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| Authored by: sproggit on Friday, April 20 2012 @ 06:53 PM EDT |
To the parent post, that asked about the possibility of some form of anti-trust
case against Oracle on the grounds that they have the "monopoly" on
JAVA.
This does not meet the standard for a potential monopoly case. Yes, JAVA is a
popular computer language [perhaps on the wane now] but in it's sector it is
still not the most popular... So for example it is used on the web, and there it
competes with Perl, PHP, Python, ASP/.Net and others. It is also used on hosts
ranging from phones [ :o) ] to mainframes, but on each platform there are plenty
of other languages to choose from. Most importantly of all, there is no lock-in
that forces people to use JAVA.
The first response mentioned Microsoft, and that is a more clear-cut case. MS
set up deals with hardware manufacturers to ship machines pre-loaded with
Windows [and still do] making it hard for anyone to purchase a machine equipped
with an alternate OS. That's monopoly power, and it's quite different - it's
near-total domination of a market sector [i.e. the PC].
The second case we could consider would be the case between Apple and Psystar,
when the latter produced Apple "clones" that could run OS/X. Psystar
tried to convince the Court that Apple were a monopoly, but the Court found that
there were lots of alternative personal computing solutions and thus the Psystar
argument was not convincing.
The third case I can think of dates back to the 1970s, and was the US Department
of Justice against IBM. The DoJ forced IBM to "open up" the APIs of
what is now zOS [and what was then OS/360] to permit competing products to work
with it. Ironically, as a result zOS is probably the most open OS platform on
any hardware in the world today... how many other platforms have things like a
completely "pluggable" security sub-system?
Sorry if this is a circuitous route to an answer. For the reasons I've tried to
show above, we cannot construe Oracle America's stewardship of the JAVA language
to be a monopoly. In truth, by submitting JAVA to the GPL and supporting the
JCP, Sun/Oracle have done a lot more towards openness than most originally
proprietary languages.
Sadly, it looks as though Oracle's management are now attempting to re-write
history...[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]
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