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> Guessing only: MS is a software company so they'd want to make it harder for others to copy (like whatever Google supposedly copied from java.) The guess can
by azakai 14y ago
> Guessing only: MS is a software company so they'd want to make it harder for others to copy (like whatever Google supposedly copied from java.)
The guess can be a little more specific: Microsoft saw what the verdict said about Java and was concerned for what it meant for C#. Oracle having less control over Java because languages are not copyrightable means Microsoft has less control over C#.
C# is important to Microsoft, so it's going to make an effort to maintain full control over it.
Which would be bad for all of us should Oracle and Microsoft prevail. Java and C# are widely-used, and the kind of control Oracle and Microsoft want over them is excessive.
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- kvb 14y agoActually, I think that there are both benefits and costs to tightly controlled languages, and it's not clear at all that the costs outweigh the benefits. Indeed, arguably C#'s great progress in the last decade compared to Java is due in large part to Microsoft's hegemony as opposed to Java's community process. Regardless, as I understand it (though IANAL) Oracle's copyright argument was over Android's reuse of Java's APIs (including signatures and documentation), not over the Java language itself. Basically they claimed that just like a cookbook is subject to copyright even though an individual recipe may not be, so should the collected Java API be even though individual method signatures wouldn't be.
- nitrogen 14y agoMy response to the cookbook analogy would be that Oracle shouldn't be granted a copyright on the API because that gives them effective ownership over the code everyone else writes to interface with that API.
- xentronium 14y ago> The guess can be a little more specific: Microsoft saw what the verdict said about Java and was concerned for what it meant for C#. Oracle having less control over Java because languages are not copyrightable means Microsoft has less control over C#. > C# is important to Microsoft, so it's going to make an effort to maintain full control over it. C# is ECMA standard.
- camkego 14y agoIt sounds like part of the issue might be the copyrighting of APIs, not the language.
- xentronium 14y agoThis seems more plausible. I'd guess they are strongly against emulating Windows API system calls in projects like reactos or wine.