Microsoft's C# (Sharp) & .NET -- A Heads Up

[Thaddeus L. Olczyk]

On Sat, 01 Jul 2000 15:51:48 GMT, Joshua Macy <amused at webamused.com>
wrote:

>"Thaddeus L. Olczyk" wrote:
>> 
>> On 28 Jun 2000 06:02:09 GMT, thomas at xs4all.nl (Thomas Wouters) wrote:
>> 
>> >On Wed, 28 Jun 2000 04:05:21 GMT, Courageous <jkraska1 at san.rr.com> wrote:
>> >
>> >>> On top of that, very likely that if SUN sues they win.
>> >
>> >>Ridiculous.
>> >
>> >Very much so. But it wouldn't be suprising just the same, given the American
>> >patenting/registration practices and the average american courthouse ;-)
>> >
>> >Overseas-ly y'rs,
>> >       Thomas
>> Virtually all SUN has to do is pull some of the demo programs out of
>> Microsofts manual. Write the equivalent code in python, perl, C++,
>> pascal, and a few other languages. Compare them side by side. A fairly
>> sophisticated person can see that it's resemblance to Java. Look at
>> the law judges are sophisticated enough. Given that Microshit is being
>> sued by SUN for their abuse of Java, I don't think it will be hard at
>> all for  SUN to convince a judge that all C# is, is a variant of Java
>> with tons of proprietary crap glued on and the label changed.
>
>
>  You seem to be under the misapprehension that under American law, Sun
>owns the very concept of the Java language--that's just not true.
>Microsoft could make their own version of Java if they wanted...that's
>perfectly legal; IBM is contemplating doing just that. What Microsoft
>did wrong was they used Sun's own code, which came with a license that
>forbade making incompatible extensions, to make an implementation with
>incompatible extensions.  If they had gone to the effort of making a
>clean version of the code, they would have been in the clear.  The only
>problem they would have faced is that they might not have been able to
>use the Java trademark, which--guess what--C# doesn't do.
>
>
>  Joshua
I doubt very much that you saw any of Suns code in J++. However to get
at certain documentation such as how the JVM worked ( meaning what
essentially the bytecode has to look like ).  I believe that the
license required you to agree to certain things like Sun was the only
one which had rights to Java. I would have to see Microshits license
to know for sure.

As for the law. Perhaps you should aquaint yourself with case law.
Such as Ben Bova and Harlan Ellison vs I think it was Universal
Studios, 197?. Bova and Ellison wrote a novellette which Universal
wanted to make a TV series out of. But the authors didn't like the
changes that Universal wanted to make in the book, so they backed out.
Universal changed the name and a few of the peripheral elements,
incorparated their changes and went ahead anyway. Bova and Ellison
won. Sound familiar?