Re: "with one of the usual activist investor"
"As for copying APIs, it's a damage only for lazy companies unable to innovate and desperately need to piggyback on someone else's work."
Do you write S/W? Maybe not. But if you do go and look again at your source code. Does it have includes or the like according to language? Where does the included material come from? Some of it might be your own but a lot of it will be the APIs of standard libraries that are part of the system S/W. This is how the S/W industry works. It uses standard APIs, even if, like Google did here, it reimplements the API (with, in this case, the exception of a few lines). This is the danger of this precedent - it drives a coach and horses through a basic working assumption of the entire development process.
What work did Google save by using the Java API? Id didn't save the work of implementing a Java byte-code interpreter nor a compiler. It didn't save the work of implementing anything other than a trivial amount of the library behind the API. What's lazy about implementing all that? It didn't really save much work of devising its own API as all these APIs, C, C++, Java & the rest all follow much the same lines.
What it did save was the need for huge numbers of non-Google, repeat non-Google, independent application developers having to learn a new API.
But to return to my tongue in cheek proposal, one interpretation of the SCO suit was that IBM, being so much bigger than SCO, could just have taken them over to end the suit and that provoking this was the intention. Put that together with the fact that someone pointed out the disparity in size between Oracle and Alphabet and the possibility that an asset stripper might be able to make money breaking up something with as many lines of business as Oracle and you have an intriguing possibility - Alphabet could possibility save itself $8.8bn and make a bit of extra money as well.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
