Re: anoco
"he is here to be the one writer pushing the balance to the right "
The Register is a broad church; Andrew's articles are not our only coverage of the Oracle-Google issue. It's good to air opinions that might otherwise be suppressed because they are unpopular.
FWIW, my personal opinion is that there are pros and cons to not extending fair use to APIs, I just don't want to live in a world in which software interfaces are not covered by fair use. If you want a world with strong control over API ownership, be my guest. I don't want to be on that planet.
For one thing, no fair use means discouraging common interfaces to databases, operating systems, web servers, networking devices - it'll be chaos with no sign of any interoperability.
Sure, you can potentially pay a royalty for using an interface, but then you're at the mercy of whoever is licensing the tech to you. If they play fair, perhaps it'll work out OK. If they play nasty, then you'll refuse to use their interface, come up with or use something similar, and get sued anyway for infringement.
Just make APIs fair use - make it OK to reuse function names and call/return definitions - and then may the best implementation win.
Having said that, I respect Andrew's opinion and I don't see why it should be squashed because it's unpopular in some quarters.
C.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
