Well, actually, that would be a surprising bit of honesty. It's
really about fragmentation, but fragmentation isn't illegal. Microsoft
was busted because they signed a contract with Sun promising not to engage in
fragmentation. If they (Microsoft) had waited until Harmony was done to create
J++, I shudder to think what would have happened.
Sun tried to use a
clever combination of copyrights, trademarks, and patents to prevent
fragmentation. They may have been partly inspired by the GPL, which cleverly
uses copyright law to enforce open access to code, even though that's not at all
the purpose of copyright law. The problem is that Sun was trying to protect
something abstract, while the GPL protects things that are concrete--actual
code. Protecting an abstract idea, unless you can patent it, is difficult to
the point of being impossible.
--- Do not meddle in the affairs of
Wizards, for it makes them soggy and hard to light. [ Reply to This | Parent | # ]
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