Who else is worried about the fate of APIs and the future of software?

It'll be a chaotic mess, no matter how they rule, but this might be a good thing in the long run. Right now, sort of like code in general was for a while, nobody gave any real thought to using code they found, somewhere. For example, old computing magazines have sample programs to type in, but nobody really knows if you were allowed to share the results with friends or modify them. But we now have a system of clear copyrights and licenses, where many people are openly suspicious of proprietary software, and that's not weird.

If Google loses or only wins on Fair Use grounds, every software shop and every developer needs to consider whether they trust the management of the programming language(s) and package(s) they use to (for example) not charge for updates in the future, and maybe get out of this weirdness where for-profit companies exclusively control the fates of many programming languages. What I mean is, it wouldn't be the worst thing in the world if programmers walked away from C#, Java, React, Go, and so forth (for new projects), until their parent companies slapped a Creative Commons license on the documentation.

After all, even the big-five tech companies are really just a hostile takeover and/or economic collapse away from getting taken over by a competitor or hedge fund that'll want to wring every penny out of their mindshare. Slapping a public license on the specification, though, tells the community that no one entity controls that ecosystem by condoning exactly what Google did with Java.

Off-topic, what's particularly irritating about this case has always been that Oracle benefited massively from this "infringement," though Google obviously benefited more. I won't say that Java was "dying," because nothing ever dies in this industry, but there were plenty of articles rightly calling Java the COBOL of the twenty-first century, something that senior citizens get paid a ton of money to know for when the machine in the back room that everybody forgets exists goes down. Android (and later Minecraft) made it a language that people learned voluntarily, and that meant a lot more licensing of Oracle's tools.

Further off-topic, the right argument for Google to use in front of the Supreme Court is that an API is like law. Everybody needs to know the law, but no two people are obligated to share the same interpretation of any particular law (implementation of an API), with courts existing precisely to mediate when two interpretations conflict in dangerous ways. Presumably, the Supreme Court Justices understand that concept.

Oh, well...

I didn't realize this was going on. I can understand why Oracle has brought this to court, but would it really apply to most APIs? Or only privately owned APIs/languages? I would hope the latter.

My question is, what happens if Oracle wins? Do they take a gob of money from Google and then say, "ok, you can keep using our code". Or will Oracle be like, "thanks for the dough, now you have one year to rewrite your codebase or we're gonna sue for further copyright infringements".

If the SC determines that APIs can be copyrighted, what exactly are we talking about when we say that?

If your REST API has an endpoint of /v1/users, does that mean mine can't?
Or if we're talking about the code itself, then my goodness... if you use javascript ES6 functions, can I not?
If you implement an API login endpoint that checks for a user/pass and responds with a token, can I not?

What exactly can you copyright when most of our codebase languages are open source, free to use, and come with best practices of how to do things?