A San Francisco court has spent the past few weeks considering a copyright question that could weigh heavy on the future of cloud computing.
It’s part of a high-profile lawsuit between Oracle and Google. Oracle says that Google violated its copyrights and patents when it wrote its own version of Java for the Android mobile operating system. Part of what the court is trying to figure out this week is whether Google wronged Oracle by writing software that mimicked the Java Application Programming Interfaces (APIs are coding standards that let programs communicate with one another).
The conventional wisdom in the coder community has been that it’s fine to reproduce the interface of someone else’s APIs, so long as you don’t actually copy their software. So if the court finds that APIs are copyrightable, it could have major implications for any software that uses APIs without explicit permission — Linux for example. But it could affect things in the cloud, where there are several efforts to clone Amazon’s Web Services APIs.
“If APIs can be copy-protected, that would be incredibly destructive to the internet as a whole for so many different reasons,” says George Reese, Chief Technology Officer with enStratus Networks, a seller of cloud management services. “But with respect to cloud, in particular, it would put any company that has implemented the Amazon APIs at risk unless they have some kind of agreement with Amazon on those APIs.”
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Source: wired.com
By: Robert McMillan
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