I'm a bit behind the times here, but I read today that one of the two remaining developers of IronRuby has left Microsoft:
Overall, I see a serious lack of commitment to IronRuby, and dynamic language on .NET in general. At the time of my leaving Tomas and myself were the only Microsoft employees working on IronRuby.
http://blog.jimmy.schementi.com/2010/08/start-spreading-news-future-of-jimmy.html*
So if Microsoft's interest in dynamic languages is wilting, and Oracle's litigation scares everyone away from Java, will that leave Parrot as the last one standing?
* yep, that's a formatting bug. I assume that it's not worth reporting while the site's future is unclear.
Fork the JVM and call it something different.
Re:You know what I'd do?
Aristotle on 2010-08-21T04:12:22
Google did call theirs something different.
They’re being sued over patent violation.
Now Sun did extend a patent protection grant to conforming implementations of Java. And the JVM is conforming and free.
But the test suite that determines conformance is not free, or even available under any terms.
So good luck with that plan.
Re:You know what I'd do?
chromatic on 2010-08-21T17:08:19
In your opinion, is the patent grant of the GPL v2 insufficient protection?
Re:You know what I'd do?
Aristotle on 2010-08-22T13:22:26
Good question. I am only passingly familiar with that clause (I esp. don’t know how battle-tested it is); so I didn’t think of it, and can’t say right now. Passing the ball back to you – what do you think of it?
(Huh. If the GPL2 patent grant is strong enough for this, that would mean Android is actually more vulnerable than a JDK fork would be. Bizarre…)
Re:You know what I'd do?
chromatic on 2010-08-22T17:23:50
I discussed this with Simon Phipps once; I said I'd wished Jonathan Schwartz had given more direct promissory estoppel with regard to patents and free software. Simon suggested that anyone who received the JDK (for example) under the GPL was already a part of the JDK community and, therefore, subject to the patent licensing.
I'm insufficiently familiar with the differences between the GPL v2 and v3 with regard to patent licensing, but I believe it's possible to make a strong argument that making a program available under the GPL v2 offers promissory estoppel, at least from the copyright holder.
I'm not aware of any case law to this effect, however.
The irony of the vulnerability of Dalvik versus a fork of the JVM is indeed interesting.
