Oracle's remaining claim is that functions having particular names and belonging to particular packages is copyrighted by them and was replicated by Google. For example, the function to calculate the sine of an angle is named 'sin' and belongs to the Math package. They don't claim any particular text was copied, they claim that this structure, sequence and organization (SSO) of the functions was copied from Java. Supposing Oracle's legal theory were correct, this would give rise to two major categories of problems.
If you accept that the organization of a library of functions is copyrighted and requires a license to reproduce, it leads to the question of whether a program which merely uses said library would be considered a reproduction. When writing a library I might declare that 'sin' is in 'Math' by writing "namespace Math { float sin(float); }" which programmers call a declaration. Someone using the library might write "float sine = Math::sin(angle_as_float);", but as a programmer you can look at that call and see that it tells you that 'sin' is in the 'Math' package, same as the declaration. If Oracle's lawsuit is successful, and we agree that using a function is a reproduction of its SSO, all programs which merely interface with any other program through a library of functions would be copying the SSO. Given that nobody in the industry has ever considered SSO of an interface to be copyrightable, we've never made technical decisions or built legal agreements around it. The immediate effect is that decades of software written to run on top of Windows would suddenly discover that their code is jointly copyright Microsoft, users of an SQL database would discover that their database queries are jointly copyright the SQL server vendor or the SQL specification authors or both, and on and on across the entirety of computing.
The second issue is that Java was not the first language to put the 'sin' function in the 'math' package. For example, C places 'sin' inside 'math.h'. Is there someone with standing to sue Oracle for copying C? It's not like people really create interfaces out of whole cloth very often, you can usually find the incremental progression and improvement over time.
I expect that corporations will simply ignore the bad ruling if it does come down. If they didn't the number of new license negotiations and lawsuits would be staggering.
If you accept that the organization of a library of functions is copyrighted and requires a license to reproduce, it leads to the question of whether a program which merely uses said library would be considered a reproduction. When writing a library I might declare that 'sin' is in 'Math' by writing "namespace Math { float sin(float); }" which programmers call a declaration. Someone using the library might write "float sine = Math::sin(angle_as_float);", but as a programmer you can look at that call and see that it tells you that 'sin' is in the 'Math' package, same as the declaration. If Oracle's lawsuit is successful, and we agree that using a function is a reproduction of its SSO, all programs which merely interface with any other program through a library of functions would be copying the SSO. Given that nobody in the industry has ever considered SSO of an interface to be copyrightable, we've never made technical decisions or built legal agreements around it. The immediate effect is that decades of software written to run on top of Windows would suddenly discover that their code is jointly copyright Microsoft, users of an SQL database would discover that their database queries are jointly copyright the SQL server vendor or the SQL specification authors or both, and on and on across the entirety of computing.
The second issue is that Java was not the first language to put the 'sin' function in the 'math' package. For example, C places 'sin' inside 'math.h'. Is there someone with standing to sue Oracle for copying C? It's not like people really create interfaces out of whole cloth very often, you can usually find the incremental progression and improvement over time.
I expect that corporations will simply ignore the bad ruling if it does come down. If they didn't the number of new license negotiations and lawsuits would be staggering.