Posted on 03/16/2023 7:16:43 AM PDT by SeekAndFind
A few reasons.
First, Java was spearheaded by Sun Technologies, not Oracle. Sun was still an independent company at the time. Sun had already yelled at Microsoft for changing the Java implementation in Internet Explorer to make it faster for Windows machines.
It ended up killing Java applets completely. My feelings are they weren’t itching for another fight with the huge software giant.
Second, they didn’t copy Java’s API. That’s what Google did with Android, and that’s why Oracle is still suing them.
Microsoft borrowed a lot of ideas from Java (and C++) for their new language. If you compare the two APIs, you’ll see what I mean. C# shares a lot of syntax with Java, but the API is different.
You can’t copyright syntax and Sun couldn’t do anything about it. I don’t think they really even wanted to.
Third , Microsoft shot themselves in the foot with their initial .NET (and C#) rollout. They said it was portable, like Java, but only portable among different Windows operating systems.
* Using a Mac? Tough luck! .NET doesn’t run on Mac.
* Using Unix? Tough luck!
* Using Linux? Go suck an egg!
Java ran on all operating systems. Calling C# portable “among Windows operating systems” was a lame attempt to keep Windows the dominant business operating system.
Sun probably recognized Microsoft’s folly and just laughed.
Today, .NET and C# are available among nearly all operating systems like Java, but Java’s far more dominant and may be forever.
To recap, C# didn’t copy Java’s API. Sun didn’t have anything they could sue them over.
Update
There seems to be a lot of confusion on this topic. And Sun did sue Microsoft over Java. But they didn’t sue them for plagiarizing Java. They sued them for illegally “extending” it. Basically, they modified Java so it would run faster on Windows machines, which—according to Sun—destroyed the universality of Java.
But they didn’t sue Microsoft over plagiarizing Java.
Sun won, by the way.
Just a wild ass guess, because they’re a bunch libs contributing to libs and spending time with Epstein?
Hideously stupid questions.
Before C# Microsoft had an interim language called J++ with its own development platform, Visual J++. J++ was axed and gave way to C#.
Why didn’t Biden get fired for plagiarizing a British Pol’s speech?.....................
They did sue Microsoft... and if memory serves they won.
Microsoft being microsoft, will never accept anything anyone else has done and must do their OWN thing with it.
IIS server, VB Script, etc etc etc are all proof of this crap that went on in the 90s and 2000s with MS.
C# is a complete rip off of Java... Once they lost the lawsuit so they couldn’t bastardize java, they built their own version of it and called it C#
Why java didn’t sue more? Well, that’s anyones guess.. SUN went from darling to bust very quickly. 90s their hardware as top notch and running lots of high powered stuff... top fo the world if you will.. In the early days of the internet, there was very little that wasn’t running on a sun server behind the scenes... then the dot com bubble popped, and their hardware while still great, wasn’t selling like it once was... by 2009 they were a shell of their former self and Oracle.
I honestly don’t know if sun could sue, implementing your own version of a language isn’t illegal. Java is a programming language it can’t be copyrighted, which is where plagiarism falls. So I really don’t think SUN could sue them for that. Courts had already spoken on lots of that, after all how many CLONES do you see (or did you see) on various systems complete rip offs of successful arcade games, that got released? Literally how many thousands of pac man clones or derivatives were sold to various home systems?
RE: Why didn’t Bell Labs get sued for plagiarizing C?
I thought the C Programming language originated from Bell Labs ...
If memory serves me right, C was created by Dennis Ritchie at Bell Labs in the early 1970s as an augmented version of Ken Thompson’s B programming language.
Another Bell Labs employee, Brian Kernighan, had written the first C tutorial, and he persuaded Ritchie to coauthor a book on the language. Kernighan would write most of the book’s “expository” material, and Ritchie’s reference manual became its appendices.
I still have the classic that they wrote sitting on my shelf : The C Programming Language
Yep. No matter what you may think of Java as a programming language, as a business strategy it was the biggest blunder since IBM let Gates sell MS-Dos to whoever.
The name of the game in complex product marketing is commoditizing the product's compliments. Think cheap gas and cheap tires to make people buy more cars. Sun's premier product wasn't their hardware. It was the Solaris operating system, which was the most popular and the most profitable of all the Unix OS's. But Java commoditizes operating systems. Introducing Jave was a stupid business move and it ultimately destroyed Sun Microsystems.
Yeah, I think you are correct. I was thinking K&R and pushed the post button. Then it dawned on me K&R worked at Bell Labs.
"I thought the C Programming language originated from Bell Labs ..."
I've been a C++ programmer since 1983. I used the earliest CFRONT stuff from Stroustrup on Bell System machines. C++ is still my favorite language for getting real work done that runs fast with a small footprint.
I didn't start doing anything useful with Java until 1995. It was still pretty new with limited libraries. The type system was crippled compared to C++. The garbage collector as a way to deal with memory leaks was nice, but I had long since beaten that problem using a new tool called Purify in 1991 for C++. Windows had a new equivalent to Purify made by NuMega (BoundsChecker). C++ was still faster with a smaller footprint and didn't need garbage collection if properly coded and tested.
I helped Microsoft with some of their earliest C# compilers. It was a good technical exchange. I had opted for use of C# on some Compaq handhelds. Write once and run in Windows or on the Compaq handheld. C# had all the charm of Java and a full, strict type checking capability. The introduction of version "assemblies" helped resolve the frustration of DLL Hell that plagued Windows using DLLs under the C++ code. In time, I was able to leverage the versioned DLL/shared library concept on Sun and HP UNIX boxes. The early shared libraries on UNIX boxes came with a ritual use of "ldd" to trace the dynamic library load for a given executable. In some cases, it was necessary to package a special directory of shared libraries to ensure a given executable would run. A "path" variable used by "ldd" would seek the safe, tested shared libraries to go with the executable. Today, we use docker containers to deliver the full executable/library package that is known to operate correctly as a unit build.
I once had one of these under my desk:
Nah Java didn’t bring Sun down...
They stayed on proprietary hardware that priced them out of the market as cheaper and cheaper hardware was available and performed well enough.
I became a real C++ grammar "nazi" in the early 80s with copies of Harbison and Steele book. It was very helpful as wave after wave of GCC arrived from the effort of Richard Stallman. GCC was more strict than the standard C compiler delivered with my UNIX operating systems. It really helped expose defects. Converting traditional K&R C to fully prototyped ANSI style C was a huge win in stomping bugs.
I had one contract with 300,000 lines of awful K&R C. Round one was conversion to full ANSI style prototyped function signatures. I acquired a licensed copy of "flexelint" to run against the code base. Again, huge exposures of trashy coding practices include use of uninitialized variables. Unit testing was achieved to the point of testing 93% of every line of code as tested by the HP basis branch analyzer. Purify was used to expose use of uninitialized variables at runtime. Freeing "freed" memory. Using "freed" memory. Array bounds read/write defects. All of it squashed. On return of the code to the customer, they confirmed 100 known defects were cleared. Defects that had not been disclosed to me at the start of the clean up. It all boiled down to defects from sloppy coding and failure to test.
I haven't been writing C++ in the past few years. When I do, I like to use "cppcheck" for semantic, static code analysis and valgrind for runtime checking. Both are open source tools with similarity to flexelint and Purify.
Agree. Sun with SPARC and HP with PA-RISC were great "big endian" proprietary hardware. The "little endian" world built on the X86 architectures became cheap and easy. Making code run well on long endian architectures is time consuming. Getting Linux up on X86 was really the death knell for the proprietary UNIX on (SPARC/PA-RISC). Incorporation of the floating point processor in the X86 CPU was a necessary step to make it a practical replacement.
“If memory serves me right, C was created by Dennis Ritchie at Bell Labs in the early 1970s as an augmented version of Ken Thompson’s B programming language.”
Seems like we are well past due for the release of D. What’s the hold up?
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