I agree there's a rather obvious shilling and smear campaign going on against Google, but tax avoidance stories are going on against virtually every major corporation at the moment.
I'd care if I actually cared about corporate income taxes, but I must admit I've always felt they belong to a class of taxes designed to try to close loopholes rather than anything useful, and as a loophole closer they certainly seem to have a lot of unintended consequences. Corporations aren't people (well, they're made up of people, but the legal entity itself is not a person regardless of what some 19th Century Judges claims), and I'm firmly of the opinion income taxes need to be levied exclusively against people.
Insofar as CIT has a useful side effect, it's that companies are encouraged to keep their profits low, which can only be done by spending as much money, in some form, as they're making. Right now, with the economy in depression due to a massive demand crisis, that's not a bad idea, but does anyone seriously think Google, of all companies, is hoarding cash right now?
MPEG 4 Part 10 (H.264) is subject to an entirely different patent regime from MPEG 1 and 2 (and Microsoft earns royalties from it), so I'd expect this to have no bearing on whether H.264 support will be bundled with Windows 8. Pretty sure it will be.
I'm pretty sure it wasn't otherwise you'd see people legally selling Mac clones with Leopard installed by now.
All editions of Mac OS X, with the exception of the original Rhapsody, are upgrades. You can only install them if you already have a copy of Mac OS or Mac OS X.
I was surprised, shopping for laptops recently, how few actually came with an optical drive. The laptops the manufacturers are pushing are either Netbooks or sub-notebooks, with regular, plain old, laptops generally being aimed at corporate buyers.
So no, I don't think this has anything to do with Microsoft strong-arming anyone. And why would they want to anyway? Microsoft would be more likely to go in the other direction, wanting DVD drives included so that the computers that come with Windows are used as much as possible.
OpenJDK is completely incompatible with the Android API and bytecode system. If Google were to do that, wouldn't it make more sense for them to switch to a completely Oracle-free platform like... well....NET, LLVM, or something of that nature?
And not just Java will be threatened. Any third party tool that copies aspects of an Oracle API will be withdrawn, which means the Oracle DBMS itself will start rapidly losing support from any group that had to implement its own interface to it because Oracle didn't provide the link itself.
I'm mindboggled that Oracle thinks this part of the lawsuit was ever a good idea. Pretty much the only things that can benefit from Oracle winning are.NET, Python, PHP, PostgreSQL, SQL Server, and DB2. And while the "The great thing about SQL standards are that there are so many to choose from" thing makes DB migration awkward, it's not impossible and I certainly wouldn't advise clients to stick with Oracle or MySQL if they can avoid it.
Then why aren't you complaining about the GGP? The AC's response was perfectly valid in context: the GGP was claiming that Intel's licensing of the ix86 instruction set meant that APIs can be subject to licenses.
The AC was correct in context. You're right too, except in your condemnation of mods and the original AC. In both cases, for strictly different but equally reasonable reasons, you call into question the nature of whether the ix86 ISA means that a software API can be subject to licensing.
Dalvik isn't a reverse engineered JVM. It's not even a JVM. It's a VM, but has almost as much in common with the Java VM as UCSD p-Code.
Nor was the library reverse engineered. Reverse engineering doesn't involve reading official specs and writing your own version from those specs. It describes a process of cloning something by determining how it works by looking at the tool itself, and then creating a functional equivalent. The FFMPEG team, for example, wrote a compliant MPEG 1 decoder, but reverse engineered their Real Video decoder.
Oracle is suing Google for using the Java programming language in a way that Oracle doesn't like. That's essentially what's happening, nothing more and nothing less. Google felt the best solution for the work they were doing was to take a commonly used, familiar, and robust programming language (which until this lawsuit nobody thought was copyrightable), to implement a subset of the libraries that come with the language in its native form (kinda like every C compiler since the 1970s came with most of the stdio "API", but not the Unix functions like open() or unlink()), and to include its own Android specific libraries too.
Until the Oracle lawsuit, nobody on planet Earth had a problem with that. As I said above, if that were illegal, then so was every C compiler from BDS C (CP/M) to Lattice C (Commodore Amiga, Sinclair QL.)
What's different? Sun's management at the time - their CEO even - didn't see this as a legal or moral problem, even if they did see it as a potential business problem. Schwartz is on record saying he was glad Google picked Java over alternatives such as "Microsoft Windows".
Yes, Google is being sued for using the Java programming language in Android. They're not being sued over "reverse engineering", they're certainly not being sued for making a JVM (because they didn't), this is about Google using Java. And anyone considering making Java a part of anything they do in future has to consider the cost of doing so if Oracle prevails.
We can, but the distinction isn't as large as you think it is. Sticking a framework over Java (and who doesn't do that?) creates an incompatible environment in that software for Java + Framework is unlikely to work for just Java. And lest you consider that OK because it's a superset, bear in mind that the majority of frameworks only need a subset of Java to be functional and useful, and anyone in the process of developing a J2SE implementation is inherently going to develop subsets.
Basically, if Oracle succeeds, then realistically anyone not using the official OpenJDK binaries from the official Oracle repositories is going to have to wonder how clear they are.
While I don't want to overstate the issue, given (1) Oracle has shown no evidence of working in good faith here, (2) Oracle's history of acting in bad faith (such as their refusal to allow benchmarks of Oracle software) and (3) the ease with which someone can create software that's a threat to Oracle, I'd be inclined to recommend people stay clear, not because there's a 99% chance Oracle will sue them, but because there's a 1% chance they will. And that 1% is somewhat larger than the chance of being sued by Guido van Rossum, Larry Page, or, for that matter, Microsoft. What's the point of taking a risk, no matter how minor, if perfectly clear and acceptable alternatives exist?
I didn't say the OP disagreed, I said they lied. There's a difference. They said, outright, that this was Google. It isn't. They know it isn't. You can pretend that you have personal evidence that Larry Page personally supports everything Motorola is doing, but that's not the same thing as arguing that Google is actually doing the suing.
And yes, it's fairly obvious from the amount of lying, and the type of lying, and the bizarre twisted negative articles that keep being submitted that suggest something innoculous or good is evil, that there are shills heavily attacking Slashdot at the moment. The types of posts can't be explained by mere fanboiism.
And yes, the nature of the lie above means it's likely to be a shill job.
The major issue with traffic* caps is that they need expanding periodically to keep up with the fact that people's expectations grow. Ironically, I see more evidence that operators are reducing traffic caps rather than increasing them. Look at T-Mobile: Unlimited, replaced by 10Gb, replaced by 5Gb, and now they're encouraging people to go to 2G. Wait, what?
* The correct term is traffic. Bandwidth measure of information per second. Ethernet cable has a bandwidth cap. Not meaningful in this discussion. "Traffic" right word. I know, you're just repeating the term, but it annoys me. If it didn't annoy me I wouldn't be a nerd and we wouldn't be having this conversation, I'd be out fucking a cheerleader and drinking beer or something.
In a fair world, Apple's rules wouldn't matter. Anyone who wanted to could simply avoid using the App Store and use an alternative, which iOS users could happily use without problems.
That's how it works in the Android world. Don't like Google Play's rules? Well, there's the Amazon AppStore. And there's AppsDB. And, of course, you can just let users download the APK (nothing to do with HOSTS files, I'm referring to the file type of Android apps) directly. Why? Because Android acknowledges something that iOS doesn't: If someone BOUGHT the device. It's THEIRS. Nobody (outside of government and service providers you choose to work with) has the right to tell you what you can and can't do with what you bought after it's been sold.
That's how it should be. When Apple stops trying to control what you run on your own phone, Apple's choices about who it bans from the AppStore will cease to be controversial.
I think you've missed something. Microsoft has mentioned patents specifically on occasion (because those are what everyone was concerned about until Oracle decided they wanted to set a precedent that would allow IBM, developers of System R, to sue them over their implementation of SQL. What, what?) but they've said over and over again they will not sue people who create competing implementations. Period. Not "We won't sue... over patents", but "we won't sue".
What's also clear is that Microsoft wouldn't anyway. If they're not going to sue over the one bit of IP that everyone thought might apply, why would they turn around and go "Ha ha! We found there's something different we can sue about! Let's sue!"? It doesn't make sense. Microsoft's statements about not suing weren't "We won't sue over patents because we can't", but "We won't sue because we want.NET to become the standard".
I'd be unsurprised if the following happens after an Oracle victory (assuming that happens, I think the Jury would have to completely ignore Jonathan Schwartz for that to happen, which would be ridiculous.)
* I think a variety of software companies will make statements re-affirming that certain APIs, languages, etc, are open and that people can "copy" them (implement them) to their heart's content
* I think Microsoft will be one of those companies..NET and Microsoft's contributions to W3C standards (excepting H.264) will be amongst the many technologies Microsoft will include in that statement.
* I think people will search for alternatives to Java, with Harmony (which is close to dead already) and OpenJDK declining in support, and developers looking towards alternatives. NET will not be the only beneficiary, but with its similar architecture, and massive library of migration tools, I would be enormously surprised if it's not the biggest winner from the lawsuit.
That said, I don't think, at this point, Oracle are likely prevail on the most damaging parts of their lawsuit. I think it's highly unlikely that the Judge will allow the "copying an API" thing at all. And if he rejects it, I think it's actually dubious Oracle will attempt to appeal on that specific point, while upholding the illegality of copying an API would result in appeals and a hell of a lot of friend of the court submissions right up to SCOTUS. Nobody wants to see the same mess with copyrights that we've already got with patents - even the company with software patents are generally unhappy with them.
But, yes, if Oracle gets what it wants,.NET becomes very much the anti-Java, a surprisingly open system from a company that's not normally associated with such things.
The article claims Mono could be sued for copyright infringements, but actually Microsoft's public statements would count against any legal actions they could attempt against Miguel De Icaza.
...which means it's one of the few languages/APIs that could survive unscathed...
...which means Oracle's attempts to control Java could end up sending EVERYONE, including the GNU/Linux community who, thus far, have given.NET the cold shoulder, into the embrace of its earnest rival, destroying Java completely.
If I had any concerns about.NET beyond the fact that Mono is pretty crappy and every Mono app ever written feels like it's being hosted under Wine, I'd be upset about this. But actually... from what I hear, C Sharp is a very nice programming language...
Well, if the ads were like those shown on PBS (excluding telefons) - ie shown before and after the show, with no interruptions in the middle, I wouldn't mind paying $7 a month either!
Ads every five minutes simply make things unwatchable.
I'm not going to worry. When I smuggle in crazy ideas about privacy and civil rights, I always use stenography to hide them in PowerPoint presentations describing terrorist plots, and hide them in my underpants.
No. I meant C++. iOS and Android requires a bit of Objective-C and Java respectively, but you can write all your heavy lifting code in C++. For instance, you can write a whole C++ library and reference it in your Objective-C code, through Objective-C++.
You can, but you don't. The point here is not that there's some hypothetical apps out there that might be easier to port if there was a C++ compiler for WP7, it's that there are, in practice, very, very, very few, because C++ is not the recommended language of development for either iOS or Android.
You might find a small subset of games easier to port, but there really aren't many of them.
So in practice it wouldn't help Microsoft or WP7 in any realistic way to do this. Developers wouldn't fell "Yay! C++! I can port my apps!" because... their apps aren't in C++.
Only Phone Manufacturers are allowed to write unmanaged code for WP7 so that excludes native c++.
Well that sucks. Still, if Microsoft really does want a ton of quick and dirty ports from an established platform, perhaps encouraging Android devs to use J# for the porting, supplying an API for the purpose, is the way to go?
I suspect they'd get more ports than they'd ever hope to achieve by supporting C++, despite it not helping with iOS ports. The sum total of Java apps for Android strikes me as several times higher than the sum total of C++ apps for iOS and Android combined.
Objective C is a superset of C. Objective C++ is a superset of C++. You can use C++ without hassle on iOS.
Yes, superset. Which means that if Microsoft "allows you" to use C++ on WP7, that's not going to make any difference with iOS apps if those apps are written in Objective C++ or Objective C. You won't be able to port them easily to WP7.
With Android you've got the NDK giving you access to C/C++.
Uh yes, and?
I didn't say you couldn't write C++ on Android, I said you could. What I also said is that it's very rare, and not recommended except for exceptional circumstances. So most Android apps are not written in C++.
Microsoft missed the boat here
For "Microsoft to have missed the boat", they'd have had to do more than the OP was claiming - namely create an Objective C++ compiler (not C++, Objective C++) for the CLR, and presumably update J#, and create appropriate APIs to make porting easy.
That's rather a lot of work to make it easier for people to port apps from Android and iOS to WP7, and it seems a little improbable it would benefit Microsoft as the platform would fast develop a reputation for having a lot of quick and dirty ports of iOS/Android software that really don't fit with the WP7 way of doing things.
OK, yes, the article lumped the Apple critic and Woz together, and I agree that was dumb.
Be wary of that personal preference thing. I find myself defending numerous platforms, some I like, some I don't, because people go over the top in its criticism. That, I suspect, is true of many, and I suspect we all end up being labeled fanbois as a result, regardless of whether we're reacting to someone else's absurd assertions or not.
To make matters worse, certain websites deliberately go out of their way to pick stories that are misleading, which results in legions of people posting "Oh no it isn't", not because it is their bias, but because the article is stupid.
My personal biases? I like what Google is trying to do. I use Android because it's the best of a bad bunch, but much as I want to like it, I don't. I don't like what Apple is trying to do. I'm glad Microsoft, Google, and Apple, are doing their own things and I think WP7 brings a lot to the table.
Oh, and if Jeff Minter or the reanimated corpse of Jack Tramiel has anything to say on the subject, I'd like to know!
I wouldn't read anything into it either way. Microsoft has no control over whether there'll be updates from WP7 to WP8 on existing WP7 phones.
We have the same problem with Android. Hell, many (most?) Android Honeycomb users (and if there was ever something clearly stamped "BETA! Do not use yet!", it was Honeycomb) are still waiting for an ICS upgrade.
made it impossible to use c++ and OpenGL on them meaning every part of an Android or iOS game/app has to be rewritten to work on Windows Phone 7
You meant "Java" and "Objective C", right? Because regular apps aren't programmed in C++ on either iOS or Android (although I believe the former supports it for regular apps, it's just most are Objective C anyway given the OPENSTEP API); yes, games on Android usually require a stub written in C++, but again, it's not the recommended way to write an app except for extreme circumstances.
Also, I must admit to genuine confusion (I'm not saying you're wrong here, I'm asking...): If WP7 is.NET based, can't you use a C++ compiler that compiles to the CLR? Or have they prevented that in some way?
In the end, I have to say I don't see what you're saying is a problem. I rather like the fact that Apple, Google, and Microsoft are doing their own thing. It's been a long time since we saw major tech companies implementing different visions of how computers should be - to me, personal computing died with the bankruptcy of Commodore, and we're finally, FINALLY, seeing a break in the idea that all platforms should be the same.
Well, I'm curious to know Woz's opinion on things. Woz may be associated with Apple, but he's a smart geek who's been in computing since the beginning, and he's not a fanboi of any particular technology despite his Apple connections.
Would you have written something similar, or considered it non-newsworthy, if the subject was Dave Haynie, Richard Stallman, Chuck Peddle, or James Gosling?
Slashdot Mirror
I agree there's a rather obvious shilling and smear campaign going on against Google, but tax avoidance stories are going on against virtually every major corporation at the moment.
I'd care if I actually cared about corporate income taxes, but I must admit I've always felt they belong to a class of taxes designed to try to close loopholes rather than anything useful, and as a loophole closer they certainly seem to have a lot of unintended consequences. Corporations aren't people (well, they're made up of people, but the legal entity itself is not a person regardless of what some 19th Century Judges claims), and I'm firmly of the opinion income taxes need to be levied exclusively against people.
Insofar as CIT has a useful side effect, it's that companies are encouraged to keep their profits low, which can only be done by spending as much money, in some form, as they're making. Right now, with the economy in depression due to a massive demand crisis, that's not a bad idea, but does anyone seriously think Google, of all companies, is hoarding cash right now?
MPEG 4 Part 10 (H.264) is subject to an entirely different patent regime from MPEG 1 and 2 (and Microsoft earns royalties from it), so I'd expect this to have no bearing on whether H.264 support will be bundled with Windows 8. Pretty sure it will be.
I'm pretty sure it wasn't otherwise you'd see people legally selling Mac clones with Leopard installed by now.
All editions of Mac OS X, with the exception of the original Rhapsody, are upgrades. You can only install them if you already have a copy of Mac OS or Mac OS X.
I was surprised, shopping for laptops recently, how few actually came with an optical drive. The laptops the manufacturers are pushing are either Netbooks or sub-notebooks, with regular, plain old, laptops generally being aimed at corporate buyers.
So no, I don't think this has anything to do with Microsoft strong-arming anyone. And why would they want to anyway? Microsoft would be more likely to go in the other direction, wanting DVD drives included so that the computers that come with Windows are used as much as possible.
OpenJDK is completely incompatible with the Android API and bytecode system. If Google were to do that, wouldn't it make more sense for them to switch to a completely Oracle-free platform like... well... .NET, LLVM, or something of that nature?
And not just Java will be threatened. Any third party tool that copies aspects of an Oracle API will be withdrawn, which means the Oracle DBMS itself will start rapidly losing support from any group that had to implement its own interface to it because Oracle didn't provide the link itself.
I'm mindboggled that Oracle thinks this part of the lawsuit was ever a good idea. Pretty much the only things that can benefit from Oracle winning are .NET, Python, PHP, PostgreSQL, SQL Server, and DB2. And while the "The great thing about SQL standards are that there are so many to choose from" thing makes DB migration awkward, it's not impossible and I certainly wouldn't advise clients to stick with Oracle or MySQL if they can avoid it.
But they're not going to win, right? RIGHT?...
Then why aren't you complaining about the GGP? The AC's response was perfectly valid in context: the GGP was claiming that Intel's licensing of the ix86 instruction set meant that APIs can be subject to licenses.
The AC was correct in context. You're right too, except in your condemnation of mods and the original AC. In both cases, for strictly different but equally reasonable reasons, you call into question the nature of whether the ix86 ISA means that a software API can be subject to licensing.
Dalvik isn't a reverse engineered JVM. It's not even a JVM. It's a VM, but has almost as much in common with the Java VM as UCSD p-Code.
Nor was the library reverse engineered. Reverse engineering doesn't involve reading official specs and writing your own version from those specs. It describes a process of cloning something by determining how it works by looking at the tool itself, and then creating a functional equivalent. The FFMPEG team, for example, wrote a compliant MPEG 1 decoder, but reverse engineered their Real Video decoder.
Oracle is suing Google for using the Java programming language in a way that Oracle doesn't like. That's essentially what's happening, nothing more and nothing less. Google felt the best solution for the work they were doing was to take a commonly used, familiar, and robust programming language (which until this lawsuit nobody thought was copyrightable), to implement a subset of the libraries that come with the language in its native form (kinda like every C compiler since the 1970s came with most of the stdio "API", but not the Unix functions like open() or unlink()), and to include its own Android specific libraries too.
Until the Oracle lawsuit, nobody on planet Earth had a problem with that. As I said above, if that were illegal, then so was every C compiler from BDS C (CP/M) to Lattice C (Commodore Amiga, Sinclair QL.)
What's different? Sun's management at the time - their CEO even - didn't see this as a legal or moral problem, even if they did see it as a potential business problem. Schwartz is on record saying he was glad Google picked Java over alternatives such as "Microsoft Windows".
Yes, Google is being sued for using the Java programming language in Android. They're not being sued over "reverse engineering", they're certainly not being sued for making a JVM (because they didn't), this is about Google using Java. And anyone considering making Java a part of anything they do in future has to consider the cost of doing so if Oracle prevails.
We can, but the distinction isn't as large as you think it is. Sticking a framework over Java (and who doesn't do that?) creates an incompatible environment in that software for Java + Framework is unlikely to work for just Java. And lest you consider that OK because it's a superset, bear in mind that the majority of frameworks only need a subset of Java to be functional and useful, and anyone in the process of developing a J2SE implementation is inherently going to develop subsets.
Basically, if Oracle succeeds, then realistically anyone not using the official OpenJDK binaries from the official Oracle repositories is going to have to wonder how clear they are.
While I don't want to overstate the issue, given (1) Oracle has shown no evidence of working in good faith here, (2) Oracle's history of acting in bad faith (such as their refusal to allow benchmarks of Oracle software) and (3) the ease with which someone can create software that's a threat to Oracle, I'd be inclined to recommend people stay clear, not because there's a 99% chance Oracle will sue them, but because there's a 1% chance they will. And that 1% is somewhat larger than the chance of being sued by Guido van Rossum, Larry Page, or, for that matter, Microsoft. What's the point of taking a risk, no matter how minor, if perfectly clear and acceptable alternatives exist?
When Apple stops trying to control what you run on your own phone, Apple's choices about who it bans from the AppStore will cease to be controversial.
I didn't say the OP disagreed, I said they lied. There's a difference. They said, outright, that this was Google. It isn't. They know it isn't. You can pretend that you have personal evidence that Larry Page personally supports everything Motorola is doing, but that's not the same thing as arguing that Google is actually doing the suing.
And yes, it's fairly obvious from the amount of lying, and the type of lying, and the bizarre twisted negative articles that keep being submitted that suggest something innoculous or good is evil, that there are shills heavily attacking Slashdot at the moment. The types of posts can't be explained by mere fanboiism.
And yes, the nature of the lie above means it's likely to be a shill job.
It may have been at the time though.
The major issue with traffic* caps is that they need expanding periodically to keep up with the fact that people's expectations grow. Ironically, I see more evidence that operators are reducing traffic caps rather than increasing them. Look at T-Mobile: Unlimited, replaced by 10Gb, replaced by 5Gb, and now they're encouraging people to go to 2G. Wait, what?
* The correct term is traffic. Bandwidth measure of information per second. Ethernet cable has a bandwidth cap. Not meaningful in this discussion. "Traffic" right word. I know, you're just repeating the term, but it annoys me. If it didn't annoy me I wouldn't be a nerd and we wouldn't be having this conversation, I'd be out fucking a cheerleader and drinking beer or something.
For the love of...
GOOGLE. DOES. NOT. OWN. MOTOROLA. YET.
it even implies it in the summary. WTH?
No, it's Motorola. Google hasn't bought Motorola yet, and there's no evidence they're either in favor of Motorola's actions or against them.
I know, you already knew that, I'm correcting you so that people who don't know who paid for your post know it.
In a fair world, Apple's rules wouldn't matter. Anyone who wanted to could simply avoid using the App Store and use an alternative, which iOS users could happily use without problems.
That's how it works in the Android world. Don't like Google Play's rules? Well, there's the Amazon AppStore. And there's AppsDB. And, of course, you can just let users download the APK (nothing to do with HOSTS files, I'm referring to the file type of Android apps) directly. Why? Because Android acknowledges something that iOS doesn't: If someone BOUGHT the device. It's THEIRS. Nobody (outside of government and service providers you choose to work with) has the right to tell you what you can and can't do with what you bought after it's been sold.
That's how it should be. When Apple stops trying to control what you run on your own phone, Apple's choices about who it bans from the AppStore will cease to be controversial.
I think you've missed something. Microsoft has mentioned patents specifically on occasion (because those are what everyone was concerned about until Oracle decided they wanted to set a precedent that would allow IBM, developers of System R, to sue them over their implementation of SQL. What, what?) but they've said over and over again they will not sue people who create competing implementations. Period. Not "We won't sue... over patents", but "we won't sue".
What's also clear is that Microsoft wouldn't anyway. If they're not going to sue over the one bit of IP that everyone thought might apply, why would they turn around and go "Ha ha! We found there's something different we can sue about! Let's sue!"? It doesn't make sense. Microsoft's statements about not suing weren't "We won't sue over patents because we can't", but "We won't sue because we want .NET to become the standard".
I'd be unsurprised if the following happens after an Oracle victory (assuming that happens, I think the Jury would have to completely ignore Jonathan Schwartz for that to happen, which would be ridiculous.)
* I think a variety of software companies will make statements re-affirming that certain APIs, languages, etc, are open and that people can "copy" them (implement them) to their heart's content
* I think Microsoft will be one of those companies. .NET and Microsoft's contributions to W3C standards (excepting H.264) will be amongst the many technologies Microsoft will include in that statement.
* I think people will search for alternatives to Java, with Harmony (which is close to dead already) and OpenJDK declining in support, and developers looking towards alternatives. NET will not be the only beneficiary, but with its similar architecture, and massive library of migration tools, I would be enormously surprised if it's not the biggest winner from the lawsuit.
That said, I don't think, at this point, Oracle are likely prevail on the most damaging parts of their lawsuit. I think it's highly unlikely that the Judge will allow the "copying an API" thing at all. And if he rejects it, I think it's actually dubious Oracle will attempt to appeal on that specific point, while upholding the illegality of copying an API would result in appeals and a hell of a lot of friend of the court submissions right up to SCOTUS. Nobody wants to see the same mess with copyrights that we've already got with patents - even the company with software patents are generally unhappy with them.
But, yes, if Oracle gets what it wants, .NET becomes very much the anti-Java, a surprisingly open system from a company that's not normally associated with such things.
The article claims Mono could be sued for copyright infringements, but actually Microsoft's public statements would count against any legal actions they could attempt against Miguel De Icaza.
If I had any concerns about .NET beyond the fact that Mono is pretty crappy and every Mono app ever written feels like it's being hosted under Wine, I'd be upset about this. But actually... from what I hear, C Sharp is a very nice programming language...
Well, if the ads were like those shown on PBS (excluding telefons) - ie shown before and after the show, with no interruptions in the middle, I wouldn't mind paying $7 a month either!
Ads every five minutes simply make things unwatchable.
I'm not going to worry. When I smuggle in crazy ideas about privacy and civil rights, I always use stenography to hide them in PowerPoint presentations describing terrorist plots, and hide them in my underpants.
You can, but you don't. The point here is not that there's some hypothetical apps out there that might be easier to port if there was a C++ compiler for WP7, it's that there are, in practice, very, very, very few, because C++ is not the recommended language of development for either iOS or Android.
You might find a small subset of games easier to port, but there really aren't many of them.
So in practice it wouldn't help Microsoft or WP7 in any realistic way to do this. Developers wouldn't fell "Yay! C++! I can port my apps!" because... their apps aren't in C++.
Well that sucks. Still, if Microsoft really does want a ton of quick and dirty ports from an established platform, perhaps encouraging Android devs to use J# for the porting, supplying an API for the purpose, is the way to go?
I suspect they'd get more ports than they'd ever hope to achieve by supporting C++, despite it not helping with iOS ports. The sum total of Java apps for Android strikes me as several times higher than the sum total of C++ apps for iOS and Android combined.
Yes, superset. Which means that if Microsoft "allows you" to use C++ on WP7, that's not going to make any difference with iOS apps if those apps are written in Objective C++ or Objective C. You won't be able to port them easily to WP7.
Uh yes, and?
I didn't say you couldn't write C++ on Android, I said you could. What I also said is that it's very rare, and not recommended except for exceptional circumstances. So most Android apps are not written in C++.
For "Microsoft to have missed the boat", they'd have had to do more than the OP was claiming - namely create an Objective C++ compiler (not C++, Objective C++) for the CLR, and presumably update J#, and create appropriate APIs to make porting easy.
That's rather a lot of work to make it easier for people to port apps from Android and iOS to WP7, and it seems a little improbable it would benefit Microsoft as the platform would fast develop a reputation for having a lot of quick and dirty ports of iOS/Android software that really don't fit with the WP7 way of doing things.
OK, yes, the article lumped the Apple critic and Woz together, and I agree that was dumb.
Be wary of that personal preference thing. I find myself defending numerous platforms, some I like, some I don't, because people go over the top in its criticism. That, I suspect, is true of many, and I suspect we all end up being labeled fanbois as a result, regardless of whether we're reacting to someone else's absurd assertions or not.
To make matters worse, certain websites deliberately go out of their way to pick stories that are misleading, which results in legions of people posting "Oh no it isn't", not because it is their bias, but because the article is stupid.
My personal biases? I like what Google is trying to do. I use Android because it's the best of a bad bunch, but much as I want to like it, I don't. I don't like what Apple is trying to do. I'm glad Microsoft, Google, and Apple, are doing their own things and I think WP7 brings a lot to the table.
Oh, and if Jeff Minter or the reanimated corpse of Jack Tramiel has anything to say on the subject, I'd like to know!
I wouldn't read anything into it either way. Microsoft has no control over whether there'll be updates from WP7 to WP8 on existing WP7 phones.
We have the same problem with Android. Hell, many (most?) Android Honeycomb users (and if there was ever something clearly stamped "BETA! Do not use yet!", it was Honeycomb) are still waiting for an ICS upgrade.
You meant "Java" and "Objective C", right? Because regular apps aren't programmed in C++ on either iOS or Android (although I believe the former supports it for regular apps, it's just most are Objective C anyway given the OPENSTEP API); yes, games on Android usually require a stub written in C++, but again, it's not the recommended way to write an app except for extreme circumstances.
Also, I must admit to genuine confusion (I'm not saying you're wrong here, I'm asking...): If WP7 is .NET based, can't you use a C++ compiler that compiles to the CLR? Or have they prevented that in some way?
In the end, I have to say I don't see what you're saying is a problem. I rather like the fact that Apple, Google, and Microsoft are doing their own thing. It's been a long time since we saw major tech companies implementing different visions of how computers should be - to me, personal computing died with the bankruptcy of Commodore, and we're finally, FINALLY, seeing a break in the idea that all platforms should be the same.
Well, I'm curious to know Woz's opinion on things. Woz may be associated with Apple, but he's a smart geek who's been in computing since the beginning, and he's not a fanboi of any particular technology despite his Apple connections.
Would you have written something similar, or considered it non-newsworthy, if the subject was Dave Haynie, Richard Stallman, Chuck Peddle, or James Gosling?