Gosling: Partnership with Microsoft Meaning Less and Less

Jeebus writes "At an event in Sydney this week James Gosling questioned the technical relationship between Sun Microsystems and Microsoft in light of the antitrust demands of the European Union. Gosling also talks about reverse engineering, DMCA and collaboration with Microsoft with on identity management. "

Comments

Best quote

[bartash]

Gosling described the DMCA, which was passed in the United States a few years ago, as "really vile."

I'm confused

[PDXNerd]

Since when did a business partnership with Microsoft ever "mean" anything anyway (except decreased revenues)?

EULA, DMCA and Reverse Engineering.

[sanityspeech]

From the article:

"In the past, what we'd have to do is reverse-engineering, and we had been getting into a pickle, because for open-source projects like Samba and OpenOffice, the only way to get the information was by reverse-engineering," he said."Pretty much for ALL the countries in the world, reverse-engineering was a perfectly fine thing to do."

Seeing that EULAs existed long before the DMCA came into effect, how on earth was it possible to develop a wonderful tool like SAMBA without some reverse engineering? My guess is some EULA(s) must have been violated. Surely, Microsoft could not have supported that.

IANAL, so enlightenment on this matter would be greatly appreciated.

Re:EULA, DMCA and Reverse Engineering.

[cduffy]

Let's say that I'm a UNIX guy. I don't own a copy of Microsoft Windows. I never agreed to their EULA.

I observe and reverse-engineer an over-the-wire file transfer protocol between two computers owned by my friends.

Now, tell me: How is any EULA violated? I never agreed to it in the first place, so I can't be violating it.

Re:EULA, DMCA and Reverse Engineering.

[KarmaMB84]

That's how reverse engineering works and it used to be perfectly legal. How do you think we have "IBM compatible" PCs? ;p

Re:EULA, DMCA and Reverse Engineering.

[Juanvaldes]

That's how reverse engineering works and it used to be perfectly legal. How do you think we have "IBM compatible" PCs? ;p
For everyones connivence I have highlighted the key word.

It's simple

[michelcultivo]

Sun dominate the Enterprise users and Microsoft dominate the low-end users with their software, one is trying to acquire knowledge from another. Very simple, even a penguin can see this.

Make Samba actually work?

[desau]

From the article:

"... but we can't then turn around and be part of the open-source Samba project, and make Samba actually work."

I wasn't aware that Samba didn't work.

Seems to work fine for me.

Had me then dropped me

[KarmaBlackballed]

The last paragraph of the news story ends like this: In the hour-and-a-half session, Gosling answered many questions on a range of topics, including Eclipse and other Java IDEs (integrated development environments), DVD technology, security in Microsoft's .Net platform, the future of embedded software and more.

Only problem is the author thinks that's all we care to know about that. Sorta like writing "yadayadayada".

No need to actually report what his answers were. (Guess only an extreme geek like myself cares to hear what he said about these obscure technical topics.)