alt Hacker NewsNone of your opinion on Java changes the fact that Microsoft used it's monopoly to execute an embrace, extend, extinguish strategy on Java. It is well documented since they lost an anti-trust court case on it [1].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Microsoft_Cor....
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ThrowawayB7 • today at 6:21 AM
Back when the word hacker still meant something, that was the opinion of most hackers. Microsoft being bad guys did not make early Java versions good.
[EDIT] I'd actually say MS losing the J# lawsuit was a net positive since it gave Hejlsberg the opportunity to create C#.
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That lawsuit was overturned on appeal. The DOJ settled with Microsoft's offer to publish some APIs, instead of launching another trial.
The Java stuff wasn't even the craziest part. The whole thing from investigation to the appeal took the FTC and DOJ 11 years, where they were unable to kill of Microsoft's dominance of Internet Explorer through lawfare, but it only took Mozilla and later Google six years, nearly half that time, for an open-source web browsers to have more market share than Internet Explorer.
It turns out that a better product was all that was needed. It's too bad that the Mozilla Foundation has changed course and is now adamant that Firefox be as unusable as possible.