It's worth noting that Microsoft is aggressively pledging about patents, open sourcing with very clear and explicit licenses, and making industry-level promises that imply they're serious about making .NET Core an open and usable platform.
It would be nicer if there was a managed langauge platform that was not tied to an entity with a history of patent litigation, but let's not lose our sense of scale here. The degree to which Oracle has betrayed our community and tried to undermine the bearable status quo of the software industry to milk the Android ecosystem is as unforgivable as anything Microsoft has done in the darkest depths of the Balmer era.
OpenJDK remains an Oracle project and all contributors should sign the Oracle Contributor Agreement (OCA). Although, an agreement of this nature exists in some other open source communities. But I feel, hesitant to grant Oracle the following rights :
- License any patents bearing on your contributions to Oracle.
- Assert that you are legally entitled to grant Oracle these rights.
- Oracle have full copyright ownership of all the code in that project.
One possible way out will be something like Swift port to Android made by an open source contributor to Swift. Someone with deep knowledge of C# can take a stab at C# to Android. I'd think Google have very few C# people internally.
There already exists C# for Android, it recently became free too when Microsoft bought up Xamarin (the company formerly maintain Mono and the Xamarin Android and iOS wrappers). Microsoft is really pushing .NET Core and the open .NET platform, really an awesome move for developers.
What the parent wanted was official support from Google for Xamarin's Android API wrapper or a complete rewrite of core parts of the OS in .NET instead of Java. It seems fairly unlikely because of all the effort Google has invested in their Java VM and JIT/AOT compilers, but maybe that'll change.
I agree with most of it. But I personally think .net/C# simply to not bring enough advances over Java to even think of changing core parts. Most advantages that get mentioned are app developer conveniences.
So you replace one lawsuit-happy DB company with... another lawsuit-happy DB company.