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Monopoly corrupts. Absolute monopoly corrupts absolutely.





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Goofy software patents taken too seriously

Over at ZDNet, Ed Burnette discusses a blog post by James Gosling, who created Java while at Sun. He relates how Sun lost big on a court decision regarding a trivial IBM patent. Sun employees were soon after encouraged to flood the patent office with applications, and there seems to have been a competition on who gets the silliest patent.

Burnette conjectures that one of those goofy patents is in fact among those that Oracle, who recently acquired Sun, is suing Google over. Does this qualify as irony?


Comments

Can you provide any information on the IBM & Sun patent lawsuit? I tried looking for it and am coming up empty. I also tried searches for the history of RISC and Sun and there seem to be no mention of the lawsuit anywhere. Thanks.

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