Comment The Google lawsuit (Score 5, Interesting) 337
James Gosling:
...I'm sure they were looking at the license fees they were getting from Microsoft. Microsoft .NET just smears over a huge pile of Sun patents. When they did the .NET design, they basically cut and pasted from the Java spec. The way that they did CLR, you know they swizzled the way the instruction set went but the way this thing really operated, they exercised essentially no creativity when coming up with .NET. They've done some things since then that have been kind of good but as part of the various court cases we ended up with this rather odd patent deal with them that involved them paying us fairly tasty amounts of money. And I'm sure that the lawyers looked at the Microsoft numbers and said, yeah I want that from Google
I actually did not know, until today, that Microsoft was paying a Java patent license fee for
Just before he said the above, he said this, which is probably obvious to many people, but I found it poignant all the same:
James Gosling: With Oracle it doesn't have to make sense, it just has to make money.