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.Net On Android Is Safe, Says Microsoft 377

An anonymous reader writes "With Oracle suing Google over 'unofficial' support for Java in Android, Microsoft has come out and said it has no intention of taking action against the Mono implementation of C# on the Linux-based mobile OS. That's good news for Novell, which is in the final stages of preparing MonoDroid for release. Miguel de Icaza is not concerned about legal challenges by Microsoft over .Net implementations, and even recommends that Google switch from using Java. However, Microsoft's Community Promise has been criticized by the Free Software Foundation for not going far enough to protect open source implementations from patent litigation, which is at the heart of the Oracle-Google case."
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.Net On Android Is Safe, Says Microsoft

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  • Re:"Safe" (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 27, 2010 @02:57PM (#33396022)

    Always gotta have the anti .NET zealot idiocy in each of these stories.

  • Safe from what? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by dreyergustav ( 1013913 ) on Friday August 27, 2010 @02:57PM (#33396036)
    Some of the Oracle patents relate to Virtual Machines in general and not just the JVM. So how can Mono be safe from Oracle?
  • Et tu brute? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by JImbob0i0 ( 1202835 ) on Friday August 27, 2010 @02:58PM (#33396048)

    Almost every single company that has had dealings with Microsoft has been stabbed in the back by them...

    IBM : OS/2
    Stacker : Doublespace
    Spyglass : Mosaic
    Sun : Java
    Everyone : plays4sure (DRM servers shut down leaving purchases useless)
    Go : Mobile technology (at least I think the company was called Go)
    Caldera : DR-DOS
    Novell : Wordperfect

    How many times does this have to happen before people see a pattern and avoid partnering with Microsoft? The bigger players can survive the knife between the shoulderblades... the smaller players *if they eventually get a payoff* still usually end up dead anyway.

  • Re:"Safe" (Score:3, Insightful)

    by spiffmastercow ( 1001386 ) on Friday August 27, 2010 @02:59PM (#33396066)

    I, for one, would avoid using the terms ".NET" and "safe" in the same paragraph. I realize they are talking about safe from patent trollage, but it implies that someone would actually want to, you know, actually USE .net or Mono by choice.

    As opposed to Java? Damn right I'd use Mono.

  • Re:"Safe" (Score:3, Insightful)

    by not already in use ( 972294 ) on Friday August 27, 2010 @03:01PM (#33396088)
    I use both by choice all the time. The .NET platform is leaps and bounds ahead of the Java platform in nearly every way.

    Oh, that's right, Java is licensed under the GPL, so it's inherently better. I forgot, ideology trumps technical merit. Now, in typical slashdot fashion, mod parent Insightful and me Troll. Thanks, and have a good day.
  • Re:"Safe" (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Mongoose Disciple ( 722373 ) on Friday August 27, 2010 @03:08PM (#33396210)

    Oh, that's right, Java is licensed under the GPL, so it's inherently better.

    To be fair, a decent contingent on slashdot was always saying that Java wasn't open source enough, and in light of the recent Oracle-Google lawsuit, it turns out they were right.

    In the context of this particular story, I'm not sure how .NET doesn't look better than Java -- you've got one's parent company saying they won't sue you (even if that's not a great guarantee) and one that's actually suing you right now.

  • Re:"Safe" (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Lunix Nutcase ( 1092239 ) on Friday August 27, 2010 @03:10PM (#33396242)

    Except that poetmatt is just throwing out FUD. He is intentionally misrepresenting the fact that Microsoft has stopped officially supporting development of things like IronRuby as deprecating the entire platform. The fact that it is even modded as insightful despite being obviously false is quite telling for Slashdot.

  • by gparent ( 1242548 ) on Friday August 27, 2010 @03:12PM (#33396272)
    You submit bug reports and they fix them. Java has bugs too, C++'s stdlib has bugs too.
  • by ma3382 ( 1095011 ) on Friday August 27, 2010 @03:20PM (#33396390)
    "MonoDroid applications run with the Mono execution environment. This execution environment runs side-by-side the Dalvik Virtual Machine. Both runtime environments run on top of the Linux kernel and expose various APIs to the user code that allows developers to access the underlying system. Both Mono and Dalvik are runtimes written in the C language."

    http://monodroid.net/Documentation/Architecture [monodroid.net]
  • Re:"Safe" (Score:3, Insightful)

    by xtracto ( 837672 ) on Friday August 27, 2010 @03:25PM (#33396454) Journal

    Well... to be fair, there is a difference between Oracle suing the GOOGLE company and Microsoft promising not to sue YOU (user/developer) for using the Mono implementation... mainly because Novell/Microsoft relation.

    I wonder how far would Microsoft allow Google to go in implementing a C# compiler/interpreter in the same way they are doing it with java...

  • Re:Et tu brute? (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 27, 2010 @03:26PM (#33396462)

    Java: Microsoft did not develop .Net, until Sun sued them for license issues, effectively stopping them developing on Java.

    I think you missed the part where Microsoft made Visual J++ with various extensions and a failure to pass the Java compliance tests. Fixing compliance would have been easy, if they just wanted to make a compatible Java(tm) implementation, but really this was their first attempt to shaft Sun.

    .Net is Microsoft's 2nd try...

  • Re:Et tu brute? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by xtracto ( 837672 ) on Friday August 27, 2010 @03:27PM (#33396488) Journal

    About Java:

    You *DO* Remember that the main problem was with J++ and Microsoft trying to distort a standard (or at least, a standard they *signed* they would respect) to make it incompatible?

    Kind of how they made special Javascript or ActiveX extensions which broke the net??

  • by Sycraft-fu ( 314770 ) on Friday August 27, 2010 @03:28PM (#33396498)

    IE was purchased by Microsoft. They didn't do some dirty trick, they found a company making a product they liked and purchased them. Not just the rights to their product, the brought on the developers and all that.

    DR-DOS wasn't a product that MS ripped off... It was a product that ripped off MS. MS-DOS launched in 1981. DR-DOS launched in 1989 and was version numbed to be the same as MS-DOS. They weren't breaking any laws or anything, but DR-DOS was designed to be their own DOS, compatible with MS-DOS.

    Wordperfect lost on its own merits. It was the be-all, end-all of office programs. However the developers failed to keep it up, failed to improve it, and Office eclipsed it. You ever try using it recently (it is still around, still in development)? It is a pile of crap. It lost because there was a superior competing product. You know, how capitalism is supposed to work and all that.

    I'm not claiming MS has never done anything underhanded. However people whine and bitch far too much. That a given product failed doesn't mean MS did anything wrong, it may just mean that the product sucked.

  • Re:Really?? (Score:0, Insightful)

    by ccarson ( 562931 ) on Friday August 27, 2010 @03:44PM (#33396700)
    The more platforms we have available as developers, the easier it is to find solutions. Being able to program in Java and .NET and mixing a system seamlessly allows for faster development and more bells and whistles. I welcome .NET on any platform because it's better at certain things over Java (and vice versa).
  • by bieber ( 998013 ) on Friday August 27, 2010 @04:18PM (#33397172)
    ...except that MonoDroid is a completely proprietary platform, and I don't know about you, but this free software developer likes to keep his software running on free systems.
  • Re:"Safe" (Score:3, Insightful)

    by butalearner ( 1235200 ) on Friday August 27, 2010 @04:35PM (#33397436)

    Except that Mono is *also* under the GPL. No, it's not about ideology, it's simply some slashdotters have a vendetta against Microsoft that they'll follow even against common sense.

    I bet you would've said the same thing about the people who refused to use Java for the exact same reason. Yeah, the good folks who had the Java patents before were fine with Android, but look what happens when new people are in control. It doesn't have to take a company buyout - what happens years down the road when there are new people in charge at Microsoft? All of sudden those glaringly obvious holes in patent protection aren't looking so benign. I like how Oracle says that Google "knowingly infringed on Oracle intellectual property" when Oracle didn't own it until long after Android was released.

    Microsoft: Go ahead and use all of these parts of .NET. We promise we won't sue.

    FOSS developers: What about that other part of .NET, which you might note is a key part in Mono right now?

    Microsoft: ...

    Microsoft: Go ahead and use all of these parts of .NET for Android. We promise we won't sue.

  • Re:Et tu brute? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by benjymouse ( 756774 ) on Friday August 27, 2010 @04:51PM (#33397668)

    At the time Java came with its own set of widgets, and it had a terrible reputation (deserved) for being slow. At the center of the conflict was Microsofts insistence that developers should be able to use native Windows widgets for GUI apps - otherwise it would risk tainting the Windows platform as slow and unresponsive (yeah - I know - even slower, ok?).

    To facilitate that they wanted developers to have the option to call native APIs directly. Library developers would then be able to make abstraction libraries which could take advantage of the rich Windows GUI (and COM) controls.

    Sun would have none of that. Microsoft wouldn't yield. Microsoft lost the lawsuit, and then went on to make a language the way they felt it should be made. With a way to call native APIs which is leaps and bounds better than the nazi-abstraction of Java. No glue code necessary, just pure metadata annotations.

    Sun went on with their own business and along comes IBM with Eclipse. Only IBM weren't too happy about the whole Swing deal. Java has definitely improved in speed, but on the GUI side all those gains (and more) had been eaten up by Swing. So IBM went for native GUI widgets with SWT.

    There was a reason Microsoft didn't want to fix their JVM so that it would pass the compliance tests. They lost (or settled?) and Sun got an insane amount of $$$. Microsoft created C# and .NET the way they though it should be.

    C# has evolved much faster than Java. And in some areas Suns "doubts" about whether such language features were feasible has been put to shame: Delegates, operator overloading, Native API (P/Invoke) marshalling, reified generics, value types etc.

  • by Mongoose Disciple ( 722373 ) on Friday August 27, 2010 @04:53PM (#33397716)

    I can't say for 100% sure without examining their exact problem, but I would bet that your devs aren't very good and are trying to blame the tool rather than the craftsman. At least, I've never had problems solving similar problems with .NET. (Or Java or anything else, for that matter.)

  • by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 27, 2010 @05:19PM (#33398028)

    That's Accenture, but yeah, let's not let facts get in the way here.

  • Re:Et tu brute? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by tepples ( 727027 ) <tepples.gmail@com> on Friday August 27, 2010 @06:57PM (#33398964) Homepage Journal
    That's what Java namespaces were invented for. Microsoft could have left all the java.awt.* stuff working and put all its embrace-and-extensions in com.microsoft.gdi.* and the like.
  • Re:Safe from what? (Score:4, Insightful)

    by yyxx ( 1812612 ) on Friday August 27, 2010 @07:56PM (#33399454)

    Oracle doesn't have a patent on "virtual machines", they have a patent on specific technologies. So, the question is whether Mono violates Oracle's specific patents. Sun/Oracle's patents were mostly known at the time Microsoft designed the CLR, so there's a good chance that they designed around Oracle's patents. Dalvik, on the other hand, was created both to be Java compatible and also under the assumption that Sun was friendly towards open source systems.

    You can never be certain that a given piece of software violates no patents at all. But Mono seems in a pretty good position: Microsoft doesn't claim patents against it, and furthermore, it was designed to avoid patents by the other big player, Sun/Oracle. That's probably as good as it's ever going to get for these kinds of virtual machines.

  • Re:Really?? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by ozmanjusri ( 601766 ) <aussie_bob AT hotmail DOT com> on Friday August 27, 2010 @07:59PM (#33399486) Journal
    The more document formats we have available as users, the easier it is to find solutions. Or maybe not...

    Computing is moving away from the desktop and onto mobile devices. Microsoft was built on vice-like control of the desktop computers, and as a result, the field has been stagnant for decades.

    Do you really think they won't take any opportunity they can to gain the same level of control over portables?

  • Re:Et tu brute? (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Cyberax ( 705495 ) on Friday August 27, 2010 @08:09PM (#33399546)

    "What I have issues with it the revisionist painting this as some sinister attempt on part of Microsoft to try to extend and then extinguish Java."

    Unfortunately, it's not revisionist. It _was_ their intention, documented and proven in the court.

    http://www.nytimes.com/1998/10/22/business/memos-released-in-sun-microsoft-suit.html?sec=&spon=&partner=permalink&exprod=permalink [nytimes.com]
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steven_McGeady#Microsoft_trials [wikipedia.org]

  • by masmullin ( 1479239 ) <masmullin@gmail.com> on Friday August 27, 2010 @09:28PM (#33400004)

    It always confuses me that these companies go with java when they could have gone with C/gtk

    yeah yeah yeah... garbage collection. but if its really garbage collection shouldn't it just collect the whole damn language?

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