[ocdtrekkie]

Oracle winning will not destroy the tech industry, bring innovation to it's knees, or any other crazy apocalyptic concept people have.

It'll mean Google will pay a huge penalty for very willfully stealing Java when they knew they were supposed to license it, and other companies will be a little more explicit about getting licenses squared away. Reliance on open source APIs and platforms will probably go up, and license compliance with terms of GPL and the like will be taken more seriously.

[cromwellian]

Riiiight. Because no lawyers have ever smelled a new ambulance to chase kicking off dozens of harassment suits when new precedents are handed down. Oracle has already threatened OSS databases, Samba was once threatened by Microsoft aggressively, and whose to say WINE and other OSS API reimplementations won't be under legal threat the way Unix reimplementations were.

Any precedent that establishes clean-room API reimplementations are subject to copyright infringement is bad for everyone.

You're willing to risk throwing out the baby with the bathwater.

[thu2111]

Yes, that's possible.

But patents are already just as powerful, actually much more so. They cause a lot of problems but haven't caused the tech industry to collapse in a MAD Mexican standoff of lawsuits.