Sunday, September 26, 2010

Windows & .NET Watch: Big business behaving badly - SD Times: Software Development News

Excerpt from a timely Larry O’Brien reality check; see the link below for more background/context-setting and insights

Sun sued Microsoft, claiming that Microsoft’s extensions would confuse developers (locking them in so that their applications could only run on Windows), and having altogether nefarious motives. Sun ultimately prevailed and received a boxcar full of hundred-dollar bills, and Microsoft walked away from Java, creating C# and the .NET framework.
In recent years, recognizing the success of Java but knowing that it had to compete with the iPhone, Google created the Dalvik VM, which among other potentially infringing things uses a different bytecode language than Java’s. Dalvik’s also a register-based machine as opposed to stack-based, but as with almost all software patent lawsuits, the technical details of potential infringement have nothing to do with the choice to sue. Will anyone be shocked if Google suddenly discovers that some piece in Oracle’s software portfolio infringes upon one of Google’s many patents and decides to countersue?

Windows & .NET Watch: Big business behaving badly - SD Times: Software Development News

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