Due to their monopolies on these APIs / services, phones without Play services aren't competitive, and their design prevents users from installing it on an Android compatible device. It has to be built into the OS with those special privileges unavailable to other apps.
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Should be possible for a company like Amazon or Facebook to do a lawsuit about the push service alone. They should be able to offer a competing push service that's not disadvantaged (Android) or completely incapable of working (iOS) without wrapping the Apple / Google services.
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Though I agree on all points, Google still has strong arguments supporting the right to provide that functionality exclusively via Google services (and there are many precedents). This is esp. true since alternatives exist, however bad or limited (Websockets, SSE, OpenPush, etc.)
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it's going to be a tough fight, I think moreso because Google is prepared to defend nearly every aspect of Android because they're battle-hardened from the fight with Oracle.
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I don't think there's much that's relevant from the fight with Oracle. That case has been about whether the software industry as a whole will be able to continue in the US based on whether APIs can be copyrighted and whether reimplementing them is fair use. Not really connected.
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right. but you're thinking too technically :) I mean in the sense that their legal team has looked Android up down and sideways and thought through arguments and counterarguments for any scenarios they will likely face in regard to Android. Over the course of years.
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Doesn't mean they will win. It's not looking good for them or the rest of the US software industry (Oracle included) based on how that Supreme Court case seems to be going.
Seems the software industry as a whole has made bad assumptions about how copyright law will be applied.
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The software industry as a whole has assumed that APIs are not copyrightable and that you can implement software with a compatible API. Oracle themselves heavily relies upon being able to do this. Doesn't seem like legal teams at these companies really know what they're doing.
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that's not my reading at all. In my view, these companies exist in a state of "mutually assured destruction" in regard to these IP constructs (see: software patents and overlapping portfolios). They're external levers of control that the companies regularly ignored internally. 1/
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Oracle violated a sacred trust, so to speak, by challenging a mechanism of control (APIs) the industry "big dogs" rely upon. Who knows what occurs after the fallout, but I expect new & lucrative API licensing to funnel money upward to Big Tech and hurt FOSS, small devs, users 2/2
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Could easily hurt them a lot more than smaller developers.
There are so many major examples of reimplementing APIs and those big tech companies depend on them.
Google started from an existing open source Java standard library implementation (Apache Harmony) too.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SCO%E2%80 as a nice example of a case where the outcome could have been different if the argument had been that copying the Unix interfaces (far more than just the Linux kernel system calls) is what infringes rather than the implementation being copied from it.
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I'm just giving my reading of the practical, socio/political/economic situation surrounding the case. I appreciate the background but I've literally been following Oracle v Google fight for a decade, I understand the fundamental issue at stake re: APIs and how dire this can be 1/
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My tacit assumption is that a new state of MAD will take place with a new set of legal norms/licensing framework. The "big dogs" (GAFAM+Oracle+IPO unicorns) are not going to eat each other alive and have money to burn on licensing deals. They hang out in the same clubhouses.
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There are a lot more SCOs. Oracle is ending up with a copyright / patent trolling business model themselves. They go after their own customers. Their business is entirely based on vendor lock-in and lawsuits at this point.
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