an Oracle win would be a mess for the computer industry.
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