Google vs. Oracle: The Supreme Court will decide software development’s future?
I am somewhat ignorant, so I would love it if someone could fill me in on what I&#x27;m missing.<p>* APIs are just as novel as implementations. API design is hard, and interesting, and it&#x27;s code just as much as a library is code.<p>* While in this case it would be nice for Google to win because it&#x27;s a case of a Proprietary software being used for Open Source, I see a far more daunting problem. I see massive companies like AWS reimplementing open source projects&#x27; APIs with proprietary solutions, and I&#x27;m not sure if copyleft licensing would be able to protect them if Google wins. That sounds far more dangerous to me than a company being able to copyright its API.<p>* People say this would be a disaster. Is it not the case that, if this happened, that <i>new</i> and novel APIs could be copyrighted? Why is that bad? The difference between a free&#x2F;proprietary API is that you can&#x27;t use a drop-in replacement, but we already avoid proprietary software, or overly restrictive software, all the time. So wouldn&#x27;t we just continue doing so?<p>edit: From another of my posts, to put it this way:<p>To me, if I write a program under license X, it is strange to me that someone can reimplement my program&#x27;s API under an incompatible license Y. To me, that violates my license, and software licenses are enforced via copyright protection.