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Comment by blinkingled | Hacker News Reader

Not buying Sun was the mistake. $7B is all that would've taken (less if they sold the os and hardware division) to make the computing world a better place.

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Not necessarily. If the judgement that APIs are not copyrightable is upheld (which is a big if), the computing world will be a better place than it would be if Google had managed to avoid the question.

the edge goes both ways - if it somehow (hopefully, now its false) judged that API's _are_ copyrightable, then what?

7B is pocket change to them, completely agree. I was shocked to hear they let it pass iirc. I figured they were playing hardball and it just blew up in their face.

Or did they make the right decision? Just because they have the money doesn't mean they need to spend it. Did litigating cost them 7 billion? The legal win shows they made the right choice in not spending 7 billion on what they are allowed to use for "free".

IMHO you're over simplifying. Oracle was better positioned to capitalize on Sun assets, so they were likely to pay more than Google. Microsoft or Apple may have decided to bid to prevent Google from acquisition. Merging with a huge enterprise is always painful.

I'm not so sure given the results. Google (with selling the hardware / chip division to Fujitsu) would have done pretty well given all the tech projects Sun had.

If Apple had bid to prevent (patents I suppose), I wonder if ZFS would have finally been on OS X. Java would have been the truly odd man out in that acquisition. I could see Java being sold to IBM.

zfs actually was on a few leopard betas.

Not that it worked well mind you, it made Finder even more useless than before. But it did "work" for varying definitions of the word.

Yeah, I was more thinking production ready default and integrated into the shipped programs (e.g. Disk Utility).

Oh I agree, what was there was nice too by the way. Shame it never made it though.

At least we have dtrace!

While you're obviously right (Oracle _did_ pay more that whatever Google offered (if anything), in retrospect perhaps blinkingled's assertion that $7B might have been a reasonable amount for Google to have offered seems at least arguable. In one sense perhaps you are oversimplifying - sure Oracle was in a better place to use some of Sun's assets, but Google is clearly now in a dangerous place having a competitor like Oracle owning major parts of technology Google's mobile strategy depends on. Whether that's seven billion dollars worth of danger I have no idea - but I suspect there are people at Google regretting the decision _not_ to buy Sun (or more specifically, buy Java and get all the rest of Su for free) back when they had the opportunity.

Google is basically a java shop. Are you saying they are unable to capitalize of Sun assets ? they choosed java as Dalvik first class language , what more do you need to capitalize of Sun's asset. It is a mistake and google will pay a huge price in the future.

Question: will this cost Google $7B?

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