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

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.

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.