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by AnimalMuppet 2400 days ago
Your analogy is false. Google didn't copy the whole thing; they copied the API. THat's analogous to copying the chapter titles but not the chapter contents, far more than it is analogous to copying the whole book.
1 comments

No, it's more analogous, but worse so, IMO, to copying all the sentences of the book in a manner like this:

"Jack and Jill ran down the hill."

into

"Gil and Jacky descended the mound."

It's exactly the same story just with different implementations that exhibit the same behavior. They didn't make something compatible with Java -- they replaced Java with something exactly like Java.

It's even worse than the example above, because they kept the same names of the classes, interfaces, etc.

They had to keep the same names of classes, interfaces, etc. in order to copy the standard library’s API. And it’s not illegal to copy the titles of chapters and write your own story. Even if they’re very similar, if you do it properly (no peeking at original), there’s nothing illegal about it.