Long interview with the principle architects of C#. (Who also wrote some obscure language called Turbo Pascal (which I once learned in an introductory computing science course (along with Modula) before SFU wised up and started teaching C)). Some very pointed jabs at java, of course:
I might point out that we're taking a true open standards approach with ECMA. When and if ECMA actually arrives at a standard for C# and a common language infrastructure, the result will be available under ECMA's copyright and licensing policies, which are truly open. Any customer, and any person, will be able to license the ECMA C# standard, subset it, superset it, and they won't have to pay royalties. They'll be able take it and go implement it on any platform or any device. We fully expect people to do that. That is something fundamentally different from our competitors who wandered around the standards bodies, looking for someone to rubber-stamp their proprietary languages.
If Microsoft does go ahead with this, Sun should (but probably won't) be deeply shamed, considering its own "yes we want a standards process but we still want complete control" approach to java.
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