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

[Joshua Macy]

"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