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Sun Files Suit Against Microsoft for Anti-Trust Violations
Herve writes "Sun Microsystems announced it has filed a private antitrust lawsuit against Microsoft Corporation. The suit, filed March 8, 2002 in the United States District Court in San Jose, CA., seeks remedies for the harm inflicted by Microsoft's anticompetitive behavior with respect to the Java[tm] platform and for damages resulting from Microsoft's illegal efforts to maintain and expand its monopoly power. In June 2001, the Federal Court of Appeals found Microsoft guilty of illegally abusing its monopoly power with respect to Sun and the Java platform. Sun's suit seeks to redress the competitive and economic harm caused by Microsoft's illegal acts."
...the suit is also seeking access to the APIs used by Microsoft software and the IE source code.
Would be interesting to see if there are "hidden interfaces" exposed in the Windows API.
Unbundle tied products like Internet Explorer, IIS and
I think microsoft should be forced to release RFCs for anything proprietary that they use to extend their monopoly.
I for one would be so so so glad to see IIS go away permanently. Has microsoft even begun a next generation "secure" implementation of IIS yet?
An Education is the Font of All Liberty
Stright from MSNBC,
Sun sues for 1 billion!
http://www.msnbc.com/news/721268.asp?0cm=c30
For an opinion about this antitrust issue and Microsoft's behaviour check Cringley's column this week.
Pedro Côrte-Real.
Steve Case spent years whining about MS and trying to get the government to act. I've heard he's an Ayn Rand-style libertarian most of the time. It's good to see Sun actually trying to do something about the problem instead of pushing the DoJ to watch its back. I think parts of the federal antitrust suit were legitimate, but this type of thing may be better worked out between the companies themselves.
For all those of you just tuning in...
If Sun wins the suit, they stand to get treble damages, because MS has already been found guilty of abusing a monopoly.
Frankly, it's this type of stuff that's really going to put a serious drag on MS.
I do wish the JD and GWB would actually DO somthing about MS, but it appears that they won't. Hopefully the states will be able to continue. The reason I want this, is it seems, well unseemly, that Sun et. al. use this forum to get MS. Sure, MS deserves it, but it's not like Sun wouldn't be doing the same thing, should they be in MS's position.
It just seems better for the Gvmt to strike MS, and split the company. They should also levy massive fines, as the value of competing companies could have been very large - but instead they're bankrupt or playing the small time. (Think of DR-Dos, OS/2, Netscape, WordPerfect, Novell etc.)
Why do I think splitting the co is the right action? Well, that way the Gvmt doesn't have to be invloved in the day-to-day activites of the company. The problem now, is that what benefits MS's is often not what benefits the customers. It's better for MS to keep the client locked to Windows, and locked to Office, as well as all the other "tightly-integrated" MS apps - think tightly-insecure!
If the Office group were a separate company, then they wouldn't care who used office. Any copy sold was a buck in their pocket. So, port it anywhere it could sell decently. But right now, it's to their benefit (high stock-price, better profit sharing etc) to help sell Windows the OS. More Windows, more bucks. Don't sell office on other platforms that threaten Windows, because it cuts into your pay.
By breaking the company into smaller function specific pieces, we can align the best interest of the company with those of the consumer. Ala - a MARKET based solution - stemming from necessasary Gvmt intervention. That's the way it should be.
But, if our good old DOJ can't do it's job properly, I guess we'll just have to settle for a box or rats all biting each other to cut MS back to size. It's sure not pretty, but it'll probably help. I guess the guilty verdict is the the good thing to come out of this so far...
Cheers!
Microsoft pissed me off royally a while ago, in what I'm sure they would have called a "feature" but was probably, in reality, a way to counter Java somehow (even though this relates to JavaScript), or Netscape, or somebody. All it ended up doing for me was causing me unnecessary work.
Several years ago I was responsible for creating the website for my Dad's company. Just a small business thing, a source for information on their products, manuals, etc. After a while we started thinking that it would be great to have something that could help his customers choose which model best met their needs (a procedure my dad would spend 15 minutes on the phone to do), so I coded up what I considered a very nice little JavaScript program to do that. Worked great and without problems for about 2 years or so until the "latest and greatest" version of IE came out which "just happened" to have changed some of the JS commands around, and the program no longer worked for IE users. The day I discovered that probleam was the day I downloaded IEradicator and I haven't missed it since. And, coincidently, my dad sold his business and I didn't have to be bothered by that problem anymore.
Some men spend their entire lives trying to kill themselves for having been born. --Ross MacDonald
You can't really take sides. For several reasons:
On the one side:
1) MS has offered a decent VM from the start.
2) MS tried to screw people in adding uncompatible java calls (non-JNI) without labelling them properly. They were trying to break Java.
On the other side:
1) Sun VMs have taken a long time to match MS VMs in perfs.
3) Sun hasn't done much good in client-side support. Java applications are memory-hungry and just slow. Chances are that MS would have done better.
Hence, yes, Java has failed under Windows as a client application framework. Sun is to blame for that.
Microsoft did play hardball, but this was settled a long time ago.
Sun can't blame MS for Java's failures. Client-side Java failed under Linux too! Mozilla doesn't install Java by default!
This would be a lot more interesting if Java had been an open technology, not something controlled by Sun.
-- Find the Truth...
What took them so long? Going in to fight Microsoft in the courts isn't a fun thing to do. Sun has had experiance with this in the past. The legal costs will probably be large. It might also distract people from Sun's own message and product line. This is the sort of decision that has to be made with lots of care. I'd guess they had hope the courts would have smacked MS around a bit more, but decided they needed to step in since the administration has had the DOJ roll over and play dead.
The fact is - Sun's right. And Microsoft knows it.
However, since justice belongs to the highest bidder in this crony capitalist country - I predict Microsoft will successfully defend themselves against these warranted charges.
Naturally, this will employ tons of lawyers - and since they're tech lawyers, this is probably Good For The West Coast.
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[sorry about the prior post - hit the Enter key by mistake]
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--- Will in Seattle - What are you doing to fight the War?
The lawsuit is not about java. Most of the complaints relate to workgroup servers, web-browsers and productivity suites.
Does anyone know what became of the DR-DOS/Novell/Caldera complaint that Microsoft illegally tied the OS to the window manager (GUI)? I remember running Win95 on top of DR-DOS even though Microsoft claimed the window manager and OS were inextricably linked.
You know, as I understand it, the basic problem with Microsoft is that they use their market power to lock other people out, rather than compete with them.
Netscape: Hey OEM! We have this product! It's great! It adds value to your system! We'll license it to you cheaply! Please bundle it!
OEM: OK! Sounds Good!
Microsoft: Hey OEM! We don't want you bundling this product. Stop it or else we'll yank your Windows license... or maybe you'll just lose your "discount".
OEM(1): Yikes! We'll stop... hey, that IE 3.x product looks OK.
OEM(2): I don't know, our customers really like Netscape... maybe we could display IE prominently and still include Netscape?
Microsoft: Well, the price of producing Windows _is_ going up.... but you are a good customer, maybe we can work something out.
So it's easy to see that at first, Microsoft didn't compete on quality or even simply bundle. They tried to lock Netscape out. To a great degree, they were succesful. Netscape lost licensing revenues and mindshare which might have been used to fund good development....
But I don't see how this happened with Sun. Does Sun have contracts with OEMs to distribute JVMs or class libraries? Did they try, and were locked out? Or is it that they distributed with Netscape, and were locked out? Or are they still whining about incompatibilities with Microsoft's own terrible Java?
I may not know the facts here, but I don't see how Sun is a victim in the same way that Netscape is, much as I think Microsoft's business practices are deplorable.
Tweet, tweet.
1) Several folks say the previous Sun suit was to get Java off Windows. I beleive it was to force MS to follow the contract and keep the MS version 100% compatible with the established standards. When MS LOST that suit, they decided to pull all support. If Sun didn't want Java on windows they wouldn't have licensed it to them in the first place.
2) Did anyone consider that maybe the MS Java VM being faster than the Sun Java VM had something to do with MS not makeing their full APIs available for other companies to use? Just a thought.
Part of Microsoft's investment deal was Corel's agreeing to waive any future law suits. It may have saved them at the time but Sun's claim is peanuts compared to the damages Corel could have claimed due to Microsoft hijacking the Office suites market.
All may not be lost. Earlier this week news came out that the former antitrust chief under
New York AG, Stephen Houck, has joined the rebelling states' legal team, throwing Ballmer
and his legal eagles off balance. The NY AG's office was leading the
enquiry into the Office suites monopoly case until they shelved it to
concentrate in the still-lingering Netscape case.
The Office suite case files are there to be picked up again, and this
time MS has already been convicted of monopolist behaviour; it's just
the "remedy" that they're busy watering down, despite Enron hanging
over quite a few high-placed Republicans' heads.
If the Netscape case, as it would appear, gets sold down the river,
what are the chances that the angry states will try again using
heavier ammunition, such as WordPerfect Office? Or if Java is deemed worth billions
under a private antitrust case, what would the former main competitor
to Microsoft's profit center Office be worth?
Whatever rights Burney signed away in order to get that "life-saving
investment" from MS, surely those clauses can be annulled by any
fractionally competent lawyer. The second task would be get injunction
against MS-Office...
Of course someone would need to take over this company first, but
they'd get all the products, including the WPO, for practically
nothing! In this climate some high-profile law offices might even want
to take the private Office antitrust lawsuit on a commission basis. BTW Corel's market cap is a little over $250 mil while they have over $100 mil of cash. So for $150 investment someone could get a chance at a big settlement and the company/products would be a bonus. Anyone out there from IBM or AOL interested?
Today's vices may be tomorrow's virtues.
Which is the real joke here. Sun is crashing because of the competition from Linux, Microsoft is practically irrelevant to its market.
Sun grew fat during the Internet dotcom craze because there were lots of VCs out there throwing obscene amounts of money arround. The VCs would typically demand that their companies applied the latest, sexiest technologies - regardless of whether there was a point. Some friends of mine had to recode their system from Lisp to Java just to please their VC.
A lot of the startups were buying high end Sun gear because it pleased the VCs for whom Sun meant Java, meant 'sexy', meant a red hot IPO.
Today their are two factors that are causing trade to shift from Solaris to Linux. First Linux is now sexier than Java. If your VC demands buzword compliance then Linux is fine. Second companies no longer have unlimited amounts to spend on unnecessary hardware. A company like Google that uses low cost Linux/Intel boxes is thought of much better than one that blows money on Sun gear that costs much more.
Propietary UNIX is doomed. But Microsoft is not the reason, Linux is.
The only proprietary UNIX vendor I would put much faith in long term is Apple. They do have a major base of desktop software and they are the only folk in UNIXland who appear to understand what a user interface is. But even Apple may well end up having to jetison the quasi-proprietary kernel and moving to an open source core some day.
Sun's problems are not going to be solved even if they do force Microsoft to distribute Java. At this point .NET is rapidly becoming the hot issue for enterprise customers. While .NET has lots of hype features, the core advantage of .NET is it provides the means by which the WinTel market can transition from 32 bit x86 architecture to 64 bit Itanium.
A company can transition to using the .NET CLI with a simple re-compilation. The Java VM requires them to rewrite their application, it is a non-starter as an Itanium migration strategy.
Looking for an Information Security student project suggestion?
Try http://dotcrimeManifesto.com/
I'm still convinced that Sun's whining is not necessarily the real reason XP doesn't ship with the the JVM. The way I see it, by not including the JVM, but including support for MS-only scripting technologies, they passively discourage third parties from implementing with Java. The reason is fairly straightforward, if you are John Q. User who just bought a computer with XP Home, and you go to a site which requires Java, are you going to wait 20 minutes for the JVM to download and install? Probably not, however, if you go to an alternative site which makes heavy use of MS technologies, you can just surf right on, and will likely bypass all Java-enabled sites entirely. If your website is e-commerce in any way, would you want to use a technology which puts obstacles between you and your customers' money.
Microsoft's warning that the page won't display correctly if the JVM is not downloaded is similar to the error messages people got when they ran Windows 3.x on top of DR-DOS. It puts FUD into the users and steers them away from non-MS technologies.
In case of fire, do not use elevator. Use water!
NOW Sun is suing MS because MS isn't including their particular little technology into Windows?
Stop the circle, I want to get off.
Really, where else does this go? Can any company sue MS because they decided to not include something in their OS? I don't see any complaints that you can't install Java on your own, so any enterprise company that wants a Java solution on MS platforms can do it, it's just not bundled.
This is a load of horse-shit IMHO. If you want to accuse MS of abusing its monopoly power by bundling technology in, then fine. But don't tell me that their competitors can dictate what non-MS technologies have to be included in an MS product! That's the exact opposite of a market system!
Somedays it's just not worth chewing through the restraints...
KDE and GNOME exist outside of the market. They exist outside of the market due to the problems of competiting commercially against the "most compatible" player. No gratis-ware can be used to refute the existence of a monopoly. The fact that gratis-ware is the most likely competition against the market leader is infact a demonstration that the market leader enjoys a monopoly as defined by the Sherman Act.
I was suprised when I read this. It's not often an attitude shown on slashdot, but it is true. When it takes a completely free OS, with tons of completely free Applications, and free access to the source code of all these Applications, to get a tiny 1% market share, the market has failed miserably. I have tremendous respect for Linux and it's supporting projects, but it isn't a good example of how the market isn't being monopolized. BeOS, a commercial project which showed incredible potential, and had even met some of that potential(and I'm running it right now), on the other hand, is a good example of how it is monopolized.
It's been a long time.
MS's attitude was to leverage the Java language to make it easier for people to develop applications for Windows.
Sun's attitude was that Java was a platform, not just a language.
Most people were more interested in Microsoft's attitude than in Sun's, and when the lawsuit came on Microsoft, Microsoft developed a better solution for Microsoft (they could integrate the new solution with COM, C++, VB, and Windows APIs), left a legacy path to upgrade, and let the consumer decide which was better. It is still too early to decide which is better, but C# has a lot to love if you're an enterprise and you stuck with VB or COM based development, as so many have done. Legacy is Microsoft's friend here.
Microsoft has a platform that they make money selling. Sun has a platform that they hope will level the playing field. The unfortunate short-sightedness is that the client side is where everyone wants to be, but where Microsoft is. Making a platform that can't integrate with Windows will not be as successful as making a platform which does.
Microsoft integrated Java with Windows, and Sun screamed, "this is my platform, you can't attach it to yours".
Also, a lot of people are claiming that Microsoft doesn't document their APIs. This is bullshit. Anyone who makes this claim has never written any software for Windows. Any company that claims that they need to look at the source to a Microsoft program is admitting that they can't find out what they need from integrating against it. Obviously, Sun doesn't get this part. IE is an activex control that has more registry code and wrapper code than source code.
When Nullsoft Winamp came out, there was this thing called the Winamp browser. Yeah, that's the IE Activex control. If a tiny company bought by AOL could figure out how to put IE in their app, don't you think a giant company like Sun could figure it out? It's not hard or undocumented...
Yesterday, I downloaded the Windows Platform SDK. It was >200MB, and it included a lot of documentation. Yes, it isn't cheap to buy the development tools like Visual C++ or Visual J++, but they don't suck either.
I programmed in Java for a long time, and it was a great experience, but in the end, the performance sucked, and I got tired of Sun playing API swap on me. Microsoft playing API extend is a lot better. At least they never cut you off. You might have to bloat your install if the feature isn't in the next version of Windows (as is the case for Java), but such is life.
People should deal with reality, not complain about the past. Microsoft is a strong company that has cutting edge products and huge resources. I wouldn't call their stuff innovative, but I would say that it gets the job done, and it is worth the price.
Attitude is the least of my worries. When getting the job done is priority #1, I pick the guy who gets the job done.
Now watch my post get a score of -1, troll.
Just the score that a seasoned software developer gets who develops on a Microsoft platform when posting to Slashdot that they aren't evil to me.
Oh, yeah, that and I used Java for several years, and ate up bullshit like: Sun good, Microsoft evil for years, before a job required development on Windows. Now I have seen that the technologies aren't so different, and from a get the job done perspective, nothing should be preventing you from getting the job done with either. Nothing except incompetance.
Their JVM is better than the other ones I've used, which are Kaffe and Sun's Java for Linux. I run Matlab 6, which compiled pure java. In spite of the better process protection protection et all on Linux, the Linux version spits out all kinds of java class errors, and is slow as the dickens, while on Windows 98 it runs much better (until Windows OS-rot sets in, of course). And I also have to agree that Sun is no paragon of openness, but the part about submitting .NET to ECMA is pure FUD.
I can, right this very minute, go out and get any number of alternatives to their products for a wide variety of prices.
You are saying that you can go down to CompUSA, K-Mart, Wal-Mart, Ultimate Electronics, Sears or any other national retailer and buy a big name brand (IBM, HP, Compaq, etc.) desktop or laptop computer with "any number of alternatives" OS on it? I don't believe it at all! You must be shopping on some other planet. Excluding Apple, I have NEVER seen in ANY national retail store, ANY name brand PC with any OS except Windows. In fact I have asked several times if I could buy a PC without an OS on it and you can't even buy that. Until I can walk into Sears, K-Mart or Wal-Mart and buy a PC running Linux, BeOS, OS/2 or *BSD on it, Microsoft has a Monopoly.
Using exclusive contracts and binding OEMs to license argreements may sound odious, but those companies didn't have to sign them.
No, they could have chosen to go out of business instead.
They could have taken their business elsewhere.
Where else are they going to take their business? They can't sell enought PC's to stay in business, until there is a competitive OS that has enough users to sustain it. There aren't going to be enough users of an OS, until there are enough Apps for it. And there aren't going to be enough Apps for it until there are enough users to make it worthwhile for the developers.
The only way then for a competitor to Windows to break into the biz is to do what Be tried to do. Get a hardware manufacturer to put your OS on a machine alongside of Windows, until you have enough users for the developers to start making apps. Then once you've got the ball rolling and you have enough users THEN you have a viable alternative to Windows and the hardware manufacturers can tell Microsoft to stick their contracts.
But the thing is that all Microsoft had to do to maintain their monopoly was keep the hardware guys from ever putting another OS anywhere near a PC (as they did with Hitachi and Be). If you can enlighten us as to how Be could have (or any other alternative OS can) break into the market, I and many others would really like to hear it.
There is NO WAY you can convice me that there isn't a market out there for a competitor to Windows. Of all the people I know (most of them are in the computer business), I can count on one hand how many of them claim to like Windows. Wheras, I know a hundred or more who would drop Windows like a rock if they had a viable alternative. For an real good laugh (at Microsoft's expense) scope out the Operating System Sucks o' Rules Meter. That alone is enough to convince me that there is a market for an alternative to Windows, if somebody can stop Microsoft from continuing their monopoly maintaince tactics.
Finally, I want to say that choice is a *GOOD* thing. When there is no competition, there is no incentive to create a quality product. In fact it's quite the opposite, if there is no other choice they can keep selling you buggy version after buggy version because that's how they make money and you have NO other choice but to keep buying the upgrades. I firmly believe that if Microsoft didn't have *BSD and Linux breathing down their necks, Windows would be every bit as buggy and unreliable as it has been for years. (I'm talking about servers here.)
Personally, I think it's great that everybody is lining up to take a swipe at Microsoft. Bill and CO. have cheated their way to the top and they deserve every blow. I especially hope that Be gets a huge chunk of change from Microsoft, because it was truly a crime the way Bill & Co. deprived the world of an excellent computing platform.
As similar as they may seem, they have completely different origins. Read more here:
The origin of this new runtime environment lay in the little-noticed acquisition by Microsoft of Colusa Software in 1996. Co-founded by Steven Lucco, Colusa had released a product in 1995 called OmniVM based on research carried out by Lucco at Carnegie Mellon University. OmniVM was a virtual machine environment that offered two distinct advantages over early versions of Java. Firstly, by avoiding interpretation and using a virtual RISC architecture it provided near-native code execution performance. Secondly, it implemented robust 'application' isolation via a virtual memory manager. This made it a very safe environment for running 'legacy' and 'mobile' code. What caught Microsoft's eye was that, partly in order to support the porting of legacy code to the virtual environment, Colusa had produced both C/C++ and Visual Basic development environments.
And here:
On March 12th of 1996, Microsoft bought Colusa Software, the maker of Omniware and OmniVM. For several years, Microsoft has been quietly developing Colusa's universal virtual machine and waiting for the right time to deploy it.
And here:
Microsoft Research is developing a virtual machine, which it calls CVM, based on technology it acquired a couple of years back when it bought Colusa Software Inc. Colusa originally was building a run-time language similar to Visual Basic. But CVM goes beyond this; it will act as a virtual machine running on multiple platforms that can run programs written in C++, Visual Basic, Java and other languages.