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Comment by cptskippy | Hacker News Reader

I'm glad to see Microsoft embracing Open-Source, C# is such a wonderful language and easy language to use. In light of all the trouble Oracle has been giving Google, I would love to see them embrace it and provide a true alternative to Java on Android.

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Microsoft will need to revise their patent pledge first. If you look at the way it's currently written, it's almost as if it was specifically meant to preserve their option to pull an Oracle v Google against a vendor who decides to pick up .NET and run with it.

Meanwhile, Google has switched away from their Apache Harmony derivative to the officially anointed sources, so there's not much incentive to make the move away from Java entirely, anyway.

How so?

I don't understand the question.

> If you look at the way it's currently written, it's almost as if it was specifically meant to preserve their option to pull an Oracle v Google against a vendor who decides to pick up .NET and run with it

how so?

> Microsoft Corporation and its affiliates ("Microsoft") promise not to assert any .NET Patents against you for making, using, selling, offering for sale, importing, or distributing Covered Code, as part of [...] any compliant implementation in software of (a) all of the required parts of the mandatory provisions of Standard ECMA-335 [...] and (b) if implemented, any additional functionality in Microsoft's .NET Framework

Google hasn't anyone to blame but themselves.

Yep, not buying Sun was their biggest mistake.

It wasn't a mistake at all. Sun was a lot of things besides Java, it just wasn't worth it for them and they were right to take a pass. Even if they end up paying big dollars to Oracle, the amount won't be high enough to retroactively justify buying Sun. Android is big now and it can weather whatever comes from this patent battle.

I don't know, they basically bought Motorola to stop the patent trolls from getting them. After the purchase they broke up the company and sold the parts they didn't want/need. I could see the same thing happening to a Sun purchase; take the Java stuff and sell off everything else (SunOS, hardware, etc.)

Sun had a nice patent portfolio too. Some of Google's current initiatives, like being part of the OpenPower Alliance, might have benefited from the hardware acquisition as well with RISC being all the rage again. Having Solaris in their back pocket would have been handy and ZFS might have been re-licensed to be more GPL friendly as well.

I'm not sure how much of that Google could directly benefit from but they could have definitely gain a metric fkton of community good will by opening many of the technologies Sun owned that have floundered since the Oracle acquisition.

That was their second mistake.

The first mistake was screwing Sun during their license agreement discussions for Android.

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