[kwlug-disc] This sounds scary? no more GPL?

[Hubert Chathi]

On Thu, 9 Jun 2016 13:04:55 -0400, Bob Jonkman <bjonkman at sobac.com> said:

> There are two different use cases for using an API: 1) I write
> software that uses your services, so my software contains calls to
> your software using your API; 2) I write software that emulates your
> software, so my software contains implementations of your API so that
> others can replace your software with my software.  I'm not sure which
> use case Oracle objected to.

I'm pretty sure it's the second case.

> We've seen objections to both use cases -- in the first, companies
> like Open Whisper Systems will not allow third-party Signal-like
> clients to use the API calls on their server; in the second case I can
> only think of Google replicating Oracle's Java engine in Android (I'm
> sure there are others).

Lesstif implementing Motif (Does anyone remember Motif?).  IronRuby
implementing Ruby (there are many other Ruby implementations as well).
Mono implementing C#/CLI.  I don't know who was first, but obviously the
various libc implementations implement the same API.  Wine implementing
the Windows API.  GNU TLS has a wrapper library that allows programs
written for OpenSSL to use GNU TLS instead.