At 01:55 PM 5/15/00 -0700, Chris Jewell wrote:

>
>Am I misrecalling, or did Sun win a lawsuit against MicroSoft, the
>fundamental meaning of which is that you cannot call something "Java"
>unless you keep on tracking Sun's changes?
>
>I thought that Sun's position on Java, like the DOD's position on Ada,
>is that subsets are prohibited. "Java is what we say it is today;
>tomorrow it may be some superset of today's definition; every Java
>implementation is required to keep on chasing our expansion of the
>language." Nicht wahr?
>

Sun's Java licensees (of which Microsoft was one) are bound by the
terms of Sun's Java technology license, which doesn't permit subsetting.
A JVM that is not a derivative of the Sun reference implementation
is completely unencumbered. One would be treading on thin intellectual
property ice to advertise it as a Java implementation. I suspect
that calling it an implementation of the Java language would be ok.
I presume the open source versions of Java are appropriately
unencumbered.



Jim Starkey