Re: Java? Java? What's that again?
C# itself is a Java clone made after Microsoft lost its litigation with Sun. Just MS did it different enough to avoid further litigation, and made its whole tooling stack on its own.
The Sun/MS case was different.
Sun's complaint was not that Microsoft was using the Java APIs without a licence -- Sun were quite happy for Microsoft to use the APIs and to produce their own version of standard Java -- it was that Microsoft had extended Java in such a way that would encourage Windows Java programmers to write MS-Java code that couldn't be compiled on a standard Java compiler or run on a non-Windows platform. Sun's goal with Java was portable code that could be run anywhere and Microsoft's extensions would have restricted Java code (that used the extensions) to Windows platforms. It would have been easy for a developer to write an application in MS Java thinking that as it was Java it would run anywhere, and only to discover that that was not the case when the time came to port the application to another platform.
Yes, C# is different from Java ... the most significant difference, from Sun's PoV is probably that it has a different name. Nobody is going to write a C# program thinking it will run on a standard JVM.
Google instead wanted to use the whole existing tooling stack to support Android development without investing too much, thereby it needed a 1:1 replacement of Java.
Methinks that that is in keeping with Sun's original goals for Java. The Java language isn't being changed or extended by anything that Google are doing, and any Java code written for Android that doesn't directly use Android APIs will be usable in Java apps on other platforms.
This is all in Java's -- and so in Oracle's -- best interest, but they're getting greedy. I hope they get slapped down.