Mozilla: Conda, Firefox 73 and Mozilla Weighs in on Google v Oracle (SCOTUS)
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Conda is pretty great
Lately the data engineering team has been looking into productionizing (i.e. running in Airflow) a bunch of models that the data science team has been producing. This often involves languages and environments that are a bit outside of our comfort zone — for example, the next version of Mission Control relies on the R-stan library to produce a model of expected crash behaviour as Firefox is released.
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I had been vaguely aware of Conda for a few years, but didn’t really understand its value proposition until I started working on the above project: why bother with a heavyweight package manager when you already have Docker to virtualize things? The answer is that it solves both of the above problems: for local development, you can get something more-or-less identical to what you’re running inside Docker with no performance penalty whatsoever. And for building the docker container itself, Conda’s package repository contains pre-compiled versions of all the dependencies you’d want to use for something like this (even somewhat esoteric libraries like R-stan are available on conda-forge), which brought my build cycle times down to less than 5 minutes.
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Newsletter 2 (Firefox 73)
Heads up: the next newsletter will likely cover both Firefox 74 and Firefox 75 due to the shorter release cycles this year.
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Competition and Innovation in Software Development Depend on a Supreme Court Reversal in Google v. Oracle
Today, Mozilla filed a friend of the court brief with the Supreme Court in Google v. Oracle, the decade-long case involving questions of copyright for functional elements of Oracle’s Java SE. This is the fourth amicus brief so far that Mozilla has filed in this case, and we are joined by Medium, Cloudera, Creative Commons, Shopify, Etsy, Reddit, Open Source Initiative, Mapbox, Patreon, Wikimedia Foundation, and Software Freedom Conservancy.
Arguing from the perspective of small, medium, and open source technology organizations, the brief urges the Supreme Court to reverse the Federal Circuit’s holdings first that the structure, sequence, and organization (“SSO”) of Oracle’s Java API package was copyrightable, and subsequently that Google’s use of that SSO was not a “fair use” under copyright law.
At bottom in the case is the issue of whether copyright law bars the commonplace practice of software reimplementation, “[t]he process of writing new software to perform certain functions of a legacy product.” (Google brief p.7) Here, Google had repurposed certain functional elements of Java SE (less that 0.5% of Java SE overall, according to Google’s brief, p. 8) in its Android operating system for the sake of interoperability—enabling Java apps to work with Android and Android apps to work with Java, and enabling Java developers to build apps for both platforms without needing to learn the new conventions and structure of an entirely new platform.
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today's howtos
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More on the SCOTUS Case
The case for open innovation
Google says nature of APIs under threat as Oracle case heads to US Supreme Court
The Hill's coverage
Tech industry rallies behind Google in Supreme Court fight
EFF's position
EFF Asks Supreme Court To Reverse Dangerous Rulings About API Copyrightability and Fair Use
Michael Risch brief
Google v. Oracle: Amicus Briefing
Microsoft and IBM: Here's why we back Google in Oracle Java...
Microsoft and IBM: Here's why we back Google in Oracle Java API copyright case
Conservancy Joins Mozilla's Amicus Brief in Google v. Oracle
Conservancy Joins Mozilla's Amicus Brief in Google v. Oracle
Professor Samuelson "on Why the Supreme Court Should Reverse"
Google v. Oracle: Amici Weigh in on Why the Supreme Court Should Reverse the Federal Circuit’s Rulings
OSI Files Amicus Brief in Supreme Court's Google v. Oracle
OSI Files Amicus Brief in Supreme Court's Google v. Oracle
Red Hat and IBM Jointly File Another Amicus Brief
Red Hat and IBM Jointly File Another Amicus Brief In Google v. Oracle, Arguing APIs Are Not Copyrightable
Google garners support from tech industry in Supreme Court API
Google garners support from tech industry in Supreme Court API copyright fight