[TriLUG] This is not good

William Sutton william at trilug.org
Tue Apr 21 11:01:25 EDT 2009


What happened was a case of Microsoft's SOP of embrace-and-extend.  They 
licensed the right to package Java with their development tools, and then 
proceeded to extend and change the API they published, even to the point 
of breaking the existing Sun API.  Sun sued, claiming they owned Java and 
that Microsoft couldn't just change the APIs and still call it Java. 
Microsoft claimed (iirc) that anybody could use the language and so anyone 
should be able to do so.  The judge ruled in favor of Sun, so Microsoft 
took its marbles and went home.  Presently they came back with C#, into 
which they put the features they liked from Java, plus a few of their own.

William Sutton

On Tue, 21 Apr 2009, Christopher L Merrill wrote:

> Greg Brown wrote:
>> Didn't we already go round and round on this dance with J++ back in the
>> day?  Or was the problem with J++ was that MS was trying to commercialize a
>> fork of a open source project?  It was a while ago.. details are fuzzy.
>
> Java wasn't open source then. M$ licensed it and then allegedly violated the
> terms of the license.  MS called it Java, but it wasn't quite Java.  I don't
> remember the details beyond that.
>
> The pseudo-java being used in Android (Google, again) might also be
> considered a fork by some. Or the pre-cursor to one.
>
>
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