It took nine long, argumentative and legally expensive years, but the nasty tussle between Oracle and Google over “fair use” of Java’s application programming interfaces has ended with a decision by the U.S. Supreme Court to keep Java APIs in the free domain for software developers. The high court on April 5 ruled 6-2 in favor of Google in the Google v. Oracle case, reversing the ruling of an appeals court and confirming that Google’s copying of the Java API (owned by Oracle through its acquisition of Sun Microsystems in 2009) was a fair use of that material “as a matter of law.” Justice