Android, Google vs Oracle

[MoonRise]

http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/...84M18K20120523

https://plus.google.com/102150693225...ts/TZsT2BP3TDh

[SteveRiley]

Yup, people are noticing. Particularly certain groups offering ways to sidestep the legal wars:

http://blog.xamarin.com/2012/05/01/android-in-c-sharp/

Oh, and Jerry, they're hiring people with your favorite title!

http://blog.xamarin.com/2012/05/15/c...r-evangelists/

[MoonRise]

Hmmmm. Interesting. Really Don't want Mono on my systems. That was the point in the first place for a Linux based system in the first place. To each his own.

[GreyGeek]

....
Oh, and Jerry, they're hiring people with your favorite title!
....

Not quite:

What is a Developer Evangelist? The job of an evangelist (sometimes called a Developer Advocate) is to raise awareness for our products in developer communities online and off. This means doing things like speaking at events, creating blog posts and screencasts, answering questions on Stack Overflow or anything else that helps our customers be successful.

James Plamondon's gang of TE's worked much differently, using stealth postings, the stacked panel, the slog, etc... Xamarin was created by Michael de Icaza after he and his 100 man crew of Mono developers were let go by the company that bought parts of Novell. He focus primarily on writing Mono apps for iPhone and Mac. Gnome and Mono were create by him and he worked for Novell, which had signed royalty agreements that "admitted" that Linux violated MS patents, a claim MS often makes but cannot prove in court. They can, however, use their team of lawyers and financial clout to extort license agreements from small fry Linux users. That agreement put Gnome and Mono under the direct influence of MS, which is probably why Mark Shuttleworth decided to abandon Gnome & Mono and create Unity, which is independent of both. Besides, Mono is a patent trap.

Now that Android has captured more than 50% of the smartphone market he must be hooking his cart to Android as well. Even if it is a patent trap Mono has technical problems which, IMO, are insurmountable. The first is that Mono will never be 100% compatible with the latest version of Mono. Second is the fact that .NET has been, for all practical purposes, abandon by MS in favor of HTML5 and Javascript. Third, Mono ships with violations of ECCA 334 & 335 when it includes WinForm, etc.., the GUI components. That's why he was forced to create GTK# binding to Mono ... so he could use the GTK gui API.

I haven't followed Mono since Novell crashed. I don't know if de Icaza has created an unhindered replacement for WinForm and the rest, to avoid patent violations.

In my opinion Judge Alsop has raised a troubling red flag. I don't understand what he means when he is talking about copyrights on the API. API is merely source code and all source code has an automatic copyright. Any source written after Jan 1, 1978 had a copyright that last till 70 years after the death of the coder who wrote it.n (17 U.S.C. & 102b)

If he is implying that APIs can be put behind pay walls then that spells trouble for the Qt4 API. It is used with KDE. It could force the KDE Foundation to fork the Qt4 GPL version.

Also, Oracle may choose to appeal. Just because a jury ruled that Google was innocent of IP violations in the first trial doesn't mean that a second jury, using the same evidence, would arrive at the same opinion. Oracle is hoping on that and will use the first trial as a rehearsal. They'll comb through its transcripts and find their weaknesses, and the weakness of Google, and strengthen their weaknesses and improve their attacks. They'll hire psychology experts to evaluate the jury, etc. That's how "Dr. Phil" rose to fame. His psychological evaluations of the jury are what Oprah claims won her case.