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Comment by luminaobscura | Hacker News Reader

"For example, Java-based code using the replicated parts of the 37 API packages will run on Android but will not if a 38th package is needed. Such imperfect interoperability leads to a “fragmentation” — a Balkanization — of platforms, a circumstance which Sun and Oracle have tried to curb via their licensing programs. In this litigation, Oracle has made much of this problem, at times almost leaving the impression that if only Google had replicated all 166 Java API packages, Oracle would not have sued."

LOL

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Why is that an LOL?

That is exactly why Sun sued Microsoft and won. Microsofts JVM was slightly incompatible with the official one. If Microsoft had replicated all Java API packages, and not added Windows-specific ones then they wouldn't have sued.

One of the big sells of Java has always been "write once, run anywhere", Sun sued Microsoft because their incompatible JVM made that not true anymore. Now it's effectively true of Android; no program written in Java not specifically for Android can possibly be expected to work. Not that I think that is a particularly bad thing, since J2ME is a big pile of crap, but it's kind of interesting to see the difference between the perception in favor of Sun then and against Oracle here when the core issue is the same.

Microsoft entered into an contract with Sun specifically agreeing that any Java implementation they shipped would be fully compatible with Sun's version.

Now it's effectively true of Android; no program written in Java not specifically for Android can possibly be expected to work.

The large majority of existing Java code and libraries will work on Android without modification.

The relevant point being that Google didn't want to license Java under the standard terms because they wanted control over the platform, and certainly partially because they saw what happened to Microsoft.

It certainly wasn't just the technical matter of reproducing "166 APIs", there was the whole political angle of putting Android under control of Sun/Oracle's committees.

(And just on a trivial note, Microsoft eventually created their own 'clean-room' Java called "J#". It died in obscurity, but Google wasn't the first.)

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