Post Syndicated from Bradley M. Kuhn original http://ebb.org/bkuhn/blog/2016/05/13/classpath.html

I’ve posted in
the past
about the Oracle vs. Google case. I’m for the moment sticking to my habit
of only commenting when there is a clear court decision. Having been
through litigation as the 30(b)(6) witness for Conservancy, I’m used to
court testimony and why it often doesn’t really matter in the long run. So
much gets said by both parties in a court case that it’s somewhat pointless
to begin analyzing each individual move, unless it’s for entertainment
purposes only. (It’s certainly as entertaining as most TV dramas, really,
but I hope folks who are watching step-by-step admit to themselves that
they’re just engaged in entertainment, not actual work. 🙂

I saw a lot go by today with various people as witnesses in the case.
About the only part that caught my attention was that Classpath was
mentioned over and over again. But that’s not for any real salient reason,
only because I remember so distinctly, sitting in a little restaurant in
New Orleans with RMS and Paul Fisher, talking about how we should name this
yet-to-be-launched GNU project “$CLASSPATH”. My idea was that
was a shell variable that would expand to /usr/lib/java, so,
in my estimation, it was a way to name the project “User Libraries
for Java” without having to say the words. (For those of you that
were still children in the 1990s, trademark aggression by Sun at the time
on the their word mark for “Java” was fierce, it was worse than
the whole problem the Unix trademark, which led in turn to the GNU
name.)

But today, as I saw people all of the Internet quoting judges, lawyers and
witnesses saying the word “Classpath” over and over again, it
felt a bit weird to think that, almost 20 years ago sitting in that
restaurant, I could have said something other than Classpath and the key
word in Court today might well have been whatever I’d said. Court cases
are, as I said, dramatic, and as such, it felt a little like having my own
name mentioned over and over again on the TV news or something. Indeed, I
felt today like I had some really pointless, one-time-use superpower that I
didn’t know I had at the time. I now further have this feeling of:
“darn, if I knew that was the one thing I did that
would catch on this much, I’d have tried to do or say something more
interesting”.

Naming new things, particularly those that have to replace other things
that are non-Free, is really difficult, and, at least speaking for myself,
I definitely can’t tell when I suggest a name whether it is any good or
not. I actually named another project, years later, that could
theoretically get mentioned in this
case, Replicant. At that time, I thought
Replicant was a much more creative name than Classpath. When I named
Classpath, I felt it was somewhat obvious corollary to the “GNU’S Not
Unix” line of thinking. I also recall distinctly that I really
thought the name lost all its cleverness when the $ and the all-caps was
dropped, but RMS and others insisted on that :).

Anyway, my final message today is to the court transcribers. I know from
chatting with the court transcribers during my depositions in Conservancy’s
GPL enforcement cases that technical terminology is really a pain. I hope
that the term I coined that got bandied about so much in today’s testimony
was not annoying to you all. Really, no one thinks about the transcribers
in all this. If we’re going to have lawsuits about this stuff, we should
name stuff with the forethought of making their lives easier when the
litigation begins. 🙂