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Comment by jimmyvanhalen | Hacker News Reader

it's not just Gosling.

"Just because Sun didn't have patent suits in our genetic code doesn't mean we didn't feel wronged. While I have differences with Oracle, in this case they are in the right. Google totally slimed Sun. We were all really disturbed, even Jonathan: he just decided to put on a happy face and tried to turn lemons into lemonade. which annoyed a lot of folks at Sun."

In a March 8, 2007 e-mail to Schwartz about working with Google on licensing or partnering with Sun on Java, Sun's co-founder and chairman, Scott McNealy, characterized the relationship with Google at the time: "The Google thing is really a pain. They are immune to copyright laws, good citizenship, they dont share. They dont even call back."

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If Sun didn't want to risk ever feeling this way, they shouldn't have made Java open in the way they did. They purposely made Java so that this kind of thing could happen, and then felt wronged when it actually did.

>purposely made Java so that this kind of thing could happen?

what kind of thing? can you explain a little bit more.

I think he was talking about forks. As you see, when Sun opened it's language, people said at Sun said some interesting stuff:

"But I think there’ll be lots of forks, and I approve. I suspect that basement hackers and university CompSci departments and other unexpected parties will take the Java source, hack groovy improvements into it, compile it, and want to give it to the world. They’ll discover that getting their creation blessed as “Java” requires running the TCK/trademark gauntlet, which isn’t groovy at all. So they’ll think of a clever name for it and publish anyhow."

Director of Web Technologies at Sun Microsystems, 12/11/2006 [ Source: http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/200x/2006/11/12/OSS-Java ]

This sound exactly what Google did, so why are they suing now?

Well... that seems fairly damning.

>"hack groovy improvements into it, compile it, and want to give it to the world."

under GPL (OpenJDK) not ASL (Harmony <-- groovy name).

Here's what the Apache Foundation said after it discontinued work on Harmony.

"Java specifications are proprietary technology that must be licensed directly from the spec lead under whatever terms the spec lead chooses."

From what I understand, whatever license Java is released under allows for the possibility of another party creating a clean room implementation of the language and releasing it on their own, outside of any control, influence, or fees due to Sun.

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