Could an Oracle Win Against Google Blow Up the Cloud?

A San Francisco court has spent the past few weeks considering a copyright question that could weigh heavy on the future of cloud computing. But it could affect things in the cloud, where there are several efforts to clone Amazon's Web Services APIs. "If APIs can be copy-protected, that would be incredibly destructive to the internet as a whole for so many different reasons," says George Reese, Chief Technology Officer with enStratus Networks, a seller of cloud management services. An open source effort called OpenStack is the most prominent example of a project that mimics Amazon's APIs, and the case could give Amazon legal grounds to seek licensing deals from OpenStack users such as Hewlett-Packard and Rackspace. “The problems that would face cloud computing are many of the same problems we’d see, frankly, all over the internet if APIs were copyrightable," says Julie Samuels, an attorney with the Electronic Frontier Foundation who has been following the trial.