Microsoft's J/Direct called death of Java (1997)

infoworld.com

5 pointstwoodfin3 comments

Apparently Microsoft had their own implementation of the Java 1.1 API, Sun Microsystems sued them, and Microsoft decided to pay $20 million out of court.

Flash cut to 2021, the new owner of the same API, Oracle, sues Google for the same exact thing, but Google takes it to court and wins.

Interesting to think what would have happened if Microsoft had taken it to court and won.

It's not the same thing. J/Direct was not a different implementation of the JNI API; it was a different and incompatible API that served the same purpose. This could have led to fragmentation.

J/Direct was a part of Microsoft's different implementation of the JDK.

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