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Comment by snarf21 | Hacker News Reader

In addition to the specific claims and their validity, one fact remains. Oracle bought Sun for the sole purpose of suing Google. Full stop. I used to date someone involved in the case when it was just getting started. Oracle can go pound sand.

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Everyone seems to have forgotten that Sun licensed Java under an open license that would have allowed Google to use these interfaces without issue, if they had met certain criteria for supporting the full Java platform. Google essential thought "Well, we have too much bloat, and these parts are totally unneeded in our platform, so we're going to strip them out."

Oracle's lawsuit is so bad-faith it is laughable.

I seem to recall Sun refusing to allow Apache Harmony's implementation of the Java stdlib to be certified, or didn't allow access to the TCK or something like that. It may have seemed at the time like trying for an official certification for Android was pointless.

Yep.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apache_Harmony#Difficulties_to...

And adding to that, the entire enforcement mechanism was through trademarks, not copyright. And trademarks are about the only IP construct not brought up in this case.

Nope, Sun's license did not allow for Java SE on mobile devices without a proper license, hence the J2ME partners licenses.

Thing is Google were also nasty towards Sun and helped it go under quite well. In many ways this is karma but too bad there's so much externality to it.

IIRC they were going to use the reference impl of Java but Sun wanted to inject themselves and the Java brand all over Android.

Plus Sun couldn't design a decent UI to save their lives, so Android probably wouldn't have been successful if Google had allowed Sun a large role in the platform.

Actually they did, but too many developers are lazy to buy books and apply their learnings.

http://filthyrichclients.org/

From the same Chet Haase and Romain Guy that went into Android's GUI framework after Sun went under.

And for mobile there was

https://docs.oracle.com/javame/dev-tools/lwuit-1.3/LWUIT_Dev...

Plus, Google could have done just like any other OS vendor does with ISO C and ISO C++, plus whatever OS APIs they feel like adding.

Yeah I don't think the problem with Sun's UI stuff was an individual or a group but probably big corp politics.

As much as I loved Sun workstations and Solaris, I'm pretty sure Sun went under all by itself.

With the Java licenses that Google have stolen from them, they could have eventually survived.

there was no other reason to buy sun?

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