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Back in the sands in the time Sun also did this with Java. IIRC the associated license was a great cause of pain for open implementations of the JVM, since without passing the suite you couldn't call yourself Java, and with passing the suite (insert some horrible restriction here I forget)

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Without passing the suite, you couldn't get the patent licences, so Sun could put you out of business if they chose to. Sun used the test suite to define what was and wasn't "Java" (you had to pass the whole test suite or you couldn't ship product) & thereby prevented anyone else from using the core language in interesting ways that Sun didn't approve of.

Google did an end-run around these restrictions by using the Dalvik virtual machine instead of the JVM where the crucial patents lurked, so Android didn't have to implement the whole of the Java library before they shipped.

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