Prior to all of this, for practically a decade, open source projects had been reimplementing parts of Java. For example, I used Java for coding on the original Palm Pilot via Ghost (http://www.cs.utah.edu/~mcdirmid/ghost/) and SuperWaba projects. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SuperWaba) No one had any problem with this activity prior to Oracle, not even Sun, it was pretty much established a long history that this was acceptable behavior, Sun even encouraged it to some extent, as long as you didn't call the result Java(TM).

Mobile and embedded environments can't run the full Java, and Sun's attempts at this (Embedded Java, Personal Java, MIDP/Jave ME) were awful. Oracle's claims that they were going to make a competitive mobile OS are dubious at best. I joined Oracle's Mobile division in 2001 until 2006, and at the point I left, my impression was that they were more or less wrapping it up, and merged the OracleMobile division back into Oracle Collaboration Suite to work on Enterprise apps like Calendar and Mail.

It is much more likely, given Oracle's history, and the public statements of James Gosling, that Oracle was more or less interested in purchasing Sun's customer base/rolodex, and patent portfolio to shakedown. They had no interest in Sun Labs, Solaris, UltraSPARC T1/Rock/MAGC, or making products out of any of cool tech Sun had developed. Sun had a lot of customers who would buy expensive Solaris boxes, who would be prime customers for databases and ERP software.

The computer industry got its start in spite of copyright, not because of it. Homebrew hackers cloned commercial systems. PC clone makers cloned IBM's BIOS. Intel clone makers clean room cloned x86 chips. Piracy was rampant, and it was the primary way other engineers learned. In the early days of the Web, the very nature of "View Source" allowed everyone to copy everyone else's Website, their markup techniques, their CSS, their Javascript. Again, it is how people learned, how the ecosystem evolved.

Look at what you're doing, someone who has claimed support for OSS in the past, you're supporting the argument that a corporation (Oracle), known for taking a buzz saw to acquisitions to get their customer base Gorden Gecko style, who ships mostly badly engineered software, poor poor Oracle, had their plans for a licensing shakedown, foiled by someone creating a viable smartphone OS that has enabled literally thousands of OEMs to build a vast ecosystem of devices for free.

Would you say the same thing about the developers of WINE if it actually started making an impact in Windows value? What if Google held a copyright over some Web APIs (perhaps Widevine video DRM stuff) that every website used, and they sued Mozilla over a cleanroom implementation that devalued the acquisition, would you be against Mozilla?

I'm literally shocked by anyone taking the position that clean-room API reimplementations deserve copy protection, especially people who claim to support OSS, and anyone defending the rights of $100 billion market cap companies to own API copyrights. This isn't some small time 3rd party library developer being deprived of living expenses. The ability for clean-room reimplementations to happen is how we break monopolies, its how network path-dependencies get disrupted by providing inter-rim migration paths. It's the entire history of the computer industry. It's how Coherent cloned Unix.

GNU and Linux largely cloned AT&T's existing Unix suite of tools in user space. These are essentially APIs, and their organization and collection, certainly represents a creative endeavor. If we were to accept this defense of Oracle, we would be forced to conclude that Unix was massively devalued as well.

The fact that competition that executes better on your idea than you do can devalue your product should not be a defense to have government and courts intervene on your behalf.