[dbtx]

> You Seem to Assume that the language in question and the API’s must have identical license requirements.

Maybe. I seem to be saying that with both languages and APIs, licensing-related restrictions are worse than useless. Anyone can go write a compiler that translates a pre-existing language into object code, right? If you can insist on being the only one who can compile your language, good luck getting people to write in it.

> But If I invent a different language and publish it in a book, why should I lose the rights to it simply because of what the language is or how people would use it.

Which rights? Isn't that the original question, the one of what rights are implied as 'granted' when you publish a thing, such as 'the right to read and understand it'? (No I didn't purchase your book, I found it at a library.) You don't "lose the rights" to it, that sounds a bit like false dichotomy. You merely would not have had all the rights you had hoped, from the beginning.

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I can almost see it Oracle's way: they own all the results of a great deal of work that Sun('s employees) did, and later on Google managed to avoid a chunk of that work and so help their own bottom line. Google also takes advantage of the industry's pre-existing familiarity with it. I still think Oracle is on the wrong side of common sense because Google was also helping Oracle's thing stay popular by increasing the motivation for anyone to gain familiarity with it, and I would call it a fair trade. But that's me, and my business sense is rather like a phantom limb.