Programming

SAN FRANCISCO -- Oracle's situation in its intellectual property legal battle against Google is looking more bleak by the day.

At one point in time, Oracle was going after Google with the intent to receive up to $6 billion in damages. Slowly that figure has dwindled down to somewhere around $1 billion and then a few hundred million.

Now, it looks like Oracle could end up with just $150,000 -- if anything at all given that the threat of a mistrial looms and we're still in the middle of the second phase of the trial covering patent … Read more

Every now and again, a court case comes along that stands to rewrite the legal rules of the computing industry -- and we might just be at such a juncture right now.

Oracle's suit against Google over Java and Android could be one such case. It's putting to the test the notion that application programming interfaces -- APIs -- can be copyrighted.

In a partial verdict today, a jury gave Oracle a hard-fought "yes" when U.S. District Judge William Alsup asked it, "As to the compilable code for the 37 Java API packages in … Read more

The highest court in the European Union issued a ruling yesterday that essentially declares programming languages are not copyrightable.

The European Court of Justice ruled in favor of World Programming Limited (WPL) over the SAS Institute, which developed the SAS System, an integrated set of programs that enables users to carry out data processing and analysis tasks.

WPL emulated these functionalities with its World Programming System to ensure that its platform would work the same way, meaning the same inputs would produce the same outputs.

Here are the most important parts of the ruling, according to the court judgment:

In … Read more

Uploading photos to the Internet is about the least exciting part of photo sharing that you could imagine, but Flickr believes a new tool for the task will improve the site dramatically.

The new upload tool, set to arrive this morning, replaces an interface that's remained largely unchanged for years: select multiple photos, watch transfer progress bars crawl across the screen, then add titles, tags, and captions.

The new tool, which runs in Chrome, Firefox, and Safari for now and will support Internet Explorer later, uses new standards such as HTML5's drag-and-drop so that you can copy image … Read more

Linux Creator Linus Torvalds has been chosen as one of two recipients of the Millennium Technology Prize.

Torvalds was named a 2012 laureate by the Technology Academy of Finland for his creation and ongoing contributions to the open-source operating system. Created in 2004, the awards recognize "technological innovation that significantly improves the quality of human life, today and in the future" every two years.

"[Linux] has become the basis of Android smartphones, tablets, digital television recorders and supercomputers the world over," the academy said in announcing Torvalds' selection. "Today millions of people are using devices … Read more

Sun Microsystems' years-long effort to profit from Java has come to this: the chief executives of two of tech's most powerful companies, Oracle and Google, being grilled in court.

Scrapping over copyrights, patents, and licensing deals is an ignominious outcome for a technology that a decade and a half ago spooked Microsoft and seemed poised to inject dynamism into a largely static Web. Back when it debuted, Java was a brand that carried impressive power.

Though Java has been technologically influential, its brand clout with the average person has diminished as other software such as Apple's iOS and … Read more

Microsoft is hiring staff "to help us bring Skype experience on to the Web," a move that could help people use the Internet-based video and audio chat service more broadly.

Skype's VoIP (voice over Internet Protocol) service today requires a native app to run on various operating systems. A browser-based version, though, could bring the service to OSes that aren't supported, such as Google's Chrome OS; make it easier for people to use Skype on a machine for which they don't have installation privileges; and potentially integrate with other Web-based services.

Microsoft revealed the … Read more

Yesterday, Google appeared to have scrapped a software project to dramatically speed up browser-based games and apps on mobile devices -- but it turns out the project is still alive.

The software in question is called Native Client, and it lets programmers adapt software they've already written so it can be packaged up as a Web app -- one that runs nearly as fast as a regular native app, in Google's aspiration. Native Client today works on personal computers using x86 chips from Intel and AMD, but the company is adapting it to devices using ARM processors -- … Read more

Google has released version 1 of its Go programming language, an ambitious attempt to improve upon giants of the lower-level programming world such as C and C++.

Graduation to Go 1, which happened this week, makes the project less academic and more real in several ways. For one thing, Google has declared it mature enough to use. For another, it's available for use on Google App Engine, a foundation for cloud-computing applications.

And last, there's a bit of validation for Go readiness: it's being used today on one of the Internet's highest-profile sites.

Go is used … Read more