Hi Thomas,

But Sun didn't react, because that wasn't their method of running a business. Can one be too altruistic?

Miguel's point about .Net is that the licenses are actually better (= giving more freedom to the user) than Java's licensing, and MS has given patent rights to follow .Net. It's beginning to look as though this might be huge.

BTW: one analysis I saw today said the IRuby fell because of the lawyers. That is, a concern about the community putting in code, and MS getting sued for bad results. Of course this is what the Codeplex Foundation does: protect those who contribute. So if IRuby, IPython and so forth were in the Codeplex Foundation, it seems to me MS and whoever could contribute development, without concern for being sued. Interesting thought, anyway. They would have to distance themselves from it, I think, by first discontinuing development, having the projects get into the Codeplex Foundation on their own, and then contributing development.

Hank

>>Oracle overpaid for Sun for a reason, which was something of a mystery. It now appears that collecting royalties on Java used in non-GPL applications might have been the reason. http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2010/08/oracle-sues-google-over-use-of-java-in-android-sdk.ars
>>
>>The reason, in case you've not delved into FOSS licenses, is that any application using a component licensed under the GPL main license must itself be licensed under the main GPL license. Otherwise you pay for a commercial license, in this case to finance Larry Ellison's next boat.
>>
>
>Well, Dalvik raised a few eyebrows over here when the concepts were introduced - with the implied question on will sun react to the recompilation and/or extensions. The copyright point - IMHO meant for the SDK and if taken to extreme - would blow any idea of FOSS java out of the water. I see this (IANAL, IANAL) as red herring - if not... umhhh.... The patents I have not really checked, but the '702 might fall in the same category as I think this is implicit in the jvm-bytecode >> dalvik.
>
>Wonder if Google will just reshuffle some Android sources and explicitly GPL or rewrite the disputed parts - as there is no "java phone OS" but only java ME implemented in most phone OS at least part is BS (but ME generated fees).
>
>>.Net looks good by comparison, especially given the availability of Mono. http://tirania.org/blog/archive/2010/Aug-13.html
>
>Looks can be deceiving [just a smartass comment with no evidence in this particular arena, just a bad taste from the IRuby happenings]
>
>regards
>
>thomas