Oracle and the End of Programming As We Know It

Initially, Oracle's suit and Google counter-suit looked to be one of those slow-moving affairs that was fascinating to watch from a distance in much the same way as the trial pitting the U.S. Department of Justice against Microsoft a decade ago.

However, events in San Francisco quickly took a sinister turn when Oracle posited an ominous theory: that Google had violated Oracle's Java copyrights by reimplementing Java APIs in Android. The question of the copyrightability of APIs is the hinge on which the first part of the trial now rests, and it provides a disturbing vision of how software development might look should Oracle prove this claim.

In a nutshell, if the jury sides with Oracle that the copyrights in the headers of every file of the Java source base apply specifically to the syntax of the APIs, then Oracle can extract payment and penalties from Google for having implemented those APIs without Oracle's blessing (or, in more specific terms, without a license).

Should this come to pass, numerous products will suddenly find themselves on an uncertain legal standing in which the previously benign but now newly empowered copyright holders might assert punitive copyright claims. Chief among these would be any re-implementation of an existing language. So, 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; and so forth. And of course, all the various browsers that use JavaScript might owe royalties to the acquirers of Netscape's intellectual property.

Essentially, every language implementation not issued forth by the copyright holder will be suspect until the copyright owners announce a permanent statement dispensing with any threats to enforce the copyrights. There is no reason to believe that copyright holders will naturally act with such restraint. As we know, Oracle certainly has not. And who's to say the owners of Bell Labs care enough about the negative programming consequences of enforcing language copyrights when they can see possible licensing fees of tens if not hundreds of millions of dollars are a possible result?