http://www.alibaba.com/product...

"The future is already here -- it's just not very evenly distributed. (William Gibson)"

What a revolution for global education (similar to the OLPC hope)!

to get more fiber and micronutrients: In practice, it is what we're eating. Exercise just makes us want to eat more afterwards. Enough fiber and micronutrients shuts off our "appestat" and we feel full on less calories. See, for one example, Dr. Fuhrman's approach, which suggests people aspire to one pound cooked and one pound raw veggies every day (hard to do, but even getting close yields great benefits):
http://www.drfuhrman.com/libra...
http://www.drfuhrman.com/libra...

That said, exercise is generally *great* for your overall health, including boosting immune function by getting the lymph moving. And outdoors exercise in sunlight under the right conditions can help with vitamin D deficiency.

See also:
http://fuhrmaneattolivereview....
"Nutrisystem, Jenny Craig, MediFast and Weightwatchers offer only traditional foods from the Standard American Diet that are known to be the root cause of obesity and other common diseases. The portions may be smaller in size and in the number of calories but their nutrition is negligible and too low as confirmed by the Aggregate Nutrition Density Index."

Getting back to the main topic, in the same way, if we were producing power locally-to-the-neighborhood like via Solar PV or maybe someday hot/cold fusion, we would be less likely to have unpaid-up-front external costs like cross-country pollution, economic risks, or maintaining the US military in the middle east. Then our economy and society would be a lot healthier. Energy efficiency also works like local energy production and so generally is a great thing. Consuming foreign il is an invitation to disaster, like the USA has not learned its lesson from the 1970s!
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americ...
"We are at a turning point in our history. There are two paths to choose. One is a path I've warned about tonight, the path that leads to fragmentation and self-interest. Down that road lies a mistaken idea of freedom, the right to grasp for ourselves some advantage over others. That path would be one of constant conflict between narrow interests ending in chaos and immobility. It is a certain route to failure.
    All the traditions of our past, all the lessons of our heritage, all the promises of our future point to another path, the path of common purpose and the restoration of American values. That path leads to true freedom for our nation and ourselves. We can take the first steps down that path as we begin to solve our energy problem.
    Energy will be the immediate test of our ability to unite this nation, and it can also be the standard around which we rally. On the battlefield of energy we can win for our nation a new confidence, and we can seize control again of our common destiny."

Sadly, the USA took the wrong path to the feel-good-in-the-short-term Reagan years back then... But thankfully some people did not give up, and the cost of solar PV continues to fall and energy efficiency improvement continue to be made despite it not being a level playing field because the price of fossil fuels and nukes don't account for many negative externalities. But we could have been there in the 1980s, and saved decades of military costs and health costs and pollution remediation costs incurred since then.

Good points. How is copyright for any computer software then justified, at least for most software that is intended to be a "useful" tool, like Microsoft Word?

From what I read here, systemd is a lot less modular by bundling in a lot of services. Linux has had the virtue of modularity at is core, as exemplified by narrow-focus command line tools piped together to get work done. Modularity is something like cleanliness. If you leave crumbs all over your kitchen all the time, it generally isn't itself the problem. The problem is when roaches and mice move in and you can't get rid of them due to the crumbs you still leave everywhere. Granted, cleanliness (and modularity) can perhaps go too far (the person who scrubs the kitchen flour every five minutes). So, what is a healthy balance here? I don't know enough about the details to weigh in on that. You ask for specific problems, and while a reasonable sounding request, that is also a bit like asking people to send pictures in of specific roaches and mice. The specific problems are important of course, but what is at stake is the bigger picture, not stamping out each individual roach. What matters is increased risk. The more general issue is the management of risks from complexity, whereas modularity is one of the best (but not the only) approach for doing that.

I've seen how lack of modularity can damage other software communities -- particularly the early Squeak community, like I wrote about here
http://lists.squeakfoundation....
"I sympathize. I think the biggest issue of Squeak is issues with modularity and managing complexity. These issues translate to frustration for maintainers (and users :-). Anyway, I had related frustrations to yours many years ago and they are why I ended up doing a lot in Python and Jython on the JVM in the last decade, even to the point of working on PataPata. ... I think the most important single issue in maintaining any large system is managing complexity (documenting intent maybe comes next, including well-named variables and methods and functions). This has never been a priority for Squeak IMHO. ...
    There are several ways to manage complexity, which include:
* modularity (namespaces, packages like Java or GNU Smalltalk or Debian, letting someone else do that hard work by leveraging libraries or VMs or languages, like Squeak does by using a C compiler to generate the VM)
* cleverness (brilliant redesign, like traits was hopefully going to be)
* laissez faire, and also to each his or her own image (that is what we have now, and it is not that bad an idea, if the *core* is small and well thought out, like Spoon, so the *image* instance becomes the *module*. But alas, it is not, witness how confusing Morphic is to unravel).
    Modularity is the one way to manage complexity which seems to work best in practice, although the others have their role. However, if Squeak images could easily talk to each other and share some state, and we had Spoon-like remote debugging and development, then we could have just one application per image, and that would be easier to maintain (it would be modular to a degree but in an unusual way). But I would still suggest such a system built on well-though out (clever) modules would be more powerful and easier to use than a mess of spaghetti code, even if we had only one application per image."

With roots back to here in 2000:
http://lists.squeakfoundation....
"Squeak complexity in 2.8 has become a complex cat from the simple kitten complexity of 1.13(?) in 1996. Back then, Dan Ingalls wrote on 10 Nov 1996 those prescient words: "The Squeak team has an interest in doing the world's simplest application construction framework, but I suspect that we will get sucked up with enough other things that this won't happen in the next two months (but who knows...)."
    Squeak 2.8's complexity is now quiet (in terms of walkbacks) and stealthy (in terms of growing between releases without a complaint). And the complexity could be deadly. Witness the recent issue Stefan raised about some Squeak fonts possibly violating a Microsoft EULA. The question should never even arise of the legal integrity of the core release. We might as well just leap right into those jaws of complexity. ... "

Granted, Squeak has finally much improved since those years -- but the cost to the community as enormous from all the missed opportunity... Squeak limps along, and is a better and better system, and spinoffs like Amber Smalltalk and Pharo are awesome, but so many other systems grabbed Squeak's mindshare that Sqeuak faces big uphill struggle at this point. It never got to be the Flash replacement it could have been in browsers, or the Java-killer, or lots of other thing it could have been (the alternative to Python...).

For its own flaws (including those inherent in JavaScript), NodeJS seems to have gotten modularity right and can support that picture I painted above for Squeak of special-purpose application-focused servers talking to each other:
http://www.futurealoof.com/pos...
"All you people who added node_modules to your gitignore, remove that shit, today, it's an artifact of an era we're all too happy to leave behind. The era of global modules is dead."

Maybe what frustrates so many Linux developers is to see such an obvious problem going ignored, like for a master chef to have a new restaurant owner come in who is intentionally throwing bread crumbs all over the floor because is "looks nice"? Or, for another analogy, like an experienced firefighter being forced to live in a wood house overflowing with years of un-recycled newspapers supposedly protected by some funky new smoke detector system that is unproven and behind the scenes is implemented using a rat's nest of unlabelled wires?

That said, again, I don't know enough about systemd to know if it does indeed make good overall tradeoffs. I'm just building on the complaints about it I've read here. Things can be too clean. Humans need bacteria to survive. Evolution tends to produce odd efficiencies of unexpectedly interacting systems. So, I'll continue to watch how this plays out...

But Joey's biggest complaint seems to be about the social process. It seems to me that all social systems tend to attract parasites and rent seekers eventually. It can be hard to manage that sometimes without moving on and just waiting for the inevitable collapse before recolonizing. As Clay Shirky says:
"A Group Is Its Own Worst Enemy"
http://www.shirky.com/writings...
"What matters is, a group designed this and then was unable, in the context they'd set up, partly a technical and partly a social context, to save it from this attack from within. And attack from within is what matters. Communitree wasn't shut down by people trying to crash or syn-flood the server. It was shut down by people logging in and posting, which is what the system was designed to allow. The technological pattern of normal use and attack were identical at the machine level, so there was no way to specify technologically what should and shouldn't happen. Some of the users wanted the system to continue to exist and to provide a forum for discussion. And other of the users, the high school boys, either didn't care or were actively inimical. And the system provided no way for the former group to defend itself from the latter.
    Now, this story has been written many times. It's actually frustrating to see how many times it's been written. You'd hope that at some point that someone would write it down, and they often do, but what then doesn't happen is other people don't read it.
    The most charitable description of this repeated pattern is "learning from experience." But learning from experience is the worst possible way to learn something. Learning from experience is one up from remembering. That's not great. The best way to learn something is when someone else figures it out and tells you: "Don't go in that swamp. There are alligators in there."
      Learning from experience about the alligators is lousy, compared to learning from reading, say. There hasn't been, unfortunately, in this arena, a lot of learning from reading. And so, lessons from Lucasfilms' Habitat, written in 1990, reads a lot like Rose Stone's description of Communitree from 1978.
    This pattern has happened over and over and over again. Someone built the system, they assumed certain user behaviors. The users came on and exhibited different behaviors. And the people running the system discovered to their horror that the technological and social issues could not in fact be decoupled. ..."

So, systemd sounds nice in practice -- let's bundle all the important services together and finally get all the bugs fixed *this* time -- but in practice, experienced developers worry that the bundling creates a big technical and social problem of maintenance and debugging and related discussions and management.

I might have succeeded in 2000 with rallying Squeakers to make a better system back then, sparing years of frustration and bit rot for so many people, but there were several people (including a "lawyer") who claimed Squeak was just fine as it was, that the quirky non-open-source-recognized license did not matter and that modularity was not an import priority and so on... I'm glad those issues have been mostly fixed for Squeak in something lie Pharo, but it took many years of painful reality for the community as a whole to wake up to them become priorities, losing many good people along the way -- even losing Dan Ingalls to JavaScript...
http://www.infoq.com/interview...

Granted from 2005: http://www.rense.com/general65...
"I had been stationed in Germany for two years while in the military, so I lit up, and commented about how beautiful the country was, and inquired if he was going back because he missed it.
      "No," he answered me. "I'm going back because I've seen this before." He then commenced to explain that when he was a kid, he watched with his family in fear as Hitler's government committed atrocity after atrocity, and no one was willing to say anything. He said the news refused to question the government, and the ones who did were not in the newspaper business much longer. He said good neighbors, people he had known all his life, turned against his family and other Jews, grabbing on to the hate and superiority "as if they were starved for it" (his words).
      He said he was too old to see it happen right in front of his eyes again, and too old to do anything about it, so he was taking his family back to Europe on Thursday where they would be safe from George W. Bush and his neocons. He seemed resolute, but troubled, nonetheless, as if being too young on one end and too old on the other to fight what he saw happening was wearing on him. ...
    I have related this event to you in the hopes it will serve as a cautionary anecdote about the state of our Union, and to illustrate the path we Americans are being led down by a group of fanatics bent on global economic and military dominion. When a man who survived the fruits of fascism decides its time to leave THIS country because he's seeing the same patterns that led to the Holocaust and other Nazi horrors beginning to form here, it is time for us to recognize the underlying evil inherent in the actions of those who claim they work for all Americans, and for all mankind. And it is incumbent upon all Americans, Red and Blue, Republican and Democrat, to stop them."

What has really changed from the Bush years of great significance in that regard?

See also:
"They Thought They Were Free: The Germans, 1933-45"
http://www.press.uchicago.edu/...
""What happened here was the gradual habituation of the people, little by little, to being governed by surprise; to receiving decisions deliberated in secret; to believing that the situation was so complicated that the government had to act on information which the people could not understand, or so dangerous that, even if the people could not understand it, it could not be released because of national security. And their sense of identification with Hitler, their trust in him, made it easier to widen this gap and reassured those who would otherwise have worried about it.
    "This separation of government from people, this widening of the gap, took place so gradually and so insensibly, each step disguised (perhaps not even intentionally) as a temporary emergency measure or associated with true patriotic allegiance or with real social purposes. And all the crises and reforms (real reforms, too) so occupied the people that they did not see the slow motion underneath, of the whole process of government growing remoter and remoter."

Jews who moved to Israel seem to me overall to have interpreted "never again" in terms of who has the most guns. But there is another perspective on that, which is to think that "never again" should be about militaristic bureaucracy getting out of control. A culture like the USA (or Israel for that matter) can be full of guns and people who know how to use them, but still infested with militarist bureaucracy infesting every aspect of life (including via perpetual full-surveillance "schooling"). Like bureaucracy, humans have had a long association with fire, and fire is useful to warm our homes and cook our meals, but it is a terrible thing when it rages out of control.

That said, how should we behave when we are essentially trapped in the middle of such a (currently) slow moving disaster? It seems always possible it could turn around instead of get worse. The USA is a different country than Germany, with a different history and different traditions. And social and economic life often sucks for immigrants in new countries, like shown by Michael Ruppert's experience moving to Venezuela (ignoring how I think "Peak Oil" is a non-issue given Solar PV and likely fusion):
http://www.fromthewilderness.c...
"The important distinctions about adaptivity are not racial at all. US citizens come in all colors. American culture is the water they have swum in since birth. A native US citizen of Latin descent who did not (or even did) speak Spanish would probably feel almost as out of place here as I do. They would look the same but not feel the same. And when it came time to deal collectively with a rapidly changing world, a world in turmoil, a native-born American's inbred decades of "instinctive" survival skills might not harmonize with the skills used by those around him.
    Another one of my trademarked lines is that Post Peak survival is not a matter of individual survival or national survival. It is a matter of cooperative, community survival. If one is not a fully integrated member of a community when the challenges come, one might hinder the effectiveness of the entire community which has unspoken and often consciously unrecognized ways of adapting. As stresses increase, the gauntlets required to gain acceptance in strange places will only get tougher. Diversity will become more, rather than less, rigid and enforced.
    Start building your lifeboats where you are now. I can see that the lessons I have learned here are important whether you are thinking of moving from city to countryside, state to state, or nation to nation. Whatever shortcomings you may think exist where you live are far outnumbered by the advantages you have where you are a part of an existing ecosystem that you know and which knows you. If the time comes when it is necessary to leave that community you will be better off moving with your tribe rather than moving alone."

The USA still has the strength, as exemplified by a true "Promised Land" of NYC (rivaling Israel for Jewish resettlement), of being a place where diverse people have learned to live and work together, perhaps better than anywhere else on the planet.
"The Difference: How the Power of Diversity Creates Better Groups, Firms, Schools, and Societies"
http://www.amazon.com/The-Diff...

AC, thanks for the insightful reply! Indeed several Nobel-prize winning economists have supported the basic income for some of these sorts of reasons.

Great points!!! I've made similar ones on scope, suggesting the Java API is derivative of Smalltalk's class libraries. Also, one can look at the FSF's claim the calling GPL'd code even via dynamic linking creates a derived work.

Copyright has many absurdities built into it when applied to programs, and this is one of them. I agree that in practice, if APIs were extensively protected, then people would gravitate towards freely licensed ones. And people might go back decades to find the origins of various software expressions related to interfaces in decades old code (independent invention wold be the only defense, and might be hard to prove). Although, the freely licensed APIs would probably be used by everyone else who argued they copied something from it... One can hope that the SC ruling for Oracle might push copyright for software to the point where copyright for software is show to be so absurd it is abandoned, but somehow I doubt even that would get copyright for software repealed.

Reminds me of the same kind of nonsense as is now happening with patents and smartphones. It's one thing when you are producing machinery in the 1800s and devices are covered by at most a handful of patents. But a Smartphone may be covered by literally thousands of patents (both hardware and software). How do you begin to keep track of that when designing something, let alone negotiate rights to each patent? How are patents then promoting the useful arts when in practice all they do is get in the way? Contrast with the US Fashion industry which in general is not covered by copyrights or patents.

My main point is not to argue for more copyright; it is to say that, like Rodney Dangerfield, API designers "no respect". :-)
http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/R...

Granted, so many APIs suck for all the reasons the Google engineer said they were hard to make that it's understandable why people don't respect them. It's like how general tankers in World of Tank have so little respect for Artillery (another hard job). :-)
http://forum.worldoftanks.eu/i...
"Arty seems like the best choice to blame at for some idiot players who have no idea where to go in battle and cock up the whole battle. Arty is not air strike, it takes time to aim and reload, most importantly, i cant shoot at target that i cant even see on my map. For those noobs who always blame at other player in order to feel good abt their own IQ, stop pissing ppl off and learn how to play."

I get the feeling you perhaps have not designed any complex software more than one, especially software libraries intended to be supported for years? Otherwise you might not so easily dismiss the creative challenge of creating good APIs. Sure, implementations may require hard work up front, but a sucky API generally creates massive amounts of hard work for everyone else for years to come. A bad API in that sense is much, much worse than a bad implementation, which as Linux shows, can be fairly easily replaced eventually. While it may look trivial, creating a good API demands immense amounts of understanding of the problem space, the limits of computers, the user community, and so on, including imagining future needs. And choosing the right simplification can be the hardest, most creative act of all -- which is just as true for programmers as it is for painters, novelists, architects, screenwriters, illustrators, actors, and so on.

Actually, it is more and more rare that someone can get anyone to pay something for what want to get paid for in the USA. See for example, from the 1990s by the then Vice Provost of Caltech
https://www.its.caltech.edu/~d...
"The period 1950-1970 was a true golden age for American science. Young Ph.D's could choose among excellent jobs, and anyone with a decent scientific idea could be sure of getting funds to pursue it. ... By now, in the 1990's, the situation has changed dramatically. ..."

Sure, you can always point to funding successes, but as a successful percentage of aspirants, the odds get longer and longer with more qualified people and less global-scale opportunities as big winners dominate the landscape.

BTW, people did get funding for creating triple stores and similar thing, just not me (not that I ever tried to raise funding for the Pointrel System, in part because I wanted it to be free and open source).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T...

Besides, in a world of so much potential plenty, why make people justify what they want to do based on the possibility that "investors" who are already financially obese can monopolize it for a profit? Also, in a supposed democracy, why should a system like "Freedombox" get the left-overs while phones and tablets full of essentially spyware get vast amounts of money poured into them?
http://freedomboxfoundation.or...

But regardless of funding issues, this whole case shows how valuable the Java API had become, given Google took such pains to use it exactly... Part of the value of that API was the immense amounts of marketing put into Java by IBM and Sun for a decade (given Java sucked at the start, and is not that great even now although it has become OK-ish after vast investments). For good or bad, Oracle bought that Java asset, including community good will and everyone's investment in learning that API and making software that was dependent on it (even if much of the better part of Java down to aspects of Swing's API and the hotspot compiler was a rip-off of Smalltalk, with Sun hiring a bunch of ex-Smalltalkers).

Just because a system needs multiple parts to work does not mean one part of it (the API) can be dismissesed as unimportant or uncreative. Interfaces are very important, even if many people don't appreciate that fact.

Still, it is true that good interfaces hopefully become standards, and proprietary standards are very problematical in a supposed free market. Proprietary standards can ultimately be very costly to a society. The internet and the web succeed in large part because it was an *open* standards.

However, by contrast, due to marketing power from IBM and many other factors, Microsoft succeeded in dominating the desktop with a proprietary standard. I'm actually surprised how far WINE has gotten given Microsoft; parallels there to this case would be of interest (same with Mono).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W...
"Microsoft has not made public statements about Wine."

Related by Manuel De Landa:
"Meshworks, Hierarchies, and Interfaces"
http://www.t0.or.at/delanda/me...
"Certain standardizations, say, of electric outlet designs or of data-structures traveling through the Internet, may actually turn out to promote heterogenization at another level, in terms of the appliances that may be designed around the standard outlet, or of the services that a common data-structure may make possible. "

As a developer, years ago I rooted for Apple to lose the look-and-feel lawsuit that threatened to make creating good user interfaces impossible -- but, I would never say creating a good user interface was not a creative act involving a lot of hard work and researcher and inspiration and reflection and trial-and-error.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A....
"Apple Computer, Inc. vs. Microsoft Corporation, 35 F.3d 1435 (9th Cir. 1994) was a copyright infringement lawsuit in which Apple Computer, Inc. (now Apple Inc.) sought to prevent Microsoft and Hewlett-Packard from using visual graphical user interface (GUI) elements that were similar to those in Apple's Lisa and Macintosh operating systems.[1] The court ruled that, "Apple cannot get patent-like protection for the idea of a graphical user interface, or the idea of a desktop metaphor [under copyright law]...".[2] In the midst of the Apple v. Microsoft lawsuit, Xerox also sued Apple alleging that Mac's GUI was heavily based on Xerox's.[3] The district court dismissed Xerox's claims without addressing whether Apple's GUI infringed Xerox's.[4] Apple lost all claims in the Microsoft suit except for the ruling that the trash can icon and folder icons from Hewlett-Packard's NewWave windows application were infringing. The lawsuit was filed in 1988 and lasted four years; the decision was affirmed on appeal in 1994,[2] and Apple's appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court was denied."

However, that may have been a rare bit of sanity about copyright in the courts. Copyright rulings generally are pretty adhoc. There is little consistency to them according to people like Alan Kay who have been expert witnesses in a variety of cases. This amicus brief is rolling the dice, and we don't know who will win. If APIs get ruled as proprietary, which they might considering the Google presentation I linked to, then the whole computing landscape may change overnight generally much for the worse.

Copyright has become overly broad IMHO, and, for example, right now try to popularize a story using the characters from Harry Potter or Frozen and see how far you get (if you are financially successful) before getting sued. Granted, some places look the other way about fan fiction, but if you make serious money, you can expect a legal attack by copyright owners claiming under US law to control things like character names and related concepts. What real difference is that from API names and expected exceptions and structure contents and so so as a large body of interrelated stuff like the Java API?
http://www.nolo.com/legal-ency...
"Fictional characters can be protected separately from their underlying works as derivative copyrights, provided that they are sufficiently unique and distinctive--for example, James Bond, Fred Flintstone, Hannibal Lecter, and Snoopy. Judge Learned Hand established the standard for character protection in Nichols v. Universal Pictures Corp., 45 F.2d 119 (2d Cir. 1930), when he stated that, "... the less developed the characters, the less they can be copyrighted; that is the penalty an author must bear for marking them too indistinctly." ... Exploitation of fictional characters is a crucial source of revenue for entertainment and merchandising companies. Characters such as Superman and Mickey Mouse are the foundations of massive entertainment franchises and are commonly protected under both copyright and trademark law."

That's an example of why I feel the Supreme Court may side with Oracle.

I'm not saying that situation is morally right or good public policy or good for "progress of the useful arts"; I feel it is not. But I'm suggesting that what many people are saying here, including the amicus brief, seems inconsistent to me (including denying the creativity of API design, which is at the heart of much good software development), and thus the outcome is risky. And rather than address the issue and accept that a well-designed interface is a creative act while admitting overly-broad copyright has become counter-productive (at least to the average software developer), people try to dismiss that, as you seem to me to be doing here.

Let me put it another way to show how API design is at the heart of much good software development. Forth exemplifies incremental modular design, where you build generally from the bottom up, creating Forth words that are usually a composite of just a few other words, and then building new words with the previous words you made. So much of the value created in a Forth program is in the way you create words as an API for the words in layers above, and designing useful words is the supreme art of Forth development. But how can you disentangle the act of Forth programming from API creation?
http://lambda-the-ultimate.org...
"What's interesting specifically about Forth is the low level machinery required to get it to work - or the lack of it. That's what makes a well documented minimal Forth like this quite interesting. Writing a Forth from the ground up is a fascinating experience. After just a few lines of assembler you're defining Forth words and writing hybrid Forth/Assembler. I know of no other practical language that can be bootstrapped so quickly."

Solving problems by making APIs that define mini-languages in terms of internal functions is of course true for almost any computer language, but the emphasis on creating an API to create solutions in a problem space may be less obvious in some cases than Forth. To say API creation is not creative is ultimately to deny the creativity needed for much of real programming. In practice, any significant "implementation" to solve a complex problem is built on layers of custom-made APIs almost all the way down... Granted, how you sequence API calls is not making an API, but invariably that sequence of API calls becomes itself an PI endpoint for some other layer. You just can't neatly separate making an API from making a sequence of instructions in practice in any significant piece of software; the two are intertwined in the creative act.

The public policy of whether other people should be able to call that code without your permission (GPL and derived works), or duplicate the function names and expected behaviors without your permission even with clean room implementations (this case with Oracle vs. Google), is ultimately a political question of "fair use" and should be independent of the issue of "creativity" IMHO. I'm still saddened to see how little appreciation many slashdotters seem to have for programming as a craft generally requiring a poetical mindset to do well.
http://www.i-programmer.info/n...

http://computinged.wordpress.c...
http://www.paulgraham.com/knut...
"My feeling is that when we prepare a program, it can be like composing poetry or music; as Andrei Ershov has said [9], programming can give us both intellectual and emotional satisfaction, because it is a real achievement to master complexity and to establish a system of consistent rules."

By me: "[unrev-II] Poetry and Knowledge Management (was Jack's Use Case)"
http://www.dougengelbart.org/s...

Or:
http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/P...
"The programmer, like the poet, works only slightly removed from pure thought-stuff. He builds his castles in the air, from air, creating by exertion of the imagination. Few media of creation are so flexible, so easy to polish and rework, so readily capable of realizing grand conceptual structures.... Yet the program construct, unlike the poet's words, is real in the sense that it moves and works, producing visible outputs separate from the construct itself. [â¦] The magic of myth and legend has come true in our time. One types the correct incantation on a keyboard, and a display screen comes to life, showing things that never were nor could be. (Fred Brooks (1975) The Mythical Man-Month: Essays on Software Engineering Page 7)"

Choice of words to express emotions and ideas is a poet's stock in trade, just like picking good names for methods of doings things is an essential part of the creative act of programming. I've read of one person who hires programmers who always asks programmers who their favorite poets are...

Loved the first half of your comment; the second half I have issues with. Dan Pink's talk on motivation and creativity cited research done by the federal Reserve which included experiments in a poor country which agreed with the general findings. So it is not just white middle class -- it is human. As for Bill Gates, he bought DOS from someone who had according to some sources essentially stolen it from his employer.
http://www.businessweek.com/st...
http://spectrum.ieee.org/compu...

Bill Gates was born a multimillionaire in today's dollars and could have spent his life working on free software if he wished.
http://philip.greenspun.com/bg...

Emacs is essentially a word processor, especially when coupled with tools like LaTex,

I was using a word processor (in ROM) on a Commodore PET around 1980. Many other word processors were created, along with drawing programs, and so on. PLATO preceded pretty much of of that.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P...
"PLATO (Programmed Logic for Automatic Teaching Operations)[1][2] was the first generalized computer assisted instruction system. Starting in 1960, it ran on the University of Illinois' ILLIAC I computer. By the late 1970s, it supported several thousand graphics terminals distributed worldwide, running on nearly a dozen different networked mainframe computers. Many modern concepts in multi-user computing were developed on PLATO, including forums, message boards, online testing, e-mail, chat rooms, picture languages, instant messaging, remote screen sharing, and multiplayer games."

Or with Forth, funded in part by federal dollars:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F...
"Forth was first exposed to other programmers in the early 1970s, starting with Elizabeth Rather at the US National Radio Astronomy Observatory.[6] After their work at NRAO, Charles Moore and Elizabeth Rather formed FORTH, Inc. in 1973, refining and porting Forth systems to dozens of other platforms in the next decade."

And don't forget "The Mother of All Demos" by Doug Engelbart:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T...
""The Mother of All Demos" is a name given retrospectively to Douglas Engelbart's December 9, 1968, computer demonstration at the Fall Joint Computer Conference in San Francisco. The live demonstration featured the introduction of a complete computer hardware and software system called the oN-Line System or more commonly, NLS. The 90-minute presentation essentially demonstrated almost all the fundamental elements of modern personal computing: windows, hypertext, graphics, efficient navigation and command input, video conferencing, the computer mouse, word processing, dynamic file linking, revision control, and a collaborative real-time editor (collaborative work). Engelbart's presentation was the first to publicly demonstrate all these elements in a single system. The demonstration was highly influential and spawned similar projects at Xerox PARC in the early 1970s. The underlying technologies influenced both the Apple Macintosh and Microsoft Windows graphical user interface operating systems in the 1980s and 1990s."

The reason we use what we use may relate to "capitalism", but it has more to do with the rich getting richer and market position and advertising and (sometimes illegal as with Microsoft antitrust) wheeling and dealing with supplier contracts and press and such, funding alliances, sweat heart deals with governments, and a bunch of similar things.

Rewards, in the presence of artificial scarcity, can control people. But people don't do their most creative work in such a regime. Under such a regime, people tend to gravitate to doing the minimum to get the reward, avoiding risks when possible.

I'm not saying in our system in the USA that software developers don't need money to develop software. They do because otherwise they will have to take unrelated jobs. FOr example, my wife and I went way into debt to create a garden simulator and then spent years doing unrelated work to pay the debt off. That was sad because we were all tooled up to write great educational simulations and similar related things in that domain and that capacity pretty much all got lost over the years of doing unrelated coding. But something like a basic income could solve that issue instead of raising funds speculatively via artificial scarcity and a hope of winning the copyright lottery with a copyright that pays off (most code gets thrown away fairly soon). As for other tasks related to software, the FOSS movement especially GNU/Debian/Linux has shown what is possible, Maybe it is not perfect, but it shows another way is possible,

Apple and Microsoft may have won the mindshare hype game, but there were alternatives -- some of them better. Another example:
http://www.columbia.edu/cu/com...
"Announced in June 1982. Based on the Motorola 68000 CPU, this personal workstation was intended for interfacing with laboratory instruments to acquire and analyze experimental data. In addition to a regular PC keyboard, it had a touch panel for controlling experiments. It had a custom realtime multitasking operating system called CSOS, and could be programmed in Pascal, Fortran, or Basic. The 128KB memory could be expanded up to 5MB. Up to 4 10MB hard disks could be installed, as well as various combinations of 5.25- and 8-inch floppy disks. The screen had 80 columns Ã-- 30 rows in text mode and 768 Ã-- 480 pixels in monochrome graphics mode. I/O interfaces included serial, parallel, IEEE-488, and analog, with an integrated color printer -- a big package in a small footprint. I attended a nondisclosure presentation of this product by IBM in 1980 or '81 and recall commenting that if they stripped away the instrument control panel and interfaces, they'd have a desktop computer that was miles ahead of anything else on the market. Wrong division, I guess."

Personally, I think a Commodore pet with embedded Forth might have taken the computing world by storm (compared to slow BASIC and hard to use assembly) especially if it had included bitmapped graphics (which was an add-on board I bought):
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C...
"The Commodore PET (Personal Electronic Transactor) is a home/personal computer produced in 1977 by Commodore International.[2]..."

For reference:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H...
"Many of the design features of the I were due to the limited amount of money they had to construct the prototype, but with the income from the sales he was able to start construction of a greatly improved machine, the Apple II; it was presented to the public at the first West Coast Computer Faire on April 16 and 17, 1977."

Minitel in France might theoretically have been the winner:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M...
"The Minitel was a Videotex online service accessible through telephone lines, and is considered one of the world's most successful pre-World Wide Web online services. Rolled out experimentally in 1978 in Brittany and throughout France in 1982 by the PTT (Poste, Téléphone et Télécommunications; divided since 1991 between France Télécom and La Poste).[1] From its early days, users could make online purchases, make train reservations, check stock prices, search the telephone directory, have a mail box, and chat in a similar way to that now made possible by the Internet."

Still, the first interactive computer system I played with (for like a minute or two) was probably some kind of early computer running lunar lander software with an oscilloscope for display at Brookhaven National Labs around (guessing) 1975? So, government funded... A lot of people wanted such things. People were building from kits. Someone was gong to do a premade system. 3D printing is in the same flux right now that PCs were in the later 1970s. Someone is going to be a big winner there -- but there are lots of small players right now, some of which are attracting capital, plus a few big ones (like HP) that seem to just be misfiring somehow when they should have already owned the market (like IBM messing up by licensing DOS instead of using existing in-house software, inclusion a Forth made by David Frank).

If aspirin is everywhere even without a patent on it, and fancy clothes are everywhere without copyrights on them, why not personal computers and software? Does nature need copyrights and patents to produce oak trees or hummingbirds or blue whales or lactobacillus? Do (real) apples need to be copyrighted or patented so farmers will grow them?

Meanwhile, in the *real* world, millionaire (then) Bill Gates dumpster dives to learn how to write software:
http://patch.com/california/lo...
"Allen credits his basic programming skills to Lakeside School, the Seattle preparatory school where he met Bill Gates. "We were the only high school in Seattle with a (computer) terminal. The teachers wrote a three-line base code on the blackboard and gave us the manuals, and that was it. We were hooked," said Allen. That phase of Allen's life involved taking the bus -- sports coat, tie, leather briefcase and all -- down to the offices of local computer gurus. "I would boost Bill into dumpsters and we'd get these coffee-stained texts (of computer code)" from behind the offices, grinned Allen."

Quoting a small snippet from a larger work with attribution in the USA is generally fair use. But in any case, how can the Free Software Foundation claim that code that links to GPL libraries even *dynamically* is a derived work if APIs are not copyrightable? As much as I am against excessive copyright, people can't have it both ways.

Others disagree though, although I think they are probably wrong (but its up to the courts etc...):
https://www.publicknowledge.or...
"There's a dangerous meme going around that if Oracle loses its novel copyright claims against Google that suddenly the GPL will become unenforceable. This idea hinges on a misunderstanding about the difference between linking to a code library and merely using an API. ... Florian Mueller, who provides indispensable analysis of various intellectual property issues in the mobile industry, believes that whether an API is copyrightable can only be determined on a case-by-case basis. He is certainly right that the overall design of a system of APIs can show "creativity," in the same sense that a brilliant mechanical invention is creative. But that does not mean that copyright is the proper way to protect that creativity, if at all. Copyright extends only to "original works of authorship fixed in a tangible medium of expression," and a system of API calls does not meet that test. It is not a "fixed" work in the same way that an actual computer program is. I will not address whether a system of APIs is patentable, but certainly the creativity that a well-designed API scheme might show is closer to the creativity that a concise mathematical statement (not patentable) or a new design for an engine (patentable) might show. In any event, simply because something is "creative" in some sense does not mean that it deserves legal protection, unless it can be shown that some desired level of creativity would not happen without such protection. I do not see any evidence that the dynamic and innovative software industry requires copyright protection for APIs to maintain its current high level of creativity. ..."

Some people also suggest the dynamic linking issue for the GPL would not hold up in the Supreme Court...

To add to the confusion, from Richard Stallman:
http://lkml.iu.edu//hypermail/...
"Someone recently made the claim that including a header file always
makes a derivative work.
That's not the FSF's view. Our view is that just using structure
definitions, typedefs, enumeration constants, macros with simple
bodies, etc., is NOT enough to make a derivative work. It would take
a substantial amount of code (coming from inline functions or macros
with substantial bodies) to do that."

How can he say that and still argue that dynamic linking to a GPL's library makes something fall under the GPL?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G...
"This key dispute is whether or not non-GPL software can legally statically link or dynamically link to GPL libraries. Different opinions exist on this issue. The GPL is clear in requiring that all derivative works of code under the GPL must themselves be under the GPL. Ambiguity arises with regards to using GPL libraries, and bundling GPL software into a larger package (perhaps mixed into a binary via static linking). This is ultimately a question not of the GPL per se, but of how copyright law defines derivative works. The following points of view exist: ... The Free Software Foundation (which holds the copyright of several notable GPL-licensed software products and of the license text itself) asserts that an executable which uses a dynamically linked library is indeed a derivative work. ..."

So, while they are at it, why not get the Supreme Court to rule on that dynamic linking issue? Of course, if GPL code could be dynamically linked to, then in practice the GPL become unenforceable as it was intended...

If the FSF can argue dynamic linking to GPLd code, which requires referencing API function names creates a derived work, why can't Oracle claim that an API gives them control over who uses it as creating a derived work? And further, if that API is "creative" enough to be copyrightable in that sense, when someone else intentionally makes a complete copy of that API, is that not copyright violation?

As I say elsewhere, I think copyright is now excessively long and broad, but I don't think this lawsuit is going to fix that problem. I think it likely it will make it worse if Google looses. Of course, Google may still "win" if it "loses", because suddenly it may have so much greater legal control over anyone who accesses its APIs for its web services and it may be able to prevent competitors from creating similar services (even if just by legal intimidation) or clients to its services without payment and so on... Could that have been Google's plan all along (to lose the lawsuit)? Which if so would seem to be greatly departing from "don't be evil" so I hope not.

See my other comments here clarification about it being hard "creative" work.

Top down programming is a recognized form of design. With a bigger initial team, you could imagine Linus might have never written any implementations of APIs as other team member could have filled that in, but he still have made an enormous creative contribution by good design. Example:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T...
"A top-down approach (also known as stepwise design and in some cases used as a synonym of decomposition) is essentially the breaking down of a system to gain insight into its compositional sub-systems. In a top-down approach an overview of the system is formulated, specifying but not detailing any first-level subsystems. Each subsystem is then refined in yet greater detail, sometimes in many additional subsystem levels, until the entire specification is reduced to base elements. A top-down model is often specified with the assistance of "black boxes", these make it easier to manipulate. However, black boxes may fail to elucidate elementary mechanisms or be detailed enough to realistically validate the model. Top down approach starts with the big picture. It breaks down from there into smaller segments."

What seems to me to be going on in the discussion here which disturbs me greatly as a software developer is that, in order to try to help win a political argument about interoperability, people are dismissing the creative aspect of naming things well and making good choices about module partitions. That is really really sad. It has taken me *decades* to get better at those tasks, and they remain hard, and I can still see how much I could improve on them. One pet project (the Pointrel system) I've been thinking about APIs for for thirty+ years trying to simplify and clarify the design. Maybe that is to excess :-) but in any case, an essential part of a good design is good names and good abstraction layers, and that can IMHO take a lot of effort and creativity.

But rather than, as I do, people here saying, yes good APIs demand effort and creative understanding of the problem domain, and the issue is that copyright is (or has become) a bad idea because it would restrict interoperability, people here tend to be saying, no, APIs aren't creative because it would be inconvenient if they were given how broad copyright now is. I think the end result of that is going to be:
1. Pissing off software designers
2. Losing the Supreme Court case too.
3. ???
4. Profit for those purveying artificial scarcity
(my half-ironic site on that: http://artificialscarcity.com/ )

Personally, I'm coming around just now to the thought that maybe most people on Slashdot really have never tried very hard to design great software API interfaces? Which fits the facts that most APIs I've ever had to deal with were fll of gotchas and confusing aspects. Contrast with, say, ObjectWorks Smalltalk, which in general had great APIs for streaming and such.

Maybe this discussion is an example of?
"When We Don't Like the Solution, We Deny the Problem"
http://science.slashdot.org/st...

The "solution" here (implied by Oracle) is that APIs are controllable by the copyright owner, and the problem is that APIs take a lot of hard creative work to get right? I propose other solutions, like a basic income and rolling back copyright.

If APIs were not hard to write and required creativity to do well, why are their articles giving advice on how to do it better? Example:
http://piwik.org/blog/2008/01/...
"Here are the main concepts I tried to apply when designing the API:
        Easy to learn ; the documentation provides simple examples, complete documentation
        Easy to use ; single entry point, standard parameters
        Hard to misuse ; explicit error message suggesting parameters values
        Appropriate to audience ; I talked about such a service with several users, and looked at what the competition was offering"

Perhaps on that page is a link to (sad to point it out as I like Google more than Oracle) the "smoking gun" that might lose the case and leave us worse off than with ambiguity:
"How to design a good API and why it matters?" by Joshua Bloch, Principal Software Engineer, *Google*
http://lcsd05.cs.tamu.edu/slid...
"APIs can be among a company's greatest assets
* Customers invest heavily: buying, writing, learning
* Cost to stop using an API can be prohibitive
* Successful public APIs capture customers
Can also be among company's greatest liabilities
* Bad APIs result in unending stream of support calls
Public APIs are forever - one chance to get it right"

And the damning evidence goes on from there on how hard it is to write good APIs, and how important it is to do so, and, to my mind, how much creativity the process takes to do well. I would be surprised if Oracle does not submit that in their court case, so the EFF etc. better get on it now... Seriously, how can anyone read that document by a Google engineer outlining all the complexity involved in writing an API well and turn around and say writing a good API is not a creative act?

Of course, the fact that much of the better parts of the Java API were "borrowed" from Smalltalk is another layer of complexity here. :-) But that doesn't really resolve the issue for Google to prove Oracle inherited a liability from overly broad coprygith -- unless, say, Google was right now to buy the assets of old Smalltalk vendors like ParcPlace-Digitalk (currently owned by Cincom), which I'd advise them to do this instant, but who listens to me?).
http://www.cincomsmalltalk.com...
http://www.cbronline.com/news/...
"This image seems appropriate talking to the new folks at the former ParcPlace-Digitalk Inc, of Sunnyvale, California; for it seems the $45m (in stock) July 1995 merger of Smalltalk powerhouses ParcPlace Systems Inc and Digitalk Inc was in fact as unholy and ultimately dangerous an act of constructive surgery as anything Victor Frankenstein did, at least to their investors; and just like in the old Karloff sequels, along have come a new team of eager re-animators, convinced this time they have the right therapy to make the revived old boy behave himself. Our tale begins in 1987 when Xerox's legendary Palo Alto Research Center (Parc) helped alumnus Adele Goldberg set up a company, ParcPlace, to exploit her work in the pure-play object-oriented programming language Smalltalk. ..."

Then maybe Google would open source VisualWorks Smalltalk and I could start using it again (after paying about $9K for a license for it plus ENVY server back in the 1990s but not keeping up with expensive upgrades and anyway not liking runtime fees). Although, realistically, I'd still probably keep plugging away in JavaScript when not posting on Slashdot due to ease-of-installation...

Correlation does not prove causation, but interesting paper none-the-less reading the summary: "Copyright and Creativity -- Evidence from Italian Operas"
http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/pa...

But even if it was true, should most of humanity be denied access to most of human knowledge via the internet that could otherwise be available right now (like via Google Books) so we might get a few more operas and other such thing?

Beside, current research (even by the US Federal Reserve) shows reward is not motivator for creative works (or sometimes even has a negative correlation of causing artists to just rehash more of the same old thing). Lot of studies are cited in these works by Alfie Kohn and Dan Pink to support my point:
"Punished by Rewards: The Trouble with Gold Stars, Incentive Plans, A's, Praise, and Other Bribes"
http://www.alfiekohn.org/books...
"RSA Animate - Drive: The surprising truth about what motivates us"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v...

Also: "Studies Find Reward Often No Motivator: Creativity and intrinsic interest diminish if task is done for gain"
https://www.gnu.org/philosophy...

A better answer to the issue of people having enough time to do quality work (including learning to do it) is to have a "basic income" for everyone (so, for example, monthly Social Security payments in the USA from birth, not just for those 65 and older).
http://www.basicincome.org/bie...

There are plenty of reasons copyrights stifle creativity these days, because artists can't easily remix.
https://gigaom.com/2011/12/12/...

Most, as in 99%+ (my guess), of artistic people are only held back by copyright, because very, very few people can make a living at licensing creative works as authors or composers or whatever, but they instead generally have to pay for access to contemporary novels and music and such. Some of that is discussed here:
http://www.thepublicdomain.org...

There are a few different types of APIs involved with Linux, so it is more than the public API:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L...

Consider:
http://www.kroah.com/log/linux...
"For Linux, we don't have a stable internal api, and for people to wish that we would have one is just foolish. ... Here's an example that shows how this all works. The Linux USB code has been rewritten at least three times. We've done this over time in order to handle things that we didn't originally need to handle, like high speed devices, and just because we learned the problems of our first design, and to fix bugs and security issues. Each time we made changes in our api, we updated all of the kernel drivers that used the apis, so nothing would break. And we deleted the old functions as they were no longer needed, and did things wrong. Because of this, Linux now has the fastest USB bus speeds when you test out all of the different operating systems. We max out the hardware as fast as it can go, and you can do this from simple userspace programs, no fancy kernel driver work is needed."

And:
http://www.helixsoft.nl/blog/?...
"Linux pioneered that model: they call a stable API nonsense. The interface between drivers and the kernel changes all the time. If the Linux developers think of a better, more consistent or more efficient way to interface with the drivers they go ahead and make that change."

Thinking up "a better, more consistent or more efficient way" to interface sounds like creative work to me.

I had a similar disagreement with Alan Kay who argued that programs are mathematical. Given that for our Garden Simulator my wife spent over a year full time translating badly-named spaghetti Fortran code from EPIC to well-structured Delphi code that did essentially *exactly* the same thing, but now was understandable and maintainable, I see *enormous* benefit in naming functions, parameters, and structures well and know how long it may take to do that.
http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/...
http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/...

If you don't believe well-named APIs have great value, try, say, reverse engineering compacted JavaScript code. It's possible, but it takes an enormous amount of time. From another angle, most of what is written in fiction is about the same old thing -- human conflicts, human emotions, human behavior, and so on; what differs is often mainly the nuances of how things are described or the sequence they are described in. Why should Disney get a copyright on "Snow White" (the movie) just because it attached some specific names and faces to seven dwarfs when the story itself was public domain at that point? What difference is there in that case from giving names to functions and parameters for Java when the general notion of calling into a virtual machine is also effectively in the public domain?

However, I still think you have missed my point because you say I desire copyrighted APIs. I'd rather see copyright rolled back entirely or at least greatly restricted like along the lines Richard Stallman proposes. What I am saying is that as long as one supports copyright as it is now, and as it is being expanded, then you have to accept APIs should be copyrightable. In that sense, if you believe in the value of copyrighting computer software, Linux should *not* have been legally made ignoring that copyright violation sued to be mostly just a civil matter until recently it became criminal, and that the UNIX copyright holders would have had to chosen to purse Linux in court).

I think we probably agree on the moral an economic aspects of FOSS. My point is that we should not be trying to carve out special exemptions for APIs when the whole copyright edifice is making less and less sense in the 21st century (if it even made sense in the 20th contrasted with the Fashion industry's success without it).

More than a trillion dollars US is spent annually on IT globally. People spend 100s of billions of dollars on consumer electronics and computers. Copyrighted content is such a small amount of money relative to all that. Why should the copyright tale be wagging the IT/Consumer dog? But it is. I remember in the 1990s when there was a feeling, like with Napster, that the internet would bypass copyright because there was a feeling copyright did not apply on the internet (not being a physical medium), and many people were all eager to get new computing equipment to do that. A recession started when Napster was shut down after a legal ruling against it -- related?

If you buy into the idea of copyright for software, then APIs are as creative as any other part of the program, regardless of whether it would be nice or more economic for them not to be copyrightable. It is of course possible for Congress or maybe the Supreme Court to say that related API copyrights are not enforceable for economic reasons (like "to promote interstate commerce" in terms of interoperability).

Look, what we've got now is a crazy copyright beast out of control. I wrote a satire about it a dozen years ago and sent it to the US DOJ:
http://www.pdfernhout.net/micr...
"There are only a million Americans behind bars for copyright infringement so far. No one complained about the million plus non-violent drug offenders we've had there for years. No one complained about the million plus terrorists we've got there now, thanks in no small part to a patriotic Supreme Court which after being privatized upheld that anyone who criticizes government policy in public or private is a criminal terrorist. ..."

I guess what I'm trying to get at is that this court case is like bargaining with the devil to carve out a bit of good from a great evil which is preventing extensive sharing and organizing of all human knowledge. Maybe the only real answer is to either repeal or tax-into-oblivion the whole concept of copyright. After Lessig's poor showing in "Eldred", I think it very likely this current attack on a bit of copyright will just backfire.

But as it is now, copyright just continues to expand...
http://www.oxfordscholarship.c...
"The federal copyright that the Framers envisioned and enacted was a narrow, shortâterm right in printed matter. Current copyright holders enjoy a capacious bundle of rights in many more uses of many more types of published works for a far greater time and with fewer preconditions. Yet, until recent decades, copyright law's basic contours still evinced an understanding of copyright as a decidedly limited grant. It has been largely since Congress enacted the Copyright Act revision of 1976 that copyright's scope and duration have burst from their moorings, growing with unwonted precipitousness and force. This chapter details the most troublesome areas of copyright's expansion and conceptual metamorphosis from narrow government grant to Blackstonian property right. It discusses copyright duration, creative appropriation, the turgid waters of the substantial similarity test and the idea/expression dichotomy, the constriction of fair use, "paracopyright," technological protection measures, personal uses, and new media."

Just like freedom of speech continues to contract (like into "there is a time and place" "free speech zones" which are essentially cages).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F...
"Free speech zones (also known as First Amendment zones, free speech cages, and protest zones) are areas set aside in public places for political activists to exercise their right of free speech in the United States. The First Amendment to the United States Constitution states that "Congress shall make no law... abridging... the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances." The existence of free speech zones is based on U.S. court decisions stipulating that the government may regulate the time, place, and manner --- but not content -- of expression. "

In the same way that people illegally copying software and content hurts the free and open source software and culture movements (by not investing in them instead), trying to carve out a little sanity around APIs misses the bigger issue of the growing evils of expanding copyright in practice.

I'm reminded of the increasing laws supporting slavery that got worse and worse up to the US Civil War:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F...
https://groups.google.com/foru...

If fourteen years of copyright as a civil matter was long enough when it took weeks to cross the USA by train (and foreign copyrights were not respected int he USA), why should copyright last several times longer and be a criminal matter in the age of fiber-to-the-home?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C...
"Since 1790, Congress has amended federal copyright law numerous times. Major amendments include:
        Copyright Act of 1790 -- established U.S. copyright with term of 14 years with 14-year renewal
        Copyright Act of 1831 -- extended the term to 28 years with 14-year renewal
        Copyright Act of 1909 -- extended term to 28 years with 28-year renewal
        Copyright Act of 1976 -- extended term to either 75 years or life of author plus 50 years (prior to this, "[t]he interim renewal acts of 1962 through 1974 ensured that the copyright in any work in its second term as of September 19, 1962, would not expire before Dec. 31, 1976.");[11] extended federal copyright to unpublished works; preempted state copyright laws; codified much copyright doctrine that had originated in case law
        Berne Convention Implementation Act of 1988 -- established copyrights of U.S. works in Berne Convention countries
        Copyright Renewal Act of 1992 - removed the requirement for renewal
        Uruguay Round Agreements Act (URAA) of 1994 -- restored U.S. copyright for certain foreign works
        Copyright Term Extension Act of 1998 -- extended terms to 95/120 years or life plus 70 years
        Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1998 -- criminalized some cases of copyright infringement"

I've read that Linus Torvald's brilliance (aside from management) has been mostly in creating good APIs for the Linux Kernel. His initial implementations of those APIs was not too good and was replaced by the community, but the APIs live on. It takes a lot of effort to imagine, design, and redesign good APIs. It is overall often much easier to implement an API than to design an API because the design of the API is a creative act of deciding how to partition the problem space and prioritize aspects of it. Naming things well and creating elegant structure are often creative acts, and those are core tasks in creating a good API. A good API may seem so obvious we take it for granted, but that ease-of-use may be the product of years of hard-won experience. As in: "A designer knows he has achieved perfection not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away. (Antoine de Saint-Exupery)"

See my other post questioning the value of copyright to society, but if copyright is about creativity, then IMHO APIs are often creative, and sometimes much more creative than implementations.

Copyright expansion is continually being pushed, most lately for fashion:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D...

However, by the same argument fashion can't be copyrighted because it is "useful", likewise *no* software should be copyrightable.
http://www.npr.org/2012/09/10/...
http://www.mttlrblog.org/2013/...
"Fashion design in the U.S. currently lacks copyright protection. Section 101 of the Copyright Act states that "pictorial, graphic, and sculptural works" are only protected if the design can be separated from and exists independently of the usefulness of the article. In the U.S., fashion designs are not seen as having creative value, but are rather seen solely as utilitarian."

Really, why can someone copyright "Microsoft Office", which is essentially just a bunch of instructions when they can't copyright a Gucci purse? It makes no sense, but that is so true about so much of copyright.

Short of repealing copyright (a good thing to consider IMHO), and because copyright is now effectively infinite and the bargain with the community has been broken by copyright holders by extending copyright, another approach is to tax it, as I suggested a decade ago based on an idea in someone slashdot sig:
"Copyright Tax for the Privilege of the Monopoly"
http://journalism.berkeley.edu...

Personally, I'd rather see copyright replaced with a basic income so all would-be authors had the time needed to create. That is based on this idea:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S...
"Douglas disagreed with classical economists who recognised only three factors of production: land, labour and capital. While Douglas did not deny the role of these factors in production, he saw the âoecultural inheritance of societyâ as the primary factor. He defined cultural inheritance as the knowledge, techniques and processes that have been handed down to us incrementally from the origins of civilization (i.e. progress). Consequently, mankind does not have to keep "reinventing the wheel". "We are merely the administrators of that cultural inheritance, and to that extent the cultural inheritance is the property of all of us, without exception."