Poor old Android is having a bad year. (Especially compared to last year.) Apple's iPhone is soaring in China, and apparently overtaking Android in the crucial American market. Oracle's lawsuit against Google has led to several rather awkward claims, eg that the word 'license' in the phrase "we need to negotiate a license for Java under the terms we need" referred to "not a license from anybody", a kind of license with which I was previously entirely unfamiliar. CEO Larry Page's own testimony was labelled as evasive: "His denial of knowledge and recollection contrasts with evidence," wrote Florian Mueller of FOSS Patents. What a headache. Way back in 2005, Android head honcho Andy Rubin wrote in a prescient email:

“If Sun doesn’t want to work with

us, we have two options: 1) Abandon our work and adopt MSFT CLR VM and C# language – or – 2) Do Java anyway and defend our decision, perhaps making enemies along the way.” Just imagine if they'd taken the first road. It's not widely understood in the industry that Microsoft's .NET infrastructure is more open than Java in many ways; it and its flagship language C# are ISO and ECMA standards, available to anyone and everyone, legally bulletproofed by the Microsoft Community Promise. Imagine if the Android OS ran on an entirely different technical architecture. Wait, no. Don't imagine it: examine it. Like a vision from a parallel universe, it now exists....(Read more)