This whole thing is unbelievable to me. We have Oracle spending who knows how much money suing Google and claiming that APIs are copyrightable. At the same time they, along with virtually every software company ever, rely on documented, standardized, ubiquitous protocols like IP, TCP&#x2F;IP, and HTTP to create software that does anything useful. Even the most basic notepad or calculator application relies on APIs to function. I cannot imagine a world that forces us to treat every use of an API as a must-be-legally-contracted integration. Even the most trivial applications would never get completed because the cost just to agree to all these contracts would exceed any ability to generate profit from the resulting software.<p>If Oracle wins then in a way this might actually be <i>good</i> for open source; software developers would seek out the path of least resistance: APIs that could be licensed freely. This could simply extend the push of open source <i>code</i> further to <i>APIs</i>.