MS is playing a game here. There is no sovereignty issue involved at all since the emails in question are readily accessible by MS stateside. The question is one of access. MS is playing the locality card because they want to make the court order apply to a physical data center in Ireland when it does not...unless MS wants it to.
Its fairly common when there are orders for data or code to be turned over for companies to play cat and mouse with access issues.
For example, when being forced to turn over code printing the code out in a tiny illegible font and putting the reams of paper on a truck and delivering it that way. (Its been done many times)
Even if MS prevails this is not good for the internet. If big companies resort to storing data overseas this will be toxic for US based cloud services.
Unfortunately Paul you are just as engaged in wage suppression as the rest of the valley. There's no specific talent you need outside of the US. Its what your willing to pay you have a problem with.
If you want to miss the point focus on the headline. We all know there is no shortage of tech workers, theres a glut. Hundreds of thousands of jobs have been shipped overseas in the last 10 years, and for what benefit - zero, and we have VCs blowing millions of dollars into companies that want to let you order a pizza on your iphone.
Malinvestment rules the day in the US, that and outright wage suppression when little of value is ever created. Welcome home to America.
To see the difference between Swing and SWT just look at Intellij and Eclipse.
Intellij (use the darkula theme its beautiful), looks great and responds very quickly in both the editor and when performing asynchronous operations. (I have issues with some of its functionality but thats a different story). Intellij is Swing.
Eclipse, is a 2 second push to pain IDE and always has been. Its SWT. As a 15 year java developer I really believe anyone building on the eclipse/SWT framework needs to stop. There is no benefit to the user or the developer at this point to using it except to support a dead fork of the language. In fact there really are no (as in almost zero) SWT apps out there, so why would you think its even a good idea 10 years later? Go work for IBM submit a patch to eclipse. YAY.
I have built personally beautiful apps using Swing, and if Intellij can pull it off so well, clearly swing has gotten a bad rap.
My last nit pick is the exe concept. This is utterly moronic. Its a more or less straightforward concept to bundle a JRE with your app or use an installed local copy. People have only been doing this for oh I dunno, 13 or so years??
The Windows-ification of Java gets infinite down votes from me. The SWT part is merely a waste of time.
Its fairly common when there are orders for data or code to be turned over for companies to play cat and mouse with access issues.
For example, when being forced to turn over code printing the code out in a tiny illegible font and putting the reams of paper on a truck and delivering it that way. (Its been done many times)
Even if MS prevails this is not good for the internet. If big companies resort to storing data overseas this will be toxic for US based cloud services.