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.

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Do not meddle in the affairs of Wizards, for it makes them soggy and hard to light.

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• Only secrets can do that - Authored by: The Cornishman on Friday, April 27 2012 @ 11:04 AM EDT
• The problem is, time - Authored by: Anonymous on Tuesday, May 01 2012 @ 08:01 PM EDT

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