Microsoft Ordered to Carry Java

An anonymous reader was the 17,232th person to submit that "Microsoft has been ordered to include Sun's Java runtime in Windows. Coverage from AP (via Yahoo), Reuters (via news.com), and, let's say, the BBC."

Comments

Hilarious!

[Anonymous Coward]

"An anonymous reader was the 17,232th person to submit that 'Microsoft has been ordered to include Sun's Java runtime in Windows. Coverage from AP (via Yahoo), Reuters (via news.com), and, let's say, the BBC.'"

Come on, that just struck me as funny.

I can easily imagine those many thousands of geeks going "OMG I MUST SUBMIT THIS TO /. NOW!!" ;-)

Re:Hilarious!

[LineNoiz]

I thought it funny too... Shouldn't it be 17,232nd?

Re:Hilarious!

[josephgrossberg]

Or millions of geeks going "Dammit! Where's the Slashdot discussion, so I can whine publicly!"

Re:Hilarious!

[Anonymous Coward]

It is hardly redundant. Look at the time, it was clearly the first mention of it. The first time it is posted, its funny. Every time after that, it is redundant.

Of course, the idea of joking about the editor's grammar capabilities might be redundant. Oh well, stil a waste of mod points.

(No, I'm not the original poster.)

Re:Hilarious!

[SEWilco]

17,232

I welcome the new Slashdot Submission Accounting System.
I'm sure the system which tallies the duplicate submissions also will detect and block the duplicate acceptance of articles.

Unfair

[I Am The Owl]

What's wrong with people just downloading it for themselves? This seems like unecessary government intrusion.

Re:Unfair

[tempfile]

Simple: By not including Java, Microsoft abuses its monopoly power to push ActiveX.

Re:Unfair

[Anonymous Coward]

Hah! Deal with it, Microsoft lackey! Sun 0wnz j00!! Java hax0rz in effect, f00!

Re:Unfair

[Exmet Paff Daxx]

I'll tell you what unnecessary government intrusion is. Unnecessary government intrusion is the DMCA legislating away our right to think critically and speak freely. Unnecessary government intrusion is the "War on Terror", a war on a verb, mind you, which can only be won by injecting drugs into every American which prevents fear regardless of stimulus. Unncessary government intrusion is the Office of Total Information Awareness, a Poindexter-led database of our SSN cross indexed to our freaking chest X-rays to our cell phone locations.

No, this is not "unncessary government intrusion". This is just a court trying to restore our basic unalienable right to a software language that isn't owned by a giant corporation like Microsoft.

Re:Unfair

[SweetAndSourJesus]

I think what he's getting at is that it shouldn't be Microsoft's responsibility to make sure Java is there. I don't understand how Sun managed to create a product and then demand that it be included with it's competitor's product.

That's just nuts, if you ask me (which you didn't).

Re:Unfair

[Mantorp]

"Unnecessary government intrusion is the "War on Terror", a war on a verb, mind you"

To terror or not to terror...hmm? Can't resist urge to nitpick......sorry.

Re:Unfair

[Master Bait]

Sun and Microsoft made an signed agreement many years ago for Microsoft to have the rights to include a JDC compliant Java in their OS. Microsoft produced an incompatable JDC in their typical 'embrace and extend' methodology. Therefore Microsoft violated the terms of their agreement with Sun.

Of course, in some people's eyes, Microsoft can do anything it wants because it is above the law and are therefore the corporate heros of a 'free society'. Under those circumstances, the only one who is 'free' is Microsoft and them alone.

Re:Unfair

[Dan Guisinger]

Hey Dummy, that agreement was superceeded by an agreement that Microsoft could not include the latest and greatest versions of Java as part of a settlement, and that Microsoft was only allowed to distribute their older java runtime for a few more years. It never said they were required to carry anything, and Microsoft is currently obiding by that settlement.

Re:Unfair

[jedidiah]

They're an abusive monopoly. The rules are different for them due to the DAMAGE that such an entity can do to our economy. Even in the absence of any other agreement, Microsoft shouldn't get to profit from illegal activity that is contrary to fundemental American public policy ideals (IOW, the free market).

When Microsoft is no longer in a position to extort the likes of IBM to drop their own competitive product (OS/2), then Microsoft can freely abuse it's customers againt.

Re:Unfair

[Zeinfeld]

I think what he's getting at is that it shouldn't be Microsoft's responsibility to make sure Java is there. I don't understand how Sun managed to create a product and then demand that it be included with it's competitor's product.

I don't think this is going to last long for a variety of reasons. IANAL but, heck this is slashy

First a preliminary injunction is subject to a number of tests, Sun has to have a better than even chance of winning the case, refusing the injunction would have to cause more harm than granting it might and so on.

I don't think the claim that sun are harmed holds water. It was their previous action that caused Microsoft to stop shipping the Java VM.

Microsoft have a very strong case that Sun suffers no harm if the status quo continues and that they would suffer substantial harm. Java is active code and active code has historically been subject to lots of security risks - including Java.

Secondly, I don't think that the judge's mention of Tonya Harding helps. The statements create an impression of bias. Equally the statements appear to go way beyond the issues that should be considered where a preliminary injunction are concerned and tend to indicate that the judge has formed a judgement before the hearing...

I don't have much sympathy for Sun here. It may be the US way for failing companies to go to the government or courts to try to win there what they failled to win in the market but it didn;t do Netscape any good. Scott is driving sun into the ground with his Microsoft obsession, the competition that will erase Sun completely comes from Linux and Apple. I am not an Apple fan but they are the worlds largest UNIX vendor by far, they have a solid O/S and if they can only get a powerful processor they can clean up the market for closed source Unix.

Re:Unfair

[harlows_monkeys]

I think what he's getting at is that it shouldn't be Microsoft's responsibility to make sure Java is there

The thing is, Microsoft has been shipping Java, but an old version. Combined with their monopoly, that effectively makes that version of Java the version that programmers must code to.

I'be been playing around with 1.4 on Windows and Linux, and for a lot of things, it is quite nice, actually. The JIT has dealt with the performance problems of the past. However, I can't actually use 1.4 for anything we put on the web, because of all those Microsoft JVM's out there.

And before anyone says to just have my users download 1.4 from Sun, that's 9 meg. 9 meg is too big for modem users. There is a strong negative correlation between download size and download completions, and 9 meg is way into the high failure territory.

Re:Unfair

[Anonymous Coward]

Just download it, java.sun.com. Why the fuck should it come in a competitor's product? Once again, stupid gov't, stupid slashdot readers. I hate you all.

Re:Unfair

[Anonymous Coward]

Be careful. He's going to terror you up.

Re:Unfair

[SweetAndSourJesus]

It isn't Microsoft's fault that the JVM is 9 megs. There are a hell of a lot of things I've got to download to do my job, that's life.

Real Player is a big mofo too, and nobody wants to wait to download it. Does Microsoft have to include this? How about QuickTime? How about any of the countless software titles not included with Windows? Is there some sort of free ride onto Windows install discs that only Sun is entitled to? Is it just languages? Can ActiveState demand that a Perl interpreter be included with Windows?

I see your point, that Microsoft is stunting Java's growth, but that's life. I don't think my tax dollars should be spent ensuring that Microsoft plays fair, because they aren't going to anyway.

Re:Unfair

[Anonymous Coward]

Why should Microsoft carry a program that's crap? Half the Java stuff I went to refused to load under Sun's plug-in but went just fine under the Virtual Machine from MS. They're spouting the same crap Apple did about Windows 9x and Quicktime v3. MS didn't sabotage it. Apple just wrote it crappy (big shock there). It's the same way with Sun's Java implementation.

I sooooooo hope MS or a cohort comes up with a translator like the Pascal2C one that comes with Linux that will convert Java to a .NET language.

And if you look up terror in the Dictionary, you'll see it's a noun. I cannot terror you. I can terrorize you.

And yes, this is government intrustion. It's them telling me I cannot make a choice. Bill Gates' analogy of forcing Coke to carry cans of Pepsi in every twelve pack.

If Sun is to succeed, let it be on its own merits, not because MS was court ordered to allow them to ride in on coat tails.

Re:Unfair

[Anonymous Coward]

It is their responsibility because they agreed to do it in the first place, then decided to change Java to suit them, then Sun sued them and now it has forced them to honour the original agreement. Check your background information.

Re:Unfair

[Anonymous Coward]

apparently not since the judge ruled in Sun's favor d8)

Re:Unfair

[viol8r_dk]

The real problem is not getting them to download the 1.4 version, users will do anything you tell them - the problem is that once they have done that - 90% of all online-homebanking (those ie-only ones) stop working, because they been coded specificly for MS' JVM.

And you can't really ask users to change their JVM 2-3 times a day... ;-/

Re:Unfair

[Anonymous Coward]

Nobody has to (or necessarily does) program for an older version of Java (which is largely backward-compatible anyway) as it is free to download and distribute. No serious developer will be stupid enough to use any version of Java simply because it ships with Windoze, in fact I reckon not shipping Java at all will benefit Sun, firstly it shows that Microsoft is stupid and can't see the credibility it would gain, secondly Sun would attract more website traffic. No matter what M$ does, it will never get rid of or outdo Java, .Net is a lame attempt to offer a substitute, but will never have the edge over Java because java's appeal is based on cross0-platform. The sooner M$ realises it cannot rule the world and focusses on it's strengths rather than trying to push out others who threaten it's weaknesses, or hey maybe even come up with something thats better? If M$ was Australian based instead of American the ACCC would have had them by the balls long ago. You americans allow your senators and congressman to be paid off and the only vote that counts is the $Dollar amount paid by business to political parties. Fuck Bill Gates and his honchos, I know I will live to see the day they fuck off into obscurity, and what a day that will be.

Re:Unfair

[Anonymous Coward]

Its about obligation and copyright, dumbo. M$ screwed Sun in the contract to supply a jvm, now Sun wants recompense. That's life, deal with it.

Re:Unfair

[Anonvmous Coward]

"The rules are different for them due to the DAMAGE that such an entity can do to our economy."

Ever think about how much damage would be done to the economy if MS suddenly folded? I'll give you a hint: It's not guaranteed the world would be a better place.

Re:Unfair

[Anonymous Coward]

You shouldn't call others people dumb if you can't even spell 'abiding'.

You might also note that the previous poster didn't claim that Microsoft was required to carry anything, and the 'agreement' (really a court order) was that Microsoft couldn't include the latest and greatest incompatible bastardization of Java. Read the actual settlement text, not the 'summary' at Microsoft.com.

Re:Unfair

[Rinikusu]

Actually, it's not the idea that they can do anything they want because they are "above" the law: they should be able to do anything they want with THEIR PRODUCT, including the decision to not include other people's products. It really was summed up with the statement that someone whom I've forgotten said that it's like Coca-Cola being forced to include a Pepsi in every six pack.

Now, if MS bound themselves contractually to Sun and violated that contract, then they SHOULD be forced to obey that agreement. However, once that contract is fulfilled, they should be able to say "fuck you, McNealy" and not distribute Java by default.

Re:Unfair

[Master Bait]

The superceeded agreement you speak of is the injunction Sun got forcing Micros**t to stop including their own 'embrace and extend' version of Java. Geez, the spin doctors never sleep, do they?

Re:Unfair

[Anonymous Coward]

So, then, shouldn't the legal action center on forcing Microsoft to fulfill their agreement by making their Java implementation JDC compliant and paying out damages to SUN for the amount of time it was in violation of the agreement?

It seems this goes above and beyond awarding damages for a breach of contract. This seems to be forcing MS into another agreement (what is it that SUN wants, 10 years?) rather than punishing them for their contract violation or trying to enforce the contract?

Re:Unfair

[Doubting Thomas]

Isn't that sort of like the idea that, say, Dell, or Gateway, should be able to do anything they want with THEIR PRODUCT, including the decision to not include other people's products?

Re:Unfair

[Physics Dude]

It was their previous action that caused Microsoft to stop shipping the Java VM.

No, it was Microsoft's bastardization of their Java VM that caused them to stop shipping the Java VM.

Microsoft's platform dependent extensions to their Java VM were against their contract with Sun, and when Microsoft was barred from spreading their bastardization, they said they wouldn't include ANY version of the Java VM and tried to claim it was all Sun's fault for upholding their contract to keep Java platform neutral. Apparently a lot of people bought the claim hook, line and sinker.

Microsoft's press releases sounded like Sun was barring them from shipping Java, when it was only Microsoft's bastardized version that was being barred!

Java is active code and active code has historically been subject to lots of security risks - including Java.

Compared to what??? I haven't seen such a clueless statement in a long time. Please go get yourself a book on Java's security model.

Re:Unfair

[Rinikusu]

You betcha. Unfortunately for them, they signed exclusivity contracts with MS so they could get "discounted" pricing schemes. The kicker is that MS then absolves themselves of any and all responsibility for MS products placed on the machine. As a former Dell technician, it was drilled into us that it's not MS Windows, it's DELL Windows (licensed from MS). OR something like that. It's not my fault they make shitty decisions. :P

Re:Unfair

[Anonymous Coward]

And Microsoft was found in violation of that agreement and was required to pay Sun $20,000,000 as well as phase Java completely out of it's products. Microsoft did that.

Re:Unfair

[mysticgoat]

Ever think about how much damage would be done to the economy if MS suddenly folded?

Now come back to the real world. If there was any risk of Microsoft folding from any kind of marketplace pressures, the courts would not have found Microsoft to be a monopoly.

Re:Unfair

[Anonvmous Coward]

"Now come back to the real world. If there was any risk of Microsoft folding from any kind of marketplace pressures, the courts would not have found Microsoft to be a monopoly."

Hardly conclusive. Lack of vulnerability due to economic pressures is not a requirement of a monopoly.

Re:Unfair

[civilizedINTENSITY]

" I don't think the claim that sun are(sic)harmed holds water. It was their previous action that caused Microsoft to stop shipping the Java VM."

But that previous action to which you refer was actually a reaction to MS's "...extend, extinguish", which was an illegal violation of their aggreement.

Re:Unfair

[thx2001r]

I agree 100% with you. Because DELL is in the business of making money! Their "discounted" pricing schemes help them run that much leaner. That's why DELL is doing so much better financially than its competitors and its profit margins are so much higher.

Besides, as a DELL technician, I'm sure you didn't get phones ringing off the hook asking for Linux. I would venture to guess that most of the people that want to install other OS's on their machines fall into this category of build it yourself. Linux and other similar OS's are fantastic but are so far a niche market (for consumer PC sales). Hobbyists and enthusiasts will enjoy them while others probably will ask what the big deal is... "You mean I can't install my screensaver I've used for the last 3 years?"

In fact, most people I know that buy computers build their own and see some of the all-integrated component PC's that DELL (no offense), and Gateway, and HP-Compaq mainly sell as somewhat inferior and outdated to what they can build on their own (for less, in most cases). Or, in other cases, they own lots of components already and just upgraded a few pieces at a time (new Motherboard, CPU, and memory every few years (cause how often do you need to upgrade your CPU case, or CRT, or keyboard, or mouse, or printer, speakers, or CD drive? I'm not a gaming enthusiast and upgrading my MB, CPU, and memory typically gives the necessary extra punch to do the job) recycling the ones that don't need upgrading.

Re:Unfair

[Mansing]

Sun wasn't a "failing company" when they brought suit against Microsoft.

And, as far as I know, Sun isn't a "failing company" today.

Or maybe I missed that memo?

Re:Unfair

[plague3106]

they should be able to do anything they want with THEIR PRODUCT

Until it becomes a monopoly, at which point they lose some control.

Re:Unfair

[harlows_monkeys]

Real Player is a big mofo too, and nobody wants to wait to download it. Does Microsoft have to include this? How about QuickTime?

Microsoft has not been shipping an old version of Real Player of Quicktime. They have been shipping an old version of Java.

I see your point, that Microsoft is stunting Java's growth, but that's life. I don't think my tax dollars should be spent ensuring that Microsoft plays fair

It sounds like your beef is with antitrust law in general, rather than this particular application of it.

Re:Unfair

[Anonymous Coward]

IBM the company that created the fearsome force, and the company that is now fighting that same force. Ofcourse IBM won't, there atleast on major company that figured out that Linux = GOOD.

Re:Unfair

[theCat]

Since you bring it up, nobody knows what would happen if M$ folded up. But I can tell you this much, before M$ came along companies were churning out revolutionary software and services, and M$ still haven't added much to the mix. On the way to buying everything in sight and vaporwareing their way to infamy they have certainly killed off some interesting products that came too close to their core interests. If you don't think that's true then you don't understand fully why they are being called on the carpet as a monopoly.

People think that rich companies are good for the economy. If Big Blue had killed the PC somehow would our economy be better now? IBM was rich, still is, so why not kill the PC? Or how about the Bell system. Got their asses kicked, and good thing. Otherwise do you seriously think your silly cell phone technology would have ever taken off? The Bell system was rich, but that didn't make for a great economy and fabulous options in personal communications. Did it.

You like M$, you can have them. You want to Be Like Bill, have at it. It's just money, it's not progress. Some of us still know the difference.

Re:Unfair

[bmetzler]

Unfortunately for them, they signed exclusivity contracts with MS so they could get "discounted" pricing schemes. [...] As a former Dell technician, it was drilled into us that it's not MS Windows, it's DELL Windows

So what you are saying is that Dell is somehow bound to honour a contract because they signed it as a contractee of Microsoft? But, as a contractee, it's not a problem that Microsoft not honour contracts they sign?

Or are you saying that Dell really legally didn't need to honour their exclusivity contract? Actually, I'm sure that if Dell broke their contract with MS, they have an injunction filed against them, just like Microsoft has.

-Brent

Re:Unfair

[shaitand]

When the product is the instrument of a monopoly yes. With any technology microsoft wants to put on the windows monopoly bandwagon they must also include competing products. That's the idea, they have a monopoly, they no longer have the right to use windows to push their products. Windows is an illegal monopoly and if used to push anything it must also be used to push that somethings competitors to promote fair competition. They've lost their right to promotion via windows through lying, cheating, stealing, and forcing it into a state where it has become an illegal monopoly.

Re:Unfair

[Rinikusu]

Um.. You know.. I'm not sure what you're getting at, but if you read my initial post above you'd see that I fully SUPPORT enforcement of contract law. However, most people don't even read the articles, I should be surprised if they actually read the comments, either. Don't worry, I've found myself guilty of the same offense. Contracts are legally binding. Of course, then there's EULA's and that whole mess....

Re:Unfair

[bmetzler]

I'm not sure what you're getting at, but if you read my initial post above you'd see that I fully SUPPORT enforcement of contract law.

Ah, I'm sorry. I misunderstood your comment. I though you were contrasting Dell's contract with Microsoft to Microsoft's contract with Sun. But you were really comparing them. I'm glad you corrected me that you support this injunction.

A lot of these comments are really bogus and it's getting late....

-Brent

Re:Unfair

[Anonymous Coward]

Hey Dan, don't you know it's unprofessional to quote the MS Marketing machine like that?

This post is brought to you by 7-11. Drink 7-11 coffee, because it's the best in the world.

Re:Unfair

[Rinikusu]

No shit. I gotta be at work at 5AM. :(

Re:Unfair

[Anonymous Coward]

Java is active code and active code has historically been subject to lots of security risks - including Java.

I agree there. Code constantly under development is usually pretty prone to security risks. That's why I'm so mother fucking happy that Windows never has to release a single fucking security update. What fucking planet are you on ass clown? IE's got shit coming out of the wood works here and it's five fucking years into production. The holes found in Java today are piddly compared to the gaping bullshit I see in IE on a weekly basis.

Scott is driving sun into the ground with his Microsoft obsession, the competition that will erase Sun completely comes from Linux and Apple. I am not an Apple fan but they are the worlds largest UNIX vendor by far, they have a solid O/S and if they can only get a powerful processor they can clean up the market for closed source Unix.

How big was the fucking crack rock you smoked this morning? Linux is -NOT- a threat to the Sun industry. Linux runs on cheap assed x86 based hardware (and more.. but x86 is where it's cost effective)... for mid-grade server environments and clustered computing. Go to Sun's online store sometime. They've got shit in "entry level" listed at over 30k per box. That is NOT Linux's market. I love Linux -- it's great.... but it ain't cut out for the big iron yet. Any ass clown that tries to throw Linux on an E10k deserves to get taken out behind the office and flogged.

Who the hell is he going to go after besides Microsoft anyway? I mean shit -- with all the marketshare out there on the desktop that MS doesn't have he could yank all the business form the Linux crowds and half the business from Apple and have a giant fucking 4% of all desktops around the world! Yippee fucking do! There's a business plan for ya. Fuck going after the majority -- the real money's to be made with the 4% of hobbiest out there that actually care about their OS.

And for Apple and OSX -- Why the fuck do you think Sun's so pissed off? They have absolutely -NO- chance of getting in on the desktop marketshare with Microsoft in charge of shit. Apple's got their niche market that dwindles down as time goes on. I work with people that deal with technology every friggen day and have no idea how to work a Mac or why they're so nice. That's a friggen monopoly -- plain and simple.

Furthermore -- Where the hell do you think OS/X came from? They yanked the OS right from FreeBSD and put it on the PPC architecture. There's no way in Heaven or Hell that Apple could devote the kind of money it would have taken to get OS/X off the ground w/out the work of the FreeBSD group and the whole open source community. Why? Because there's a fucking giant gorilla running around crushing all commercial competion. How sad is that? Your stellar OS's foundation is based of the free work of hackers around the world because that's the -only- way you can compete with Microsoft.

Yes, Microsoft dominated the market. Yes they got there through shrewd business tactits. But -- they gained a monopoly and ABUSED that. Plain and simple. As a technolgoy worker I am forced, like it or not, to get down on my knees and suck the dick labled "Microsoft" now and then simply because they're a monopoly. I'm sick of sucking their cock and taking it in the ass -- fuck them. I'm a libertarian by nature but this has go to go. They're not doing any good for the tech industry nor the consumer. I'm all for the government coming in here and telling them what to do with their desktop. It's the only thing in the world that actualy has the force -TO- do it. The consumer can't -- that's plain and simple and has been proven in a court of law.

I get irate about this stuff; obviously. It amazes me that somebody that can actually use a keyboard would swallow anything less than a "thrash MS to death" mentality.

Re:Unfair

[Raffaello]

Monopoly market power is, by legal definition, the ability to price products without regard to the price of cometetitors' offerings.

So, yes, lack of vulnerability to market forces *is* a part of being a legal monopoly.

In this discussion, it's useful to know what a monopoly is in legal terms. Hint: it doesn't mean you have no competition whatsoever. It does mean that your competition is so marginal in the market, that they don't affect your pricing, so you can ask, and get, excessive prices for your wares.

Re:Unfair

[ceejayoz]

Unnecessary government intrusion is the "War on Terror", a war on a verb, mind you

Actually, "terror" is a noun. Nice troll, though.

By the way - you don't see Sun getting a free ride on Microsoft's OS because of a court decision as being "unnecessary government intrusion"?

Re:Unfair

[stefanlasiewski]

Java ISN'T broken on Windows, its a seperate add-on.

The version of Java that Microsoft included with Windows was broken (It didn't comply with the Java spec), and was included with Windows.

Why are THEY special.

Because THEY signed a contract, and MS must obey the contract.

Re:Unfair

[Anonymous Coward]

Hey Cocksucker. You seem to be forgetting one small, minor detail in all of this..that being that Microsoft is a FUCKING CRIMINAL CORPORATION, with a rap sheet that's growing every day. Personally, I think most of the executives at Microsoft Inc. need a swift kick to their respective, gender-appropriate genitalia, but you know what? Being forced to allow their competitors to survive without being trampled all over, that's kind of nice. What with them actually BREAKING THE GOD DAMNED LAW to eliminate said competitors and all.

By the way, you spelled superseded and abiding wrong. And sorry to call you Cocksucker, my colloquial friend, but I thought we were on a first name basis.

Re:Unfair

[Anonymous Coward]

You're right, it's not a prerequisite.

It's a symptom.

Re:Unfair

[Anonvmous Coward]

Um right. Never mind that MS's era rushed millions of PCs into people's homes, they stifled innovation and other bs.

Face it, before Win95 PCs were not a mass market item. If MS hadn't have succeeded, niether would have quite a few companies in its wake. My comments have nothing to do with liking MS, rather I'm not interested in joining the "MS SUCKS!" club so I can be cool.

Re:Unfair

[Anonvmous Coward]

I misread your post. When I read 'marketplace pressures' I thought you meant events like 9-11. I'm sorry. I didn't sleep well last night.

Re:Unfair

[t]

I see that you've made this story your personal agenda.

The version of Java shipping with windows is broken crap. Everyday that it ships people continue to experience it and think that it is Sun's fault for that broken crap. Therefore it is Sun's reputation being damaged by MS's actions. The argument is not weak since this would be similar to slander. Please note that it's perfectly okay for Sun to fuck up their own reputation.

Also, MS is not an "illegal monopoly". They are however a monopoly. They were also found to be abusing that fact. You obviously do not understand what you are bitching about.

Re:Unfair

[ClosedSource]

Sorry, guy, but MS is not a criminal corporation, fucking or otherwise.

Re:Unfair

[unapersson]

"It isn't Microsoft's fault that the JVM is 9 megs. There are a hell of a lot of things I've got to download to do my job, that's life."

Isn't the .NET download about 15MB?

Re:Unfair

[shaitand]

they are still on trial for their illegal monopoly, they are very much STILL an illegal monopoly.

Re:Unfair

[t]

"I'm sorry maam, this man killed your son but that was five years ago. Too late to do anything about it now."

The damage has been and continues to be done. The best the court can do is to stop the "continues" portion of the damage.

If you are quite read on the case, why do you continue to bring up Apple and operating systems in general? They are not relevant to the discussion in the least bit since MS is a monopoly in operating systems on x86. Bringing up Apple in that context is like bringing up Nintendo.

Is your entire argument hinging on the fact that perhaps today .NET is not distributed with the operating system? How much would you like to bet that it will soon be included in an upcoming operating system? I'm willing to bet anything. You?

And finally, no one cares what fantasies you have about MS being a monopoly. The reality that the rest of us live in is that the court issued a findings of fact that says they are. End of discussion.

Re:Unfair

[todhsals]

Every post like yours reveals a serious lack of understanding for how the US economy is managed by the government. Capitalism has serious flaws that have revealed themselves throughout history. The US government has taken many steps to foster, protect and manage its psudo-capitalist economy. These steps include patent laws, the Federal Reserve and yes, even antitrust laws.

The repercussions of a government not managing its economy are a lesson you should have received in grammar school.

I can clearly understand how someone could disagree with the particular policies of government or the ruling of the court. I don't know how anyone with a rudimentary education could not understand the fundamental issue of why the US does not have the kind of free-for-all, do-as-you-please economic system you seem to think exists.

Re:Unfair

[Zeinfeld]

How big was the fucking crack rock you smoked this morning? Linux is -NOT- a threat to the Sun industry. Linux runs on cheap assed x86 based hardware (and more.. but x86 is where it's cost effective)... for mid-grade server environments and clustered computing. Go to Sun's online store sometime. They've got shit in "entry level" listed at over 30k per box.

Go tell that to the folks at symbolics, the price points are even the same. Oh and symbolics had their best year the year before they went under.

There is no high end in the computer business, never has been. The high end suppliers have always been killed by competition from below. That is what happened to SGI, you can go to Frys today and buy a $400 video card with a rendering engine that is more than adequate for most professional uses so why pay $30K for an SGI workstation?

Furthermore -- Where the hell do you think OS/X came from? They yanked the OS right from FreeBSD and put it on the PPC architecture.

Actually OS/X is NextStep which is the MACH kernel plus the original BSD distribution. 4% of the desktops is a heck of a lot more machines than 30% of the high end servers. If the desktops are so irrelevant then why the paranoia about Microsoft?

I get irate about this stuff; obviously. It amazes me that somebody that can actually use a keyboard would swallow anything less than a "thrash MS to death" mentality.

You don't say. Perhaps you should try an anger management class or a 'how to flame coherently on slashdot' course.

Re:Unfair

[t]

Hilarious, is that your argument strategy? Say it enough times and it'll be true?

So exactly why is my example about the son being killed a "strawman"? Would you not punish the killer? Are you saying that if there was no possibility of the killer committing future murders that you would not punish him? How magnanimous of you.

Your counter examples to the Finding of Facts are silly. That case was tried, reviewed, and reviewed some more. On appeal the courts said that the they agreed with the Finding of Facts, just not the punishment.

The DMCA is a product of congress not the courts. Big distinction. In fact, in the first test of the DMCA with the Dmitri case, the courts found that it did not hold. So yes, I guess I do agree with the courts about the DMCA.

Similarly, your other examples are confusing laws with what the courts found. Well, except for OJ, where corrupt cops and bad handling destroyed the evidence. Not to mention that that was a jury case versus review by a highly intelligent judge.

And why is Nintendo a stupid example? If I had a Gamecube with net access and a disk that had a web browser and a java engine, it would have about as much compatibility with the world of Microsoft Windows as Apple has. Not much. That is the reality of the world.

I don't need to say whether Microsoft is a monopoly or not, the facts stand on their own.

Re:Unfair

[gotr00t]

Actually, of course it would be unfair for a competitor to be forced to hold your product, but this is really not all the case in this matter. Microsoft has went great lengths to discredit Java, and mutilate it so that it would not work very well on some M$ platforms (they all start with Wi, end with a 2 character alphanumeric sequence)

I dont get this...

[dnaumov]

I really don't get this. Why is MSFT forced to include a piece of software written by their competitor into their Operating System ? I know that having a monopoly places restrictions on what you can and can't do, but I was not aware they can go THAT far.

Re:I dont get this...

[dnaumov]

And to add...yes I think this was an UNFAIR decision to make MSFT do this. Would YOU like it to have someone else force your shop to GIVE AWAY competitors products ?

Re:I dont get this...

[bubbha]

Seems to me that MS should have to compensate Sun in this manner for their preditory practices.

Re:I dont get this...

[geek]

I think it was an "all or nothing" solution. MS wants to include a broken Java, SUN says no, they have to carry a real Java VM.

I think what the decision means is that if MS is going to include Java in it's OS's they have to include the OFFICIAL Java from SUN and not the broken one they released.

I could have read it wrong tho

Re:I dont get this...

[Exmet Paff Daxx]

Why is MSFT forced to include a piece of software written by their competitor into their Operating System?

That's simple; Java is Free and Open like the GPL!!

Re:I dont get this...

[bubbha]

The punishment fits the crime.

Re:I dont get this...

[swschrad]

because of the usual Microsoft strategy... agree to bundle something from somebody else, but "revise and extend" it with proprietary MS hooks, put out development tools that cross-operate invisibly with other MS dev tools, and co-opt the other guy's trademark into another proprietary MS lockdown.

if you use J++ to its best advantage, the "java" it cranks out doesn't run on anything else but the MS java engine, which is not going to be extended due to losing another court case.

it's the same kind of parasitic gutsucking that MS has been doing for years, and three consent decrees.

that's why the judge ruled as he did. the weight of evidence, it is called down by the court house.

Re:I dont get this...

[Anonymous Coward]

What a shame. The "Official" one is sloppy. It's slow, it hogs resources, and it crashes regularly.

I hope I have the option of uninstalling it.

Re:I dont get this...

[jjohnson]

Did you miss the whole antitrust trial where Microsoft was found to be, not just a monopolist, but an abusive, predatory monopolist (and then upheld on appeal)? That's why they're being forced to include java: it's called punishment for past wrongs that are about to be repeated.

Re:I dont get this...

[Taldo]

Why should MSFT be allowed to take their competitor's product, alter it so that it will no longer be compatible with the original, and then rerelease it under the same name?

It's called rebranding and it's illegal.

They got smacked. Get over it.

Re:I dont get this...

[Anonymous Coward]

They already chose include Java by default... an old decrepid version of it. Now they will be forced to carry up to date versions.

Re:I dont get this...

[Anonymous Coward]

on the other hand, the "unofficial" one breaks all new java programs in subtle and difficult to detect ways.

Re:I dont get this...

[blamanj]

Here's a clue.
1) Microsoft is a monopoly. This is legal as long as they don't abuse their position of power.
2) Turn back to the mid-90s. Netscape owns the browser market. In their attempt to crush Netscape, MS needs a competitive browser, i.e., one that supports Java. They sign a deal with Sun.
3) By the late 90's Netscape is toast. MS says, man this platform-neutral stuff is bad news, Let's pull out the old "embrace and extend" technique and get the drone developers using our Java "enhancements."
4) Sun says, "Hey, we define Java, and that's not Java anymore. Meet us in court."
5) Judge determines MS is using the fact they own the desktop to attempt to kill Java (not to mention the fact that they never released a VM beyond 1.1). This is an abuse of monopoly power. This being the third time or so that MS has been convicted, the judge actually does something about it.

Re:I dont get this...

[azcoffeehabit]

Looks like the .NET developers are in full force today ;)... I am in full support of this decision to force microsoft to have to include the latest version of java on their OS. This is really a step in the right direction towards undoing the damage that Micro$oft's previous actions have caused. This also helps all consumers in the future by giving us a choice in what platform we want to run our apps on, the average consumer will not go out and install the latest version of Java. If M$ can bundle the latest .NET that is technically far superior to the M$ Java VM from windows 95, of course people are going to say that Java sucks because the average person will not understand that they are using a 8 year old version of Java... a poorly implemented version at that. If M$ was allowed their way they would be destroying the customer choice through their OS monopoly. This decision ensures that there is future compitition in the web development market. good job to Judge Motz for helping to keep the free market free.

Re:I dont get this...

[geek]

Actually the appeal wasn't "held up". The only thing disputed in the appeal was the punishment, not the actual conviction.

Re:I dont get this...

[Anonymous Coward]

Christ mod this fucker down, unless insightful means completely missing the point, not reading the article, not understanding contract laws, and failing to realize what happens to a monopoly. As I think about it though, I see a bright future you at the head of MS or some other quasi-ethical corporation.

Maybe you should rearrange your handle, s/dnaumov/dumanov/ as in you were dumanov to post without knowing what you were talking about.

Re:I dont get this...

[Anonymous Coward]

Plus, the Microsoft JVM is extremely insecure, with several vulnerabilities found year after year. The last one is only two weeks old.

And you can only update the Microsoft JVM through WindowsUpdate, nowadays. Bastards...

Re:I dont get this...

[LostCluster]

The part you're missing is that MSFT agreed to provide Java in Windows in a contract between it and Sun. They're in court now because Sun says that MSFT's Java VM did not properly follow the standard as the contract said they would, and therefore violated the contract.

What the court decided is that while they hold this trial, it's clear that if MSFT's Java is violating the deal, every day this would be allowed to continue would just make the situation worse. So, for the time being MSFT must distribute a Java VM that nobody disputes is true to the standard, Sun's own VM.

In the end, this could end up being the final solution... but it's not because the government is inflicting Java on MSFT. It's because MSFT agreed to put in a true version of Java and then tried to break the agreement, and the government is now trying to make MSFT take its medicine.

Re:I dont get this...

[stefanlasiewski]

If you signed a contract stating that you would give away competitors products, then you need to honor that contract.

Don't like it? Don't sign the contract.

Re:I dont get this...

[Codifex Maximus]

>Why is MSFT forced to include a piece of software
>written by their competitor into their Operating
>System ?

Because, Microsoft Windows is not just their operating system. It is the basis for a market and as such there are many other people involved than just Microsoft. If you own a market then you have more responsibilities than if you were just merely a player in a more open market.

Sun, who wants to participate in this market, is having to compete against the OWNER of the market. The OWNER of the market has an unfair advantage in that they can and will build thier competing offering right into the OS to crush Sun. Sun merely wishes to be a player - Microsoft owns the ball.

Get it?

Re:I dont get this...

[nomadic]

You know, we probably could have understood your message without the emphases.

Re:I dont get this...

[spongman]

if you use J++ to its best advantage, the "java" it cranks out doesn't run on anything else but the MS java engine this is true of most java vendors that supply their own proprietary libraries.

Re:I dont get this...

[Lurker_2k]

you missed a few steps between 4 and 5.

namely the fact that microsoft did indeed lose the case and then tried to renegotiate with Sun to get a valid version of the JVM, sun said "F$%k you" basically and refused to license it"
Then when MS said, "Fine, we'll just take out our version as well." Sun sued to force them to include Java, even though it was Sun's own damned fault that MS wasn't including it in the first place! If Sun had actually been willing to renegotiate after their initial court victory there would have been no case.

Re:I dont get this...

[greenrd]

Congratulations: Incorrect, Irrelevant and Illogical - all in one sentence! If Slashdot had decent moderation categories your post would be at -3 by now.

Re:I dont get this...

[greenrd]

"Upheld" doesn't mean "held up". It means "agreed with", i.e. "the higher court agreed with the lower court".

Re:I dont get this...

[blamanj]

It's not comparable, since a) it's not a question of a newer technology bypassing an obsolete one, and, more importantly b) Microsoft signed a contract that they chose not to honor. That's something like signing a check when you've got no money in the bank to cover it.

Re:I dont get this...

[geek]

But it wasn't. The ruling wasn't indispute, as I said. It was only the punishment, whether or not MS was guilty never came up in the appeal.

Re:I dont get this...

[Alien Being]

"go THAT far."

It was either that, or forcing Bill Gates to be Scott McNeally's butler.

I don't think it goes too far at all.

MS went as far as fabricating evidence to convince the court that IE was a core component of Windows, and that they weren't just trying to freeze out Netscape. They went as far as infringing Sun's copyright in an attempt to take control of the Java API.

MS has PIRATED billions of dollars from its competitors. It's time for them to start paying restitution.

Re:I dont get this...

[the_Bionic_lemming]

Looks like the .NET developers are in full force today ;)... I am in full support of this decision to force microsoft to have to include the latest version of java on their OS

Yep, looks like two wrongs make a right.

I wonder when Honda will be demanding Ford Use their catalytic converter bolt pattern since Honda needs to make sure Ford's stuff is compatible with their stuff?

Re:I dont get this...

[Anonymous Coward]

....eh the facts are a little off

Nutscrape pushed itself out of the market by resting and pushing poor "standards" just for the sake of going against MS. I remember using Netscape Communicator GOLD that I bought at Best Buy HORRIBLE HORIBLE software. Everyone I spoke to was dropping that version and reverting. It turned a lot of people toward IE because they felt that NS was failing them.

MS licensed Java but it was SLOOOOOOOOOW on the desktop (and still can be hideously slow). MS made some changes sped it up, until the past couple of years MSJVM still outperformed any of other JVM. They did extend it in order to sell some developement software. Sun sued and won and still failed to step up to the plate with any decent strategy for turning the victory into capital.

Sun was failing to capitalize on Java, primarily because of mismarketing it toward the desktop instead of where it's strength lay - the server. Sun's mismanagement in getting some of the hideous GUI rendering issues squashed allowed an opening for Flash to take over the areas where Java Aplets would have been. Java on the client died off for the most part. They failed to create any notable development software and instead allowed other companies to strip that market share from them also.

Sun says "Hey, we define Java and that's not Java anymore" and threatens anyone (including MS) who wants to change it. Even if those changes might be beneficial. How many other companies has Sun nudged a little about Java api changes? The fact is they refuse to let control loose to IETF or ANSI or anyother standard body because then their competitor (MS) might be able to help shape the standards after that point.

MS was never required to release a JVM past 1.1. The original Sun/MS agreement specifically stated that they would be allowed to, under condition, to release a JVM but never states that it was required to do so. Since MS no longer had software to sell for Java developers then it didn't make any sense to continue to poor money into a non-money-making codebase. Especially if that work benefited a competitor.

Sun is hemoraging cash because of bad business decisions and instead of everyone seeing that they are allowing Sun to take the "Poor me, look at was M$ did". It's crap.

Re:I dont get this...

[azcoffeehabit]

I'll stick with your analogy... Now if Ford originally signed a contract with Honda to include the Bolt pattern for their catalytic converters and then did a breach of contract by adding a propietary Ford Brand bolt which would make the Honda CC leak exhaust and noise, would it be bad for the govenment to step in and force Ford to use the original Honda Catylitic converter bolt patten that 1) gave consumers more choice on Catalytic converters (because of no proprietary bolts) and 2) prevented air and noise polution? (your analogy, my point)

Re:I dont get this...

[rixster]

nothing to do with the comment - but your sig made me laugh.

Re:I dont get this...

[Anonymous Coward]

Fortunately this ruling will force developers to rewrite all MSJVM-based applets ... in Flash.

Re:I dont get this...

[Anonymous Coward]

5) Judge determines MS is using the fact they own the desktop to attempt to kill Java (not to mention the fact that they never released a VM beyond 1.1). This is an abuse of monopoly power. This being the third time or so that MS has been convicted, the judge actually does something about it.

It's called an injunction. Sun demanded that Microsoft cease all new development of Java. The courts agreed. Microsoft's JVM became frozen in time, and remained such. Funny, though, that Microsoft's several year old JVM still VASTLY outperforms Sun's JRE 1.4. Sun made Java. Microsoft made it viable.

Re:I dont get this...

[cristofer8]

Actually, I believe they signed a contract stating that they had the right to include it.

Re:I dont get this...

[Physics Dude]

I'm very skeptical of your version of the facts. Could you please post a reference for this 'attempted renegotiation'.

I've tried to keep up on this subject but I haven't ever seen this anywhere except in hearsay, and never with a reliable source. The closest thing I've found is the press release from Microsoft saying that "Sun stopped us from shipping our Java VM" and tried to make it sound as though Sun was stopping them from shipping ANY VM, which was clearly not the case at the time of the press release. Maybe you've been suckered by the MS spin doctors?

Your second sentence ("fine, we'll just take out our version as well.") isn't even plausible. "as well" as what? - It wasn't their desision to make - Microsoft were already ordered not to ship their bastardized version of the JVM.

Re:I dont get this...

[the_Bionic_lemming]

No problem - That was what? windows 98?

I'll be more than happy to release a patch fixing the old tech to reflect the agreement.

Or, if you need it to be on XP? I'll include that patch for the old Java engine.

Re:I dont get this...

[Anonymous Coward]

"Don't like it? Don't sign the contract."

Oh come on it's more complicated than that.

1) The contract in question did not specify that they would include future updates or versions of Sun's JAVA technologies. It obviously did not specify that they would include and support the versions shipped in perpetuity.

2) Sun mustered some righteous indignation when Microsoft did not update it's Java virtual machine (VM) to the newer version of Java. They got even more upset when Microsoft shipped a java developement package that extended the java language. They got an injunction against this product.

In both cases the problem for SUN is one of control. They wanted to extend a contract to encompass forcing newer versions to be distributed and further to ensure they were the only ones who could break JAVA while introducing new functionality and new versions. In my mind SUN should have been hit with anti trust filings for squashing a competing product that in most cases produced better and faster code in an area that SUN was the monopolist.

If SUN ever wants to go after an opensource OS that bundles an older version of JAVA after a newer version is released this case will be the precident. So the story is don't include Java by default (unless you want to play by Java monopolists SUN's wishes) and don't compete with SUN in developement tools because they will just say your stuff is NOT JAVA because it is different or offers additional functionality.

You can argue that Microsoft has ulterior motives and hell they likely probably do and such will be found by the judge. The point of this post is that SUN is a big corporation too the only difference between it and MS is it doesn't have a monoply ruling against it as of yet.

Re:I dont get this...

[i_luv_linux]

Appearently you never read the contract at all, did you? The contract says that MS can use Java, it doesn't say it should use it or include it in its products.

Honoring contract means that you follow its rules and terms. You can sign a contract that says that you can use Java in your products, that doesn't mean that you have to use it.

Re:I dont get this...

[t]

The part you're missing is the "illegally abusing a monopoly position". Your attempt to compare a newer tech with an older tech is irrelevant.

Re:I dont get this...

[squiggleslash]

Because Microsoft has broken antitrust law, illegally maintaining its monopoly on the desktop.

I assume you'd be outraged if you heard someone had to pay damages because the person whose leg they hacked off needed the money.

It's called the law. If Microsoft doesn't want to help competition, it shouldn't attempt to destroy competition in the first place. Whining bastards.

Re:I dont get this...

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, apparently the federal courts disagree with you.

Did YOU read the contract?

Re:I dont get this...

[Anonymous Coward]

It's not to be inserted in the operating system but to be included with the distro. 'Course with microsnot claiming every damn thing under the sun on the CD is part of the operating system I can see where the lesser educated among us would think that it is.

On the other hand, I don't give crap about this because I run 100% Linux and FreeBSD on three other machines and only use the m$ crippled laptop to exchange emails with the home office. All development (in Java and C) are done in UNIX, or Linux and then ported to UNIX.

Re:I dont get this...

[Eric Damron]

"Netscape and Sun banded together in an open attempt to make Windows obsolete. The entry point was the browser."

Even the browser runs on top of an OS. SUN and Netscape if allowed to proceed unfettered may have leveled the field for non-OS specific applications but Microsoft's OS was in no danger.

Re:I dont get this...

[platipusrc]

Interesting clause in the contract between them:
(Started out in all caps but lameness filter wouldn't let me post that :))

in no event will either party be liable for any indirect, incidental, special, consequential or punitive damages in connection with or arising out of this agreement (including loss of profits, use, data, or other economic advantage), no matter what theory of liability, even if the exclusive remedies provided for in this agreement fail of their essential purpose and even if either party has been advised of the possibility or probability of such damages. further, liability for such damage shall be excluded, even if the exclusive remedies provided for in this agreement fail of their essential purpose.

Re:I dont get this...

[Raffaello]

Not quite. MS tried to get a review of the ruling itself (not just the penalties) but they were shot down. On appeal the findings of fact and law were upheld, but the penalties imposed by Jackson were not.

Re:I dont get this...

[kwiatal]

Of course it was in danger! Without a dependence on platforms you could use anything. Hell, you could throw a light kernel on your box and GRUB and boot into a Java VM.

OK, so how is that wrong in any way? If people want to use a lightweight kernel to run their applications (even for popular Microsoft apps), why shouldn't they be able to do just that? If Microsoft was going to be "killed" by this, you might as well admit their OS would have never been able to face true competition without their disreputable antics and monopoly clout.

-L-

Re:I dont get this...

[Lurker_2k]

http://www.javaworld.com/javaworld/jw-01-2001/jw-0 124-iw-mssuncourt.html

Here's a few links re: the initial court case Sun had against MS. They won, and rightfully so. MS had a great idea in making a JVM that actually worked (as compared to the win32 ver SUn made at the time) but they failed to secure proper permissions in doing so and made their JVM use a bunch of win32 specific code. Sun rightfully sued and won. That's a given. MS should have sought permission/licensing with Sun before doing such a thing.
Sun (as part of the settlement with MS) allowed them to continue to use their (MS' customized) JVM for 7 years from that date but forbid them from distributing new versions. Once again, not too bad. However, as part of their agreement, MS had to stop shipping that JVM with IE/MS Windows. Now, in August of 2001, MS announces that they won't be includig their JVM as part of Windows XP, mainly due to the fact of the initial victory by Sun in 1997.

Remember, MS is prohibited from including new versions of their JVM and can only offer the old JVM. But they can't bundle it as per the 1997 settlement. So they offer it as a free download, which they are entitled to do so since they had 7 years from 1997 to do so. They weren't obligated to offer it for the full 7 years, but they had the option to. They just can't call it an "official" JAVA client.

Now, here's a few links regarding licensing.

http://rss.com.com/2100-1001-271758.html

http://www.javaworld.com/channel_content/jw-lice ns ing-index.shtml

Basically, Sun refused MS' attempts to work with them and help define JAVA as an open standard and instead decided to keep it a proprietary standard that they control. Entirely sun's perogative, but since Sun adamantly refused to even discuss ANY attempt at making Java an open standard (not just with MS, but with anyne) MS decided to just not license Java.

Now, of course Sun realized they were screwed, because basically their bluff was called they had one chance, to whine like a little baby. Which they did. And of course, since MS is quite often villianized (and often rightfully so, but not always) people automatically assumed Sun was telling the entire truth, which they weren't. It was a half truth.

Quite frankly, the whole thing is just one big pissing match. If either of them had been willing to actually listen to the opposing sides instead of just ignoring them, this never would have happened.

Re:I dont get this...

[i_luv_linux]

You didn't read the federal court's ruling did you? The federal didn't force Microsoft to include Java because of the contract, it is because of other reasons. Just think a little.

Re:I dont get this...

[Amadodd]

And another thing they should be forced to do is open their proxy authentication protocol, or provide a standerd java proxy class to authenticate against a micro$oft proxy server(or whatever they call it these days). I haven't looked lately, but if you replace the default ms java machine with Sun's Java 1.3, any applet which require an internet connection will not be able to go through an ms proxy. On the same point, can Linux go through an ms proxy?(have never tried it myself) Corporates running Exchange often run this as well.

Re:I dont get this...

[Anonymous Coward]

Ah... I was wondering when you'd post!

Re:I dont get this...

[Directrix1]

Its not a punishment. It is enforcement of a legally binding contractual agreement Microsoft made several years ago to include their Java VM in MS's Internet Explorer. Unfortunately, Microsoft just included a home-brewn MS custom/cripple/"expanded" version. Sun just wants retribution for what should have been happening for years now.

Re:I dont get this...

[Anonymous Coward]

Interesting.. Windows developers develop not only in VC++/.Net, but program in Python, Perl, delphi, shell, etc. "Right tool for the right job" and all, and are labeled drones.

Java developers develop in whatever flavor
of java sun tells them to develop in, and
they are?

Re:I dont get this...

[NorthDude]

Sun refusing to standardize Java is really not the same has Sun told MS "f*ck you", isn't it?
First of all, I am myself a Java programmer and sometimes I feel that the Java openness could be better. But it is already pretty much open. The JCP has many many participant and if the community wish to have a certain feature included, it will.

Now, look at it the other way around. If java was to be submitted to a standard body, just like MS C# ant the CLR. Nobody would have the control over how they will implement it. If it had been the case back to the day of the first Sun-MS trial, Sun could never have sued Microsoft and we would have a MS java which would have probably took over the world because it would have been bundled with the OS. Yes, I would like to see java to be open source. But I also feel a bit more secure to know that a Big corp can defend it if another company tries to screw it up.

Re:I dont get this...

[Evil Grinn]

And another thing they should be forced to do is open their proxy authentication protocol, or provide a standerd java proxy class to authenticate against a micro$oft proxy server(or whatever they call it these days).

This is something that has been known about for some time. Sun declares that it is not fixed but not in any release of Java that is currently available:

http://developer.java.sun.com/developer/bugParad e/ bugs/4626557.html

As you can see from the comments, as with most really critical bugs Sun has taken their own sweet time to fix this.

Meanwhile Java applications (but probably not Applets) should be able to get through by using the HttpClient package:

http://jakarta.apache.org/commons/httpclient

Admittedly I've never tried this since I'm not behind such a proxy.

Re:I dont get this...

[Evil Grinn]

if you use J++ to its best advantage, the "java" it cranks out doesn't run on anything else but the MS java engine

this is true of most java vendors that supply their own proprietary libraries.

Examples, please?

The closet thing I can think of is the headaches that can come from trying to use anything other than IBM's version of the JDK with Websphere. But even there its not impossible, just a pain in the ass.

Re:I dont get this...

[Anonymous Coward]

http://www.mdd.uscourts.gov/Opinions152/Opinions/S unPI1202.pdf says on page 10:

a. Microsoft distributes the most current, unmodified binary
implementation of the Java Runtime Environment for Windows
(currently known as the Java Plug-in for Windows XP) provided by
Sun to Microsoft, and ensures it is installed and enabled as the default
Java Runtime Environment for any and all configurations of such
products;

Does this mean a can't use an older JVM as default (because of compatibilty problems)

Otherwise some mechanism will reset it to the most current.

If true, does this set a precedence to allow MS to change my configuration (for excample if I uninstalled MSN,IE or something else).

Re:I dont get this...

[Anonymous Coward]

make that eh... 17,233

did ya hear, micorosft is being forced to include the java runtime in their interweb os.

Cool, this saves me a few steps at build time. :)

(yea i always misspell it)

Re:I dont get this...

[Eric Damron]

Saying that Java will allow application independence is a far cry from saying that there was an attempt to kill Microsoft's OS. You are really stretching a lot with that statement. Let's not forget that most people already ran Microsoft's OS and therefore would run the Microsoft version of JAVA. Again, Microsoft's OS was in no danger.

Re:I dont get this...

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't worry, nobody seems to get the point of this...

The problem with this injunction is that it essentially forces one entity to run a binary module it gets from another at startup without giving the user prior control about it.

If Sun was led by an obsessive egalomanic like Scott Nealy, they'd be free as per this injunction to include code that would crash windows on install or destabilizes it majorly, and Microsoft could not do anything against it.

Oh, wait. That's just the case.

Just imagine what could be done to linux if any linux distro was forced to install and execute a package supplied (without source, of course) by Microsoft.

Re:I dont get this...

[Anonymous Coward]

Another issue - people here probably have no experience shipping software packages in large volume. 90 days is next to nothing when it comes to changing the package authoring of retail software. An extreme example of where this would fail is if sun would submit to microsoft 90 days before windows ships a 650MB java package. MS would be required to include it, but it would mean they'd have to either cut 100% of windows features or add another cd. The consequences in terms of renegotiation and channel allocation are tremendous (the pipeline and number of cd's to burn is part of agreements that are finalized way before shipping to the retail channel)

Re:I dont get this...

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually this is completely wrong. Read the judgement (the judge explicitly points out that this is not the case).

This judgement is something MS can't accept - it effectively grants Sun the right to ship random binary code with windows and have it installed by default. Guess which companies image would be hurt if that part would bluescreen on 1% of pc's (I'd bet Bill Gates ass that Sun does less testing on obscure windows hardware than MS does) or if it has some sort of security hole. Or if that component pumps up banner ads during install.

This injunction will end up getting some lawyers kids through a rather expensive college, but it'll not influence the market one way or the other. Huge win for Suns and Microsofts customers - they'll get to pay for this through inflated prices... :(

Re:I dont get this...

[Lurker_2k]

It is pretty much a FSCK you when Sun basically got all pissy because MS didn't use the JVM for the full 7 years they were allowed to and then promptly sued first. It's also a FSCK you to MS, Java devs, etc when Sun refuses to open their standards to an industry wide body. I don't see anyone complaining that C++ has been diluted because MS makes VC++. How would having Java be an OPEN standard make it possible for MS to have an "MS Java which would have probably took over the world"? If it's an OPEN standard, then MS can't just make propietrary (sic?) versions and have them take over the world.

Re:I dont get this...

[Anonymous Coward]

A JVM is just an app, and does no hardware access except through the OS. Blame the OS if it can cause a bluescreen.

The banner ad thing would be a problem (though MS could probably drop the JVM, countersue, and win at that point). But how can Microsoft's image regarding security get any worse?

Re:I dont get this...

[mentin]

OK, so how is that wrong in any way?

There is absolutely nothing wrong with it. But nothing right as well.

Just instead of writing applications for Win32 you would write applications for Netscape (may be for Java, but Netscape wanted their browser to be THE platform, so tried to extend Java just like MS).

Of course, this put Microsoft into danger, it fighted back and won.

Re:I dont get this...

[mentin]

You obviously did not read Netscape developers docs when they just released NN 3.0, grabbed most of the browser market share and were planning 4.0.

Almost in every paragraph it said 'Netscape Navigator is THE platform'. If they succeeded, the applications would be written for Netscape, not for Win32. You may like it or not, but Microsoft obviously could not like this. If all applications user runs are run inside Netscape, you don't need Windows any more!

Re:I dont get this...

[Eric Damron]

"...THE platform'"

THE development platform for applications not THE OS platform.

Re:I dont get this...

[Eric Damron]

Let me elaborate.

They were claiming that JAVA would be the applications platform that would allow programmers to code once and complile on any OS Platform. Again, this is a far cry from saying that JAVA was going to kill Windows. You are compairing apples with oranges.

Most people ran Windows so they would run JAVA applications on their Windows OS platform.

To say that Microsoft was justified in doing what they did because JAVA would have reduced Microsoft's ability to use it's monopoly power to lock people into it's own OS is ludicrous.

Re:I dont get this...

[Anonymous Coward]

That's not the point of the original poster - a JVM should absolutely not do anything that could bluescreen. The problem is that, given that binary code from an unknown source is executed, so it _can_ do anything...

Re:In Soviet Russia

[Mantorp]

How could you be so sure? Always wondered but usually only ACs take credit...

Poor Java

[kingkade]

So much potential (and it still is an absolutely great platform) but it got such a kick in the ribs from MS and this decision is typically late in prescribing a remedy.

Re:Poor Java

[Aram Fingal]

So much potential (and it still is an absolutely great platform) but it got such a kick in the ribs from MS and this decision is typically late in prescribing a remedy.

Does "it" refer to Java or Windows?

Re:Poor Java

[kingkade]

Does "it" refer to Java or Windows?

Hehe, ...it got a kick in the ribs form MS

Re:Poor Java

[damiam]

Now why would you think it refers to Windows, especially when Java is in the fucking subject line?

Eh?

[Anonymous Coward]

Applying SP1 of WindowsXP, or a slipstreamed Windows XP SP1 automatically installs the JVM. This is what MS is distributing with the MSDN packs.

How can they be forced to do this when they are doing it voluntarily?

Maillions of Submissions

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe if so many people submit something they're reaaly just looking for a good meta-news site on which to discuss it. After 100 submissions, it's probably a good idea to just post.

Bad idea

[The Terrorists]

Slashdotters must not automatically consider this a good thing.

Who says that every such order will be to the benefit of Windows and the user?

Let's just say that all the Linuxophiles' gripes about windows were made moot and the software became what it could be - a truly universal effective program intelligible to most humans.

This happened because of the courts forcing it to do so.

Alternative OSes would not prosper in such an environment. Indeed, they would be dropped as everyone but diehard iconoclasts switched to new, improved Windows.

At this level of dependence, people would be as vulnerable to a bad decision by the courts as they would be to a bad decision by bill gates.

Re:Bad idea

[MoonBuggy]

But the point of Java is to be cross platform.

If it was properly implemented on all OSs then (idealistically) all software could be developed to work on all platforms. If all software worked on whatever OS you liked then it wouldn't matter that only 3 other people on the planet used your OS of choice because it would still have the same range of software as windows.

Re:Bad idea

[Anonymous Coward]

Actaully no. You would have to actauly run everything ina virtual machine, beacuse computer hardware is very very differnt, what would work on one, would be complety differnt on another. that's a major speed hit if you have to do that (just look at java)

That's ludicrous

[I Am The Owl]

What's next? Should Microsoft be forced to include Mozilla with every copy of Windows? How about Linux? Should they have to include 1 copy of FreeBSD, Linux, BeOS and QNX with every sale of their Windows software?

Now, don't get me wrong, I hate MS as much as the next guy in the open source community, but doesn't this open up a slippery slope? Where does it stop?

Re:That's ludicrous

[Squidgee]

With any luck it ends when Windows is nearly monopoly free! And good!

Re:That's ludicrous

[jjohnson]

Not really, since Sun/Java was directly named in the findings of fact. The only other entity that might seek similar relief is Netscape. I wouldn't cry over the forced inclusion of that, either.

The judge isn't forcing Microsoft open to competition generally, he's remedying a situation in which a company was wronged in the past, and (successfully) claimed they were about to be wronged again. This pretty significantly limits the number of companies with a claim.

Re:That's ludicrous

[91degrees]

This is meant to be a punishment. Microsoft abused its monopoly position, and therefore has to do as its told, otherwise the courts might actually do something.

Perhaps they should be forced to give customers a choice of which browser to use. They were guilty of using these tactics against Netscape (although Netscape seemed to try to push out competitors with their own HTML extensions), and part of their monopolist tactics seemed to revolve around giving IE away. It wouldn't even cost them anything to bundle Mozilla.

As for Linux - Possibly. It forces them to show that there is a choice.

Forcing them to Bundle BeOS would be quite logical since it was MS's behaviour that killed it. This could have been a serious punishment since this would actually create an installed userbase of a faster, cleaner, better OS which had only one downside of lack of support. But it's up to MS to prove to the court that the inclusion of a piece of software would do a disproportinate amount of damage for the crime they committed.

Re:That's ludicrous

[limekiller4]

First, I honestly feel bad for ya because you're going to suffer the "Slashdot Death by Disagreement" fate. I disagree with you, but that does not, in of itself, make your post bad. It should be moderated, IMO, merely by how it contributes to good discussion.

To answer, however, I think that the Reuters article covers that question well by quoting the judge:

"'It is an absolute certainty that unless a preliminary injunction is entered, Sun will have lost forever its right to compete, and the opportunity to prevail, in a market undistorted by its competitors' antitrust violations,' Motz wrote in his decision."

Re:That's ludicrous

[valisk]

but doesn't this open up a slippery slope?

Not really, imho its a justified punishment, MS deliberately built an incompatible Java substitute and shipped it with windows, which discouraged users from downloading the multi-platform Sun offering, thereby stifling it's potential to unite various OSes (however dubious that potential may have been). It also didn't help that it gained a reputation for being highly buggy and causing browser crashes ad infinatum. Then when Java was considered an dying backwater they decided to remove support altogether, no doubt in favour of VBscript and those awful Active X insecurity applets, yuk :(~

Re:That's ludicrous

[Anonymous Coward]

Now, don't get me wrong, I hate MS as much as the next guy in the open source community, but doesn't this open up a slippery slope?

Who cares? Microsoft people used to like to brag that they could force OEMs to include a ham sandwich with Windows, if they felt like it. This is sweet, sweet justice.

Well, as long as the order doesn't have any cheesy loopholes and they actually have to comply in a meaningful way.

Re:That's ludicrous

[Anonymous Coward]

I believe the correct spelling for that would be LUDACRIS. This is slashdot, after all.

Re:That's ludicrous

[tswinzig]

What's next? Should Microsoft be forced to include Mozilla with every copy of Windows?

If AOL/Netscape/Mozilla can prove harm? Abso-fuckin-lutely!

Re:That's ludicrous

[Anonymous Coward]

It ends when, hopefully, Microsoft doesn't have a monopoly anymore - or they aren't abusing it.

Re:That's ludicrous

[jedidiah]

It's a big CD, so why the F*CK not?

They've got a free playground to do pretty much anything they like. Why not impose this upon them since they are a convicted monopoly.

Any "extension" or "middleware" or "bundleware" product that Microsoft provides as part of it's OEM OS distribution should be accompanied by products from any compeitor that chooses to ask.

Re:That's ludicrous

[for(;;);]

> What's next? Should Microsoft be forced to include
> Mozilla with every copy of Windows? How about
> Linux? Should they have to include 1 copy of
> FreeBSD, Linux, BeOS and QNX with every sale of
> their Windows software?

Yes...these are nightmare scenarios...

> Now, don't get me wrong, I hate MS as much as
> the next guy in the open source community, but
> doesn't this open up a slippery slope? Where
> does it stop?

It stops when Microsoft stops being a predatory monopoly. It stops when there's competition in the computer industry again. The systems (Mozilla, the OSes) you mention, as well as Java, are at a competitive disadvantage not because of technical or corporate incompetence (generally) but because Microsoft, as has been upheld by the courts, illegally leverages its monopoly to crush competiton.

Microsoft makes some good stuff. It would make better stuff if it had to compete fairly. My industry, and the world's economy, would be helped by not allowing Microsoft's unlawful strangulation of technology's progress. So anything that helps competition's return helps me.

Re:That's ludicrous

[geekoid]

No, but /. posters should at least have some basic understanding about the article before responding.

Re:That's ludicrous

[NineNine]

The only reason that Sun would lose is because there's no compelling reason for most people to use it. They've completely failed to build a user and developer base on their own, so they instead go to the government for help. Scott McNealy is simply inept. That's why Sun would fail.

Re:That's ludicrous

[Anonymous Coward]

The only other entity that might seek similar relief is Netscape.

Yeah, and AOL/Netscape is asking for cold, hard cash instead of bundling.

Re:That's ludicrous

[WasterDave]

doesn't this open up a slippery slope? Where does it stop?

A good question. I suspect it stops when you don't have enough money to buy the lawyers to make it happen.

Dave

Re:That's ludicrous

[Anonymous Coward]

BeOS wasn't faster and its API used a subset of C++ that left it fairly crufty. Even its long-touted thread bullshit is an amusing farce, when the threads on BeOS are several times more expensive than NT or even linux, requiring needlessly complex caching of threads.

All of the comments are stupid and essentially nonsensical. Navigator, and especially later, Communicator were terrible. It's a shame that even today there isn't a single web client that isn't bloated, buggy, or fully compliant with standards. This isn't Microsoft's fault, though IE is a nice steaming pile of turd, at the time, it managed to be far more functional and lean than Netscape's offerings. Given that everyone at the time didn't pay for Netscape's web clients anyway, and the fact that they specifically targetted Microsoft, they got what they were destined to.

Forcing Microsoft to bundle a lot of useless garbage with the content the consumer actually wants to buy, is just going to cause them needless support headaches while sacrificing yet another realm of business to the Government to regulate at any moment it feels there's money to be made from some opposition.

If Java had actually been good people would use it. As it was, the crippled JVM Microsoft shipped was better than Sun's offerings for many years, even while the API grew well beyond what Microsoft supported. Sun shit on itself by having the courts find that Microsoft was in violation, and had to stop using the Java trademark, and then later, not allowing them to license further Java from Sun. They got what they deserved. Get it? Good. Now buy a clue.

Re:That's ludicrous

[tc]

Well, perhaps because they might want to keep some quality control over what they ship? (Stop snickering in the back...) What if there were a fatal bug in the Sun JVM, perhaps a gaping security hole? If MS have to ship it exactly as Sun give it to them, and Sun take their sweet time about fixing, say, a frequently occuring crash bug (which would, in the case of the JVM, basically look to Joe User like IE going tits up), then I can see how MS would indeed suffer harm. It wouldn't matter how much they claimed it wasn't their fault - people would still blame them.

In fact, unless MS has at least some say over what they have to insert, doesn't this just give Sun carte blanch to insert random bugs in Windows? (Sure, you can have a good laugh about the ones that are already there, but why should someone else have a legal right to add new ones?)

Re:That's ludicrous

[zipwow]

Sun/Java was directly named in the findings of fact

This is the single most important piece of data posted here today.

Does someone know where the wording of this is? I remember it as well, but getting the details of it would also be enlightening.

-Zipwow

Re:That's ludicrous

[maxmg]

Ludicrous? I think not...

PC manufacturers (Compaq, Dell, etc.) have long been forced to include OEM versoins of MS operating systems with their PCs - because they signed a contract that mandated them to do so!

Why should different rules apply to Microsoft? Don't like your own medicine?

Re:That's ludicrous

[sheldon]

"I think not..."

I think you should have stopped there.

"PC manufacturers (Compaq, Dell, etc.) have long been forced to include OEM versoins of MS operating systems with their PCs - because they signed a contract that mandated them to do so! "

Of course you forget the basic construct of the contract, that being that the OEMs were negotiating to buy Windows from Microsoft.

So you really can't call it a mandate, since they negotiated the terms and the price.

Re:That's ludicrous

[mijok]

You don't think it would say "this program has performed an illegal action"?

Re:That's ludicrous

[sheldon]

"The systems (Mozilla, the OSes) you mention, as well as Java, are at a competitive disadvantage not because of technical or corporate incompetence "

Ahh, but the reality is that there has been gross technical or corporate incompetence. Microsoft may use some strong-armed tactics, but the reality is they just also happen to be a lot smarter than their competitors. This case resembles more the ALCOA anti-trust trial than AT&T.

Your basic desire is to handicap the players, which is understandable, but there's a difference between making a jockey carry an extra 20 pounds of lead on his horse, and tying one jockey's arm behind his back... You see, even in a handicapped race the dominate player is still going to win quite frequently.

"So anything that helps competition's return helps me."

I'd rather see companies promote interesting technologies than interesting lawsuits.

What happens in 3 years time when Sun has lost it's marketshare in the Unix server world and files for bankruptcy? Even though it is Linux which eroding this market, will it be Microsoft's fault?

Again, this goes right back to corporate incompetence.

Re:That's ludicrous

[gss]

What's next? Should Microsoft be forced to include Mozilla with every copy of Windows?

In a word yes! That is if Microsoft shipped with Windows say a 5 year old version of Netscape and modified it only work for websites running IIS. (Not the best analogy but the best I could think of right now :)

This is what essentially Microsoft has done with its bastardized version of the Java VM. Microsoft's VM is an old version of 1.1 modified with it's extensions which enabled developers to lock themselves to the Windows platform. Now of course most developers learned this early on and avoided the lock-in, plus most of Java development is done on the server now, but Mircosoft continues to provide their old VM. This alone has pretty much killed off most client side Java.

I believe Sun made the first big mistake years ago by not providing the definitive Windows VM. You didn't see Macromedia giving Microsoft the right to implement Flash anyway they saw fit way back when.

I don't necessarily agree with this ruling either, I actually would have been happy if the ruling was to force Microsoft to eliminate their old VM from existence.

Re:That's ludicrous

[bmetzler]

Of course you forget the basic construct of the contract, that being that the OEMs were negotiating to buy Windows from Microsoft.

And that's different than Microsoft negotiating to "buy" Java from Sun, right? Yeah, because we all know that Microsoft shouldn't really have to take contracts they sign seriously.

So you really can't call it a mandate, since they[*] negotiated the terms and the price.

[*] Microsoft, in this context

So, who negotiated the terms and price in the Sun-Microsoft contract? Does it make a diffence as to whether a contract should be honoured? Is there any applications to my personal business here that I didn't know about before?

-Brent

Re:That's ludicrous

[manyoso]

What on earth are you spewing? I am a big fan of .NET (see: Qt#) and I think C# is a great improvement over Java, but you must be out of your mind if you think Sun has been unsuccessful with Java!!

The judge has it spot on with this. If .NET is to prevail then it should be on the merits not because Microsoft has a huge advantage shipping .NET with a monopoly product. This is good for the public, good for the community and everyone involved because it levels the playing field and allows the technologies to compete _on_the_merits_!

Re:That's ludicrous

[i_luv_linux]

Directly named in the findings of fact mean what? Those are findings only, and Microsoft are not found guily of all those facts. So essentially, you are saying that in the court documents the word "Jim" passes somewhere, so it means that Jim has to be included with every MS product.

There is a remedy related with this issue and that is XP is providing a way for the user to change its default browser and so on.

Now java only belongs to Sun, so this court made a mistake, and it will be fixed on appeal. I guess the Judge really doesn't know much about the industry and gave a decision based on what he reads on the news.

Re:That's ludicrous

[justanumber]

The problem is that Microsoft is again leveraging it's monopoly advantage in the desktop market to muscle in on other markets that it does not yet own.

By putting it's products such as .NET as part of the default desktop (in which it has a proven monopoly) it gives other products (i.e Java) no opportunity to compete. Sure you can go and download Java, but this in itself is forced competitive barrier only possible because of Microsoft's desktop monopoly. The problem lies therein.

YOU CANNOT USE YOUR MONOPOLY POWER IN ONE MARKET TO CREATE COMPETITIVE ADVANTAGE IN ANOTHER.

Microsoft has continued to ship a broken implementation of Java 1.1.8 for going on 5 years now, while continually updating it's own OLE, COM, .NET.

It has done this purposefully, to fragment the Java market and confuse prosective users of Java. This is a bit like shipping only a Visual C 1.0 runtime - when the latest version is say 6.0 - even though you had a contract (that you broke) to ship it.

Believe it or not the Sherman Antitrust Act is perhaps the most free market ideal. In it is enshrined the concept of a level playing field where consumers benefit from proper market economics, innovation and lower prices. The slippery slope is product dumpin, standover tactics and stifled innovation.

Once apon a time a level playing field was what America was all about.

Just my 2c.

Re:That's ludicrous

[mbrod]

Now, don't get me wrong, I hate MS as much as the next guy in the open source community, but doesn't this open up a slippery slope? Where does it stop?

Pure FUD.

The answer of course is it stops with this. Any of those products you mentioned for one are not programming languages and two, never had deals with MS to begin with like Sun did.

Re:That's ludicrous

[vrmlguy]

but the reality is they [Microsoft]just also happen to be a lot smarter than their competitors

Au contraire! Microsoft isn't smarter than their competitors, they just have deeper pockets. The first few versions of IE weren't very good. If you or I had started a company trying to market it against Netscape, we would have disappeared without a trace. Microsoft, on the other hand, could eat the cost and try again. Eventually, they came up with something that was just good enought that they then gave away for free. Netscape's business model was to give away the browser and sell the server. Microsoft's was to give away the browser and the server to protect their OS.

For most of their history, Microsoft was not driven by R&D. (They still aren't exactly driven by R&D, but they can and do spend more than their competitors.) Instead, they identified product lines that might be profitable and bought a market leader. (See Visio, among others.) If the market leader rebuffed their offer, then they went to the next larger company. In the worst case, they would do something in-house, but whichever way they wound up with a product, they spend money until it's a success or an abject failure (Microsoft Bob, for example). Then, inovation stops.

Microsoft makes more mistakes than anyone else, but it doesn't matter: They can just afford to make mistakes that would bankrupt anyone else.

Re:That's ludicrous

[Anonymous Coward]

That's interresting because MS is trying to buy Macromedia now. Its a loose loose situation.

Re:That's ludicrous

[Anonymous Coward]

Gee Owl, did you READ about this case? If you did, you missed the part where Microsoft signed a contract where they said they would ship java, then didn't.

Please show where Microsoft signed a contract asking them to ship FreeBSD, Linux, BeOS and QNX.

Oh, and when you say Linux, what did you mean?

Re:That's ludicrous

[jjohnson]

The findings of fact went unchallenged, and stand as a legal finding by a competent court that what was reported in them actually happened. Conclusions on the laws broken differed, but the fundamental antitrust convictions based on those findings remained.

The point is that a court has found that Sun was directly harmed, and not, say, IBM; so IBM can't go to a court and demand that Lotus Notes be included.

Besides, Sun really doesn't benefit from this at all. So what if Java's included? Sun has no large Java software packages it's trying to sell; it's almost nowhere in the web applications sphere; Java itself isn't sold, it's downloaded. Pretty much all Sun gets is bragging rights.

Re:That's ludicrous

[DaveOnNet]

Couldn't M$ still ship their own JVM along with Sun's if Sun was stupid enough to put bugs in their own software? Of course, M$ would have to implement it without breaking the license. Dave.

Re:That's ludicrous

[Raffaello]

What do you mean "findings only." Do you know what the term "finding" means?

A civil court "finding of fact" is a legally binding determination of what actually happened. If not overturned (and they rarely are) then all subsequent appeals must be based on this factual record. It also serves as an essentially undenible basis of fact for other lawsuits.

So If Sun was specifically named in the finding of fact as a victim of MS's illegal abuse of it's windows monopoly, then that's what happened as far as legal proceedings are concerned. Courts start with this as given, and then determine what was the extent of financial damage, etc. But they don't review whether MS illegally harmed Sun. It's considered a legally incontrovertible given. Hence the term "finding of *fact*."

Re:That's ludicrous

[Anonymous Coward]

Au contraire! Microsoft isn't smarter than their competitors, they just have deeper pockets. The first few versions of IE weren't very good.

Well, you're right and you're wrong. Yes, Microsoft's first versions were crap, they almost always are. However, Microsoft actually learns and improves. IE 1.0 stunk on ice. IE 3 was showing promise, and was almost as good as Netscape, IE 4 got the edge on Netscape, and from there it was all over but the crying. IE 6.0 is rock-solid, and still has useful features not available in Mozilla, (In IE, the "stop" button is always active, and always works. Went to a web page with an annoying sound clip running in a loop? Just hit Stop.) though Mozilla's got some really nifty stuff now that has me using it quite a bit. In Netscape's case, their last version, 4.xx stunk just as bad as their first version. It just had more features to stink at. Just two days ago, a friend noticed a page on her site would crash Netscape 4.xx on loading it. This is a page that passed the W3C validator (4.0 Transitional) with flying colors. IE and Lynx rendered it easily. Netscape just bailed out and disappeared every time.

Did the MS Java runtime have non-standard extensions? Yup, you betcha. It also ran like a raped ape, even without using those extensions. MS's JVM was tons faster than Sun's. Were those extensions enabled by default in the J++ development environment? Yup, though they sure were easy to turn off, just one little check-box. But this is an IDE, not the JVM that was really at issue, so why did Sun get so upset? The reason was that the J++ IDE kicked huge butt over every other (not very many) Java IDE, thus practically everyone on the Windows platform was using it. Why is it that Sun never wrote a decent IDE? Truth is, Scott McNealy wouldn't recognize a clue if it bit him on the ass. It isn't the person who writes the best engine who wins, it's the person who writes the best tools to use the engine that wins. Microsoft wrote the best tools. Sun didn't like it, and told Microsoft to take their tools and go home. Much to Sun's everlasting chagrin, Microsoft did just that.

Microsoft has NOT won every battle they entered into. We just tend not to remember the ones that didn't make it. MS has made a couple of forays into graphics editing and desktop publishing over the years. And, yes, they've even bundled some of these apps for free. Yet, Adobe, Corel and Macromedia just keep pushing 'em back down. The reason they can do it is that those companies have high-quality, solid products that they continue to maintain and keep relevant. Had Netscape had a quality product when Microsoft challenged them, IE would never have gotten a significant foothold.

If you or I had started a company trying to market it against Netscape, we would have disappeared without a trace.

Given Netscape's complacency and arrogance, just about anyone who had the commitment to write a solid product could have knocked them out of the market.

Re:That's ludicrous

[evilviper]

but doesn't this open up a slippery slope? Where does it stop?

No... and wherever the courts say it stops.

When you are a monopoly, you no longer have total authority.

For instance, because utilities are monopolies, many areas have regulations that individuals can pipe their excess power into the grid and get paid the wholesale price for power...

Local telcos are forced to allow other DSL provides (or telephone service providers) to use their lines at wholesale costs.

Think of any other monopoly, and there are similar circumstances. Monopolies are allowed to exist only if they serve the public good... They are not allowed to use their monopolies to challenge the competion as any other company could.

Re:That's ludicrous

[RodeoBoy]

This alone has pretty much killed off most client side Java.

No that's ludicrous. Ugly slow java applets and flavour of the day ui lib killed java on the client. Also developers just seemed to abandon it for that purpose.

Re:That's ludicrous

[sheldon]

"Microsoft isn't smarter than their competitors, they just have deeper pockets. "

And where did they get the deep pockets from?

This isn't some chicken and the egg question, Microsoft clearly dominates markets because they listen to consumer feedback and improve their products over time.

In every case I can think of where Microsoft took over a competitors marketshare it has been because the MS product line kept improving over time, whereas the competitor released a really crappy major upgrade.

Lotus Smartsuite 96
WordPerfect for Windows(multiple versions)
Novell Netware 4.x
Netscape 4.x
Palm(to a certain extent, they just didn't improve over time and let MS take some share)
etc.

In the cases where Microsoft has not taken over a market it has been because the competitor is smart, nimble and produced good product.

Quicken
Oracle database
Apache web server

The problem with your au contraire, besides it being a stupid french saying, is that you cannot backup your contrary statement with facts. If your theory was correct, then in each and every market where Microsoft competes they would be the dominant player.

"Microsoft makes more mistakes than anyone else, but it doesn't matter: They can just afford to make mistakes that would bankrupt anyone else."

Microsoft wasn't always a wealthy company, they became that way for a reason. Because they were willing to try things, and they were willing to risk failure. That, my friend, is how you succeed in this world! You don't succeed by sitting around like a whimpering cry baby.

"It is common sense to take a method and try it. If it fails, admit it frankly and try another. But above all, try something." -- Franklin D. Roosevelt

"If you want to increase your success rate, double your failure rate." -- Thomas Watson

"I am not discouraged, because every wrong attempt discarded is another step forward." -- Thomas Edison

"Results! Why, man, I have gotten a lot of results. I know several thousand things that won't work." -- Thomas Edison

And BTW, I love the /. mentality that a post is Offtopic if it hits too close to the truth and shatters your preconceived notions.

Re:That's ludicrous

[sheldon]

You might wish to start over and logically construct your argument.

The previous poster started out with "I think not", which I agreed with. You're unfortunately continuing this trend.

BTW, the Sun/Microsoft Java licensing agreement was concluded last year as part of a different lawsuit. This also has nothing to do with mandating the installation of the OS(which never occured), or has any bearing of similarity herewith.

Re:That's ludicrous

[NexusTw1n]

In every case I can think of where Microsoft took over a competitors marketshare it has been because the MS product line kept improving over time, whereas the competitor released a really crappy major upgrade.

While I know what you're saying, it's worth bearing in mind, that Wordperfect, Lotus etc complained at the time that MS apps were making API calls that were undocumented. In other words MS was making a superior product by exploiting its OS monopoly, using "hidden" features known only to MS to write better code.

Microsoft wasn't always a wealthy company, they became that way for a reason. Because they were willing to try things, and they were willing to risk failure.

They were willing to try things like theft - remember (to cite one of many examples) doublespace in DOS 6.1 ?
I have a MCSE, years ago I coded C++ for Win 3.1, I still use Windows on a daily basis, and like it, but I am not deluded in thinking MS innovates or got into their current position exclusively through great code and brilliant but not illegal corporate means.

Re:That's ludicrous

[runderwo]

They've completely failed to build a user and developer base on their own, so they instead go to the government for help.

Well, they seem to have at least a good enough idea of what they're doing to have gained MS as a customer; as evidenced by the contract which was signed by MS to distribute a spec-compatible JVM with Windows.

If you're claiming that the violation of that contract isn't grounds for Sun to sue Microsoft, you really should quit trolling. Breach of contract is clearly illegal under any circumstance where the contract itself is legal, which it obviously was in this case.

It becomes part of the antitrust suit because this particular breach of contract was performed as part of a strategy to horizontally expand a monopoly -- poison Java just enough to make it a pain in the ass to use on the monopoly platform while maintaining at least a semblance of compatibility for the sake of public opinion, while rolling out a red carpet for their own competing product, C#. The advantages that MS claims in C# over Java are largely "advantages" that only exist because their Java support was intentionally crippled to begin with.

Oh, and using the monopoly platform as leverage for _that_ rollout (through automatically installing it on systems by Windows Update and bundling with all new products).

Just what *isn't* wrong with this scenario?

Re:That's ludicrous

[bmetzler]

The previous poster started out with "I think not", which I agreed with.

So you support the injunction?

-Brent

Re:That's ludicrous

[bbqBrain]

Sun does benefit from this. Sun will now be able to have included with Windows a correct, complete, modern implementation of Java. This provides a means for competing with Microsoft's web services, VB, etc. If a wide enough Java app userbase is established, there will always be a credible alternative to .NET (it just so happens that servers for this alternative often run Solaris). Anything that helps to build that userbase is a Good Thing for everyone but Microsoft.

BTW, it will be very nice to see Java WebStart included by default with Windows. That should make things interesting.

Re:That's ludicrous

[vrmlguy]

In every case I can think of where Microsoft took over a competitors marketshare it has been because the MS product line kept improving over time, whereas the competitor released a really crappy major upgrade.

I note that you don't mention DR-DOS, which predates all of your other examples.

Microsoft wasn't always a wealthy company, they became that way for a reason. Because they were willing to try things, and they were willing to risk failure. That, my friend, is how you succeed in this world!

I agree. Microsoft tried "unconventional" techniques to compete with DR-DOS, and were willing to risk failure (i.e. the court system). And thus they become a wealthy company.

For those who don't want to read the article that I referenced about, let me quote a passage near the end:

Suppose that company A manufactures a product system with two components, A1 and A2, each sold separately. Company A has monopoly power over A1, but company B competes in the market for the second component with its compatible offering, B2. Thus, consumers initially can use a product system comprised of either A1 and A2 or A1 and B2. Company A now introduces a new product system, A1' and A2', which serves roughly the same function for consumers as the old product system. Component B2, however, is incompatible with A1'. Furthermore, company A discontinues the sale of A1 or else reprices A1 substantially higher than before. As a consequence, consumers switch to the new product system and company B is driven from the market for component two.

When, if ever, should the antitrust laws sanction company A for driving B out of the market?

I would be interested in hearing your answer to that question.

Re:That's ludicrous

[jjohnson]

How does that benefit Sun financially? How do they sell more products because of it? Software? Hardware? They're behind in the web applications space; they have no significant general user software applications written in Java; any benefit they derive from a wide install base of JVMs benefits other software vendors in the same proportion that they have market share--in other words, more than Sun as far as Java applications go.

Re:That's ludicrous

[sheldon]

So you support the injunction?

I really could care less. The injunction won't help Sun compete because it's not their problem.

Re:That's ludicrous

[sheldon]

Ahh, it sounds as though you are complaining about the creation of Windows 95.

Progress, my friend, is a fact of life especially in the computer industry.

I am reminded of my first experiences with Word processors back in the early 80's. I used WordStar at the time running on CP/M-80 2.2. Were you aware that Wordstar did not include a spell checker? Strange as that might sound, it's true... the spell checking functionality was part of a second program that you purchased created by another company.

Later on Wordstar and other word processors like Wordperfect included spell checking functionality in their applications.

Now let's ask another question. Since it's wrong to take a market away from a company, why is open source justified? Linux has nearly completely obliterated SCO Unix.

I think we know your answer for that one. You see, these questions are not one of ethics or morality and it is disengenuous of you to try to pose them as such.

Re:That's ludicrous

[sheldon]

"While I know what you're saying, it's worth bearing in mind, that Wordperfect, Lotus etc complained at the time that MS apps were making API calls that were undocumented."

I've never seen any conclusive evidence to support that claim. Besides even that excuse does not explain the problems Wordperfect and Lotus had, as their programs leaked memory and were generally buggy. No amount of hidden APIs is going to fix bad coding practices.

"They were willing to try things like theft - remember (to cite one of many examples) doublespace in DOS 6.1 ? "

Theft? The Doublespace/Stacker examples is one solely of patent infringement.

"I am not deluded in thinking MS innovates or got into their current position exclusively through great code and brilliant but not illegal corporate means."

Ahh, I only speak truth. The delusion is on the part of the Microsoft detractors making excuses for their incompetencies.

Re:That's ludicrous

[Anonymous Coward]

What's next? maybe every device equipped with a chip, must include a JVM.

I also hate MS like you, but I'm really afraid that my child or grandchild most likely only hate Sun.

In 80's - 90's people let M$ becomes monopoly, I'm always wonder what we're doing now.

Re:That's ludicrous

[freaq]

How does that benefit Sun financially?

Sun ONE Studio, Enterprise Edition, note the decidedly unpaltry price.
if i know that its output won't work the same on windows as it does on solaris, why am i parting with my hard earned coins? oh, right, i'm not.

they have no significant general user software applications written in Java

i wonder why that is? perhaps because nobody could make a cross platform java app unless it _didn't_ run on windows, the most common user operating system (for home use, at least)?

Re:That's ludicrous

[jjohnson]

Sun One has a far smaller market share than Websphere or BEA Weblogic. They're helping their competitors more than they're helping themselves.

Re:That's ludicrous

[vrmlguy]

No, I'm not complaining about the creation of Windows 95. I'm objecting to Microsoft deliberately engineering arbitrary incompatibilities into a product. That is most definitely a question of ethics and morality. Are you afraid to answer the direct question that I posed before?

Re:That's ludicrous

[sheldon]

"No, I'm not complaining about the creation of Windows 95. I'm objecting to Microsoft deliberately engineering arbitrary incompatibilities into a product. That is most definitely a question of ethics and morality. Are you afraid to answer the direct question that I posed before?"

Anyway, I think you need to go watch some Perry Mason and understand the meaning of a Leading Question and why they are frowned upon.

I did answer the question, but I didso by pointing out that your assumptions are flawed.

Nice.

[Squidgee]

Nice. Java is a good concept. Slow, mind you, but good, since what runs on Windows (written in Java) will run on Linux will run on Mac OS X. It makes the OS world a better place.

Re:Nice.

[Tim Macinta]

Nice. Java is a good concept. Slow, mind you, but good

It really isn't that slow anymore. I wrote an MD5 implementation in Java and when I tested the performance recently I was shocked that my Java implementation was significantly faster at checksumming a large file on my Linux system than the native md5sum binary. Now, Java wasn't entirely responsible for the speed increase (because I later rewrote parts as a native method and this was even faster still, so my optimizations had a lot to do with it), but my point is that JITs have gotten so good now that even computationally intensive Java code can run with comparable speed to native apps and sometimes with superior speed.

Now if only they would reduce the memory footprint of things like Swing.

Re:Nice.

[Anonymous Coward]

No, it is not.
Java apps are still memory hogs and I have yet to see a GUI based Java app that doesn't stand out from other ( native) apps.
You do understand that all this runtime flexibility has a price and JIT compilers can only do so much.
PS.
Java code cannot run with "superior" speed for the whole fucking Java is written in C (native) and therefore if it is faster, it is only because coders who coded Java were better than whoever coded the other stuff you are trying to compare to.

Re:Nice.

[Tim Macinta]

Java code cannot run with "superior" speed for the whole fucking Java is written in C (native) and therefore if it is faster, it is only because coders who coded Java were better than whoever coded the other stuff you are trying to compare to.

First of all, that's just not true. The JIT has access to runtime information about the code and it is therefore capable of making runtime decisions about how to best compile things. For instance, if you had a method called factorial(int) which was called frequenly with values entered by the user and the user happened to enter 20 a couple hundred times, the JIT can pick up on this and compile a special version of the method that returns a cached value for factorial(20). The HotSpot JVM supposedly does this, and I am not aware of any C compiler which does the same (it would be a much more difficult task, I would think). Yes, you could write your own caching code in C, but that is A) a lot more work and B) not likely to capture the common case as well as a JVM with runtime information can.

Secondly, as you hinted at, the design has a lot more to do with the speed of the code than what language it is written in. That's another factor in Java's favor when it comes to speed. If you know how to design things well, Java is one of the best languages to use because you spend most of the time implementing the design rather than the plumbing.

Re:Nice.

[Glock27]

If you know how to design things well, Java is one of the best languages to use because you spend most of the time implementing the design rather than the plumbing.

Yes. Even for soft realtime things (like video games) Java can work fine if you avoid intensive garbage collection during the realtime processing. That isn't so hard in these days of multi-hundred MB machines.

Another point is that the better defined (what some view as somewhat restrictive) nature of Java permits further optimizations than possible in C. Also the VM can generate optimized code for the exact processor its running on, though I'm not sure how much of that is happening in practice right now.

At any rate, the VMs are now very good. Run your own benchmarks and decide for yourself.

Re:Nice.

[iebgener]

Now if only they would reduce the memory footprint of things like Swing.

actually, IBM has done something else, they have build SWT (standard window toolkit) and the footprint compaired to swing is by far better. Unlike swing, the widget are native (msw, gtk2, motif, cocoa) and the graphic allocations are not handled by the garbage collector. And off course everything is opensource. So your logic is in pure java and your lowlevel GUI is handled by the OS. Fair trade to me. Check out eclipse.org, the development platform is built on swt.

Re:Nice.

[Tim Macinta]

actually, IBM has done something else, they have build SWT (standard window toolkit) and the footprint compaired to swing is by far better.

Thanks for the tip. I think I had looked at this awhile back, but at the time they only had support for Windows and Motif. My strategy for the peer to peer backup program I'm developing in Java has been to develop it in Swing first, since Swing is available on all platforms, and then go back and write native implementations for the platforms that need it. It's pretty easy to have multiple UIs if you separate things into model and view(s). Anyway, it sounds like the SWT could save me a bit of work on the second phase - thanks.

Re:Nice.

[swagr]

What do you mean "slow"?
Hard drives are slow... compared to RAM, but not compared to a backup tape system.
Starting a windowing system is slow, compared to not doing it and using the command line.

Re:Nice.

[Squidgee]

I mean slow compared to other OOP languages.

How about my VM?

[zerofoo]

I made a virtual machine in college. It is based on an LL1 type language and the language is compiled into an intermediate byte code, and then executed on a virtual machine that is platform specific. It's a little buggy, and it crashes the machine occasionally, (hey, I only had one semester in my compilers class to finish it!) Maybe I can force Microsoft to carry it....after all it is a competing technology.

-ted

Re:How about my VM?

[LostCluster]

Get MS to license a cross-platform standard you created for that VM, then watch them break the cross-platform feature by releasing a moddifed VM that has Windows-only calls (breaking the concept of a VM) and releasing programming tools that claim to be for your standard, but really is their modification of your standard.

At that point, you can force MS to carry your VM.

Re:How about my VM?

[Anonymous Coward]

hmmmm, did microsft include a broken and out of date version of your VM with the previous releases of Windows? or did you have a deal with them in the past like Sun did?

If so yes you have a very strong point and maybe you should get them to distribute it with their OS.

Re:How about my VM?

[Anonymous Coward]

Back in the days of Windows 3.1, I had an idea to write a desktop environment and call it 'Bob'.

A year or two later, suddenly, there's Microsoft Bob.

Can I sue them?

Re:How about my VM?

[seanb]

Well, of course you can sue! You may not have a snowballs chance in hell of seeing one red cent, but you can always sue and try your luck. With a good team of lawyers, you may even get an injunction to prevent Microsoft from distributing "Bob".

Re:How about my VM?

[Anonymous Coward]

It's a little buggy, and it crashes the machine occasionally

Sounds like they're already including it.

Re:How about my VM?

[Anonymous Coward]

Well given you're VM is a little buggy and it crashes the machine occasionally, you're VM may stand a chance over Java if MS has anything to say about it.

Microsoft to include a patch!

[Valiss]

I bet they'll find a way to screw up the inclusion of Java thereby making it necessary for you to d/l a service pack to fix it bi-weekly.

Plenty fair

[Anonymous Coward]

Because:
a) 99% of people will never download it
b) Fair punishment for Microsoft purposesly distributing a broken version of Java based on 1.1 (From 1997!) for 5 years, because it wanted to cripple the competition for it's .NET initiative.

Listen, if my Television was manufactured by NBC, they should not have the power to not carry CBS, ABC, PBS, etc. They should be forced to carry all stations, within reason, that fit the standards.

Re:Plenty fair

[shamilton]

Listen, if my Television was manufactured by NBC, they should not have the power to not carry CBS, ABC, PBS, etc. They should be forced to carry all stations, within reason, that fit the standards.

And why's that? I suppose Windows is also unfairly monopolising the OS market by only running MZs?

sh

Re:Plenty fair

[Anonymous Coward]

And why's that?

Two reasons:

- Long ago, this nation discovered that monopolies were very, very bad for the economy; especially if they were required for the lifeblood of the economy to function. If Short Line railroad has the only set of tracks between Chicago and New York, and doesn't allow competitors to use those tracks, then everyone (Passengers, manufacturers) is locked into whatever price Short Line wants to charge.

- Monopolies give too much political power to a small group of people. If NBC denied the CBS signal, then NBC effectively has control over the news.

Re:Plenty fair

[Anonymous Coward]

> Listen, if my Television was manufactured by NBC, they should not have the power to not carry CBS, ABC, PBS, etc. They should be forced to carry all stations, within reason, that fit the standards.

Actually, that's not a good analogy. Now, if NBC had a popular program running and then required that all cable providers that wanted to show that program weren't allowed to show a competition program on say, PBS (not a perfect analogy), that'd well describe MS's relationship with OEMs and Netscape (and now Sun's Java). OEMs wanted to include Netscape, but MS denied them that option or they'd have to pony up the "full" price for licenses. Back then, that was ~$8-24 compared to $89. Take that times a couple hundred thousand and see which way you'd go..

Re:Plenty fair

[Anonymous Coward]

No, it's because Sun sued them for including Windows specific instructions that allowed for some enhancements. Despite Sun's contention, it never caused a problem for *NIX or MacOS people. Their VMs just ignored it and moved on.

In the original suit, one of the things Sun got was an order forbidding Microsoft to do any work on JAva past 2005 or 2006. In fact, not including it in Windows XP is early compliance.

Sun's just scared... and they should be too. MS kills them in the OS market and Intel has a stake with UltraSPARC's name on it.

Re:Plenty fair

[Anonymous Coward]

If that outdated analogy were to work, the following would have to happen:

1) Apple, Sun, SGi, etc. all must simply vanish off the face of the planet or be pre-existing Windows houses.

2) The orignal AT&T code for Unix and all derivitives (Linux, IRIX, Solaris, BSD, etc.) have to be purged from existence. MacOS and OS X too.

People forget WE, the users, made Microsoft a monopoly. We chose Windows over OS/2 and that's the beginning. OS/2 survived pretty long too.

And comparing NBC owning airwaves is Apples and Oranges.

Re:Plenty fair

[shamilton]

You're missing the point of my question. Why shouldn't the NBC TV only display NBC stations? It's an NBC TV.

sh

Re:Plenty fair

[Anonymous Coward]

a) 99% of people will never download it

Where the fuck did you get this statistic? Out of yer arse? Or did you personally poll a sample of windows users and report the findings to the newspapers? You twat.

Re:Plenty fair

[Anonvmous Coward]

"Listen, if my Television was manufactured by NBC, they should not have the power to not carry CBS, ABC, PBS, etc. They should be forced to carry all stations, within reason, that fit the standards."

This is a dumb metaphor. If you demand everything be open to all companies like that, then you leave the door open for bigger companies to swoop in and steal business. Imagine what would happen if Disney started buying up the networks.

Think about it.

Re:Plenty fair

[EzInKy]

Though I agree with you in principle, I think your analogy is a bit off. Forcing MS to distribute Sun's Java is akin to requiring NBC to broadcast another network's signal.

Re:Plenty fair

[hermescom]

Um... the reason they are distributing a version from 1997 is because Sun sued them to disallow them any further use of Java. I'm not saying Sun was wrong to do so, but this seems weird to me that having locked MS into 1.1 via a court proceeding they are now bitching about it.

Re:Plenty fair

[shaitand]

bad bad analogy, NBC should absolutely have that right, NBC is not an illegal monopoly and they have every right to put what they want on their product unless they have a contract with CBS, ABC, PBS, etc that binds them to show those programs. Not many would buy it, but they can do it. On the other hand, Microsoft is in a far different position than NBC would be in your scenerio. Microsoft has over a 95% monopoly in windows. An illegal 95% monopoly, they don't have the right to use it to promote anything, that would be leveraging the monopoly and illegal. The only time they could do so would be if they provided equal support, access, and pre-emptive installation of competitors products with the same ease of installation or if MS is preinstalled then the competitors products must be preinstalled. Normally a buisness would have every right to not include their competitors software in their OS. But the rules all change when the product is A) a monopoly and when MS is B) bound to include said product by terms of a contract.

Re:Plenty fair

[Anonymous Coward]

A. Disney IS buying networks.

B. I don't care who manufacturers the TVs, they should still work with competing stations.

Re:Plenty fair

[stefanlasiewski]

Haven't there been some recent cases resulting in local cable monopolies being required to carry certain local stations?

Re:Plenty fair

[stefanlasiewski]

No, Sun sued Microsoft to NOT INCLUDE the broken
MS Version of Java with Windows. The MS Marketing machine then said "They won't allow us to use Java, Sniff! You poor users.".

Sun tried to force MS to use a modern version of Java (1.2 I believe), but MS wouldn't budge. Why would they? They are a monopoly.

It's part 1 of a 2+ part strategy. Today's ruling is part 2.

Re:Plenty fair

[Anonymous Coward]

I answered your questions. Reread.

Monopoly = stranglehold on the market. Train market, broadcast market, software market. You can only dominate the market so much.

Thank you, please think again!

Re:Plenty fair

[Anonymous Coward]

OK, how's this:

Most people will never download it.

Sheesh. You see a number and you go nuts wanting references.

Java is a Piece of Crap

[Anonymous Coward]

Having java come with Windows means absoluteky nothing to anyone. You could install it yourself...what is the big deal?

What happens to java when SUNW goes belly up?

Extensive coverage

[Anonymous Coward]

From gns

Of course this is a good thing

[00_NOP]

Those posters who suggest that the courts getting involved might not be good have missed the point: MS is operating an (illegal) monopoly. 98% of the world's computer users are using their software. If MS don't like you, you get screwed, so the courts' intervention can only be a good thing. In a future world where we using all sorts of different OSes and relying on standards to interact then maybe court intervention might be problematic. But we aren't there and we aren't geoing to there for many, many, years to come.

Re:Of course this is a good thing

[Cuthalion]

Being a monopoly is not illegal, however it does place additional restrictions on your buisness practices, which is what the DOJ (and pretty much everyone else) says Microsoft is violating.

Re:Of course this is a good thing

[00_NOP]

Being a monopoly is not illegal, however it does place additional restrictions on your buisness practices, which is what the DOJ (and pretty much everyone else) says Microsoft is violating.

I think that is what I said: an illegal monopoly. And it's not (just) the DOJ who say so - it's the law. Because that is what it means in a society where the law rules and the courts rule against you.

Re:Of course this is a good thing

[Arandir]

Right on! Not only should Microsoft be forced to include Java, they should also include Python, Haskell and Tcl/Tk. Make them ship with Navigator AND Mozilla. But icons for both MSOffice and OpenOffice on the desktop. Heck, throw in a loopback distro of Linux while you're at it.

After all, if Sun cannot compete because Windows doesn't ship with Java, then neither can anyone else who doesn't have their software shipped with Windows.

Hee, hee. Since Microsoft has been declared an illegal monopoly, they're fair game. Make them do whatever we want. Make them give away MSOffice for free! Make them give all of us a rebate whether or not we've even used their stuff! Make them replace their desktop with GNOME! They're evil so anything the government does to them is justified...

Re:Of course this is a good thing

[axxackall]

You forgot to include LaTeX and to change Notepad by (X)Emacs.

Unfortunately it's all not gonna happen. No one will lobby any open source software. Even Sun insisted on Java, not on Star/Open-Office.

Re:Of course this is a good thing

[Anonymous Coward]

Not only should Microsoft be forced to include Java...

... but also Linux and other *n*x systems must include .Net - fairness must be symmetric, right?

Re:Of course this is a good thing

[Slime-dogg]

Except that those open-source products don't exist in the market, and they cannot compete with Microsoft. They don't have to compete. They are free, people don't have jobs that hinge on them (well, very few do), the source is out there.

Office doesn't ship with Windows. Neither do any compilers (except for Debug.exe... gotta love it). Windows is pure binary, there is very little need for uncompiled libraries. Second, TCL/TK doesn't provide a base for servers, no one makes money off of it, and Windows is not used as a leverage to get rid of it.

You don't have to ship other OS's with Windows, you just have to make sure that the OS does what you expect it to do. If you go to a website that uses a swing applet, you should be able to see it pop up in the browser. It's an open standard, and if IE is going to be shipped with Windows, then it is MS's responsibility to make sure that it works correctly with web technologies.

When MS decides that it wants to control web technologies, and makes it so that it does, we the people must step in and bitch-slap them. I can see MS being required to ship Mozilla or Netscape, or at least open up the source to IE (and incorporate UML into IE). MS does a lot of things that forces developers to have limited options. This is what they want to have... Developers don't want to write something for a product that may or may not support it correctly. A developer does not want to have to take the extra time and work to ensure that the software product from another maker is there.

It is the OS maker's responsibility to ensure that software makers have the simplest and most varied options and methods. A simple and clear API, for instance, or a VM that runs swing...

Re:Of course this is a good thing

[00_NOP]

After all, if Sun cannot compete because Windows doesn't ship with Java, then neither can anyone else who doesn't have their software shipped with Windows.

You are Dan Quayle and I claim my $5.

How stupid are you? You should learn to read (and so check the facts) before you type. MS does ship Java with Windows, that's the whole point. But they deliberately ship a very out of date (aka broken) version to ensure that when Joe User tries to download a java applet or similar it won't work.

Re:Of course this is a good thing

[Anonymous Coward]

Sorry, the truth is MS did ship Java with Windows. JVM is not with Windows XP by default already (although you can still able to download that broken JVM though Windows update).

Now I just hope Larry will go to sue MS, as I really want Windows ship with Perl (and must be the latest version, no bug, no security hole, never hang the OS, etc..). Why not let ppl can run helloworld.pl on Windows by default?

Duopoly?

[hebble]

Wait, so let me get this straight:

If Microsoft bundles its own add-ons into its OS, that's monopolistic and bad; but if Microsoft bundles someone else's add-ons into its OS, that's competitive and good?

So now instead of one gigantic corporation controlling what's on your computer, there will be two. Ah, so much better.

Re:Duopoly?

[Anonymous Coward]

Big deal. At least it is MORE THAN ONE!

Next we need a 'tripoly'...then a ....

Its not a slippery slope unless you have more than 1 point. A point has no slope.
(not meaning a point in something; I know calc too)

The "next" step is an open market. Like linuxs, there will be various add-ins from many sources. How is this different?
Its just a VM.

Java is great for many things and C# is not needed; its just a result of MS not getting its way with Java. Just like the X-Box was made because Sony said no to being MS's beoch on the PS2.

Re:Duopoly?

[Shelled]

Close. When a DOJ-confirmed abusive monopoly bundles an intentionally crippled version of a competitor's add-on into its OS, that's bad: but if, forced by the courts to adhere to a prior contract in good faith, Microsoft bundles the correct add-on, then yes, that's good. Well, for everyone but the monopolist.

Re:Duopoly?

[g4dget]

This can't be about contractual obligations anymore: what Sun is shipping is completely different from what Microsoft and Sun made a contract over.

It is bad that Microsoft has been shipping a broken version of Java, and they should be ordered to stop. Beyond that, it's Sun's obligation to get their software onto people's desktops. AOL, which is also in competition with Microsoft, shows that it can be done.

rant

[MimsyBoro]

first of all, I too don't understand why are they being forced to include Suns Java. I hate M$FT as much as the next geek but I believe in capitalisim and not in socialisim. If M$FT is big and sucsseful it is their RIGHT to choose what to include in their OS not the courts or SUNs. If they behaved badly(read monopolisticly) they should be fined not forced to help their comptetors. This isn't soviet russia (BTW in Soviet Russia M$FT forces the court to include Java in their OS). As much as I do hate those rich pigs I have to admit their software is good (yet buggy and annoying) and their marketing is great. On the otherhand it took me three tries to get mandrake installed right on my machine and in the first few weeks it crashed 3 times. I don't recommend linux for my grandma just yet. (Mandrake 9 to those who were wondering). Bring on the mods

"include" in what sense?

[josephgrossberg]

Can they include it and then set it defaulted to "off" for "security" reasons?

Not forced, but prohibited

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't think Microsoft is "forced" to distribute Sun Java so much as they're prohibited from distributing their own handicapped version when they *choose* to distribute Java.

Hmmmm

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe they should order it to be included with gnu/hurd as well.

No offense but...

[Squidgee]

> and the software became what it could be - a truly universal effective program intelligible to most humans. You just discribed Windows as it is now; intelligible to most people. and effective. Not nearly as effective as it could be, but it is effective.

Terror is a noun

[Anonymous Coward]

Uh, yeah . . .

News flash

[first axiom]

Microsoft ordered by court to set my face as default background. Microsoft was found to be ilegally leveraging its monopoly of the operating system market to marginalize my pretty face.

This is just ludicrous. Courts on crack.

Why should Windows carry Java? Every other software vendor has to sell and distribute their own software, not rely on court-orders. Why should Sun be any different? If Windows users want Java they can buy it from Sun or download it.

Re:News flash

[WildBeast]

So I guess, I can create a Java clone and force MS to distribute it for me. We live in a world of great opportunities nowadays

Re:News flash

[hkmwbz]

No, your pretty face is still "your pretty face".

You see, Microsoft did not agree to distribute your pretty face, and then change it completely but still calling it "your pretty face". The result being that everyone recognizing Microsoft's "your pretty face" rather than your pretty face.

If they had, I am sure you would have had a case, and the courts would agree that Microsoft should undo their wrongdoing and re-instate your pretty face as the proper "your pretty face."

Because what Microsoft called "your pretty face" wasn't your pretty face in the first place, and that damaged you because people stopped recognizing you on the streed, you lost your job, girlfriend, home etc.

But your pretty face is still "your pretty face".

Re:News flash

[Anonymous Coward]

and lets do a slight shifting of context levels

Why should computers carry Windows? Every other operating system vendor has to sell and distribute their own operating system, not rely on court-orders. Why should Microsoft be any different? If computers users want windows they can buy it from Microsoft ...

Re:News flash

[first axiom]

Yes, but after Sun whined that Microsoft had bastardized Java beyond all recognition, Microsoft agreed to drop Java.

Now Sun is whining that Microsoft wants to marginalize Java.

I think Sun should get off their asses and start selling Java like normal software vendors. Or do like AOL and give it away on massive quantities of CDs, but not rely on court-orders for their business to succeed.

Re:News flash

[first axiom]

In general, I agree.

However, no court order forced Dell, HPaq, and others to carry Windows. Draconian Microsoft licensing maybe, but no court order.

That still does not excuse Sun, or the imbecile judge.

Re:News flash

[Anonymous Coward]

Microsoft should play one-upmanship and port the .NET framework to Solaris, and then have the courts order Sun to ship it for them.

Re:News flash

[hkmwbz]

Microsoft agreed to drop their Java. But that didn't clean up the mess they made - far from it.

I bet you wouldn't feel very good either if they agreed to use your face as the default Windows background and you were excited to become famous, only to find that they had photoshopped your face into something else. And everyone thought the Windows background was the real you.

Re:News flash

[Anonymous Coward]

"I think so, Brain, but how do we convince Sun to sign and then breach a contract to ship it?"

Re:News flash

[first axiom]

Yes, but after I've sued to have them drop my face as a background, sign a settlement which explicitly -prohibits- Mircosoft from ever carrying my face again AND which explicitly releases Microsoft of any future liability regarding Java, THEN I whine to a court that I've changed my mind and want Microsoft to distribute my -correct- face, because if it hadn't been for their anticompetitive practices, my face would be "ubiquitous" (from the Judge's opinion) on desktop PCs. Sun flatters itself.

Re:News flash

[hkmwbz]

Not quite. What has happened is that your face is no longer your face. That is, you have a face, but it's not what everyone thinks is your face. You may have thought that having the Microsoft version of your face removed as the default background was good enough, but it wasn't. People still get it wrong, and it becomes apparent that the damage is much greater than you perhaps thought.

You want your name to be connected with your face again, and you want them to correct their wrongdoing against you, because simply removing your face wasn't enough in the first place.

Perfectly acceptable and understandable.

And a ham sandwich, too!!

[bADlOGIN]

Seriously, considering the history of this trial, Sun should be able to integrate a ham sandwich with Microsoft's OS if they want to.
I do hope this is the beginning of a "death of a thousand paper cuts". Microsoft truely does deserves it. From the looks of it, there's already other lawsuits in line for early January.

Re:And a ham sandwich, too!!

[Valiss]

Or at the very least a MLT: mutton, lettuce and tomato sandwich where the mutton is nice and lean, and the tomato is ripe....they're so perky. I love that.

Makes you wonder

[phorm]

If this is a real number... or an exaggeration. The editors must really have a tough time of it sometimes, if they get this many articles. No wonder we get dupe posts etc.

I've had a question submission in pending since last week, they're probably really busy (or, hopefully, saving mine for a slow day).

17,232 on a Microsoft court ruling... I wonder how many post when the next distro of brand-X linux comes out. Also wonder how many people are visiting /. in a day lately, if this many are actually posting submissions.

Also wonder if they chose the AC just so that the other 17,231 people didn't have a name to cry foul upon when theirs was not the chosen submission.

Re:Makes you wonder

[Anonymous Coward]

sorry bro, there is no way that 17,000 people actually submitted this story. think of the number as hyperbole.

Re:Makes you wonder

[BabyDave]

Nah, there's really only 12 people who read /. - the rest are just CmdrTaco pretending. Why else do you think 50 people post variations on the same comment in every story?

And the /. effect? They use voodoo - stick pins into a 386.

Re:Makes you wonder

[Anonymous Coward]

What's a Hyperbole? Is that Intel's new attempt at housewares. I'm gonna have to get down to Walmart and get that new Hyper bowl... Sound's pretty cool...

Re:Makes you wonder

[Corporate Drone]

I woulda waited the extra 90 or so folks, just so i could've said that he was the 10000 * sqrt(3) 'th person ...

of course, I'm silly that way...

Re:Makes you wonder

[techwolf]

I actually asked for one for Christmas... that and a sense of humor, but I think all I'll be getting is LOTR on DVD. :\

whoa, daddy!

[SweetAndSourJesus]

We get basic inalienable rights regarding software?!? When the hell did this happen?

Oh, and last time I checked, Sun is a giant corporation. They've got big buildings and leather executive chairs and everything. They've even got lawyers with big nasty teeth. Don't paint them like they're Sun's Software and TV Repair.

I have the karma to burn

[Quasar1999]

An anonymous reader was the 17,232th person to submit...

17,232th? What the hell? No, no, no... you see this is the reason that Microsoft didn't want java included in the first place... stupid syntactical errors like the above can be generated quite easily using java, but asp libraries prevent such mistakes, and would have genereated '17,232nd' as the proper response.

Well, unless of course a human wrote that... in which case, shame on you... proof read dang it!

But on a serious note (to help save my karma), putting aside that this is microsoft, and they are evil, doesn't imposing the will of SUN onto microsoft violate something? or at the very least lower them to the same level? Microsoft wasn't preventing java from running on their os, they simple did not BUNDLE a competing product. What the hell? I don't see the problem. What next? DVD manufacturers have to bundle competing (free) DVD player software with their drives? I think not! Although MS deserves it... as a whole, this is not the right thing to do.

Re:I have the karma to burn

[Anonymous Coward]

What next? DVD manufacturers have to bundle competing (free) DVD player software with their drives?

How many times does it have to be said before people understand that monopolies have a special set of rules that are more strict, because otherwise they can use their monopoly power unfairly?

Re:I have the karma to burn

[bmetzler]

doesn't imposing the will of SUN onto microsoft violate something?

This isn't the will of Sun. It's a contract that the Judge decided should be honoured. If I sign a contract with you, and then don't fulfill my part, and you sue me, would you be imposing your will upon me?

What next? DVD manufacturers have to bundle competing (free) DVD player software with their drives?

If they sign a contract, yes.

-Brent

Re:I have the karma to burn

[sparkz]

Microsoft were bundling an incompatible Java-like VM and calling it Java. They were rightly stopped from doing this, so instead of fixing it, or bundling Sun's JVM, they just didn't release a VM. That screws all MS users, and MS say, "Sorry, Sun sued us. Sun don't care about you like we do." This (and broken MSJVM making Java look bad) are deliberate MS actions to make Java look bad, which helps MS use their monopoly position to push .NET as the "only" option (because MS have (wrongly) discredited Java). While real Java is distributed as part of MS, they can't abuse their monopoly position as easily to promote .NET.

Re:I have the karma to burn

[volkris]

The problem is that the government's will has already been imposed upon others in ways that benefit Microsoft. This is just sort of an attempt to correct the situation by further imposition of will.

And note that it really isn't Sun's will. Sun isn't forcing MS to do this. The government is the one doing it.

Re:I have the karma to burn

[nathanh]

What next? DVD manufacturers have to bundle competing (free) DVD player software with their drives?

If you're going to use an analogy then at least get it right.

Imagine that 99% of the population owned Sony DVD players. Sony purposefully cripples their player to only play DVD titles from Sony Columbia Tristar but for some reason 99% of the population doesn't mind. The subversive company Philips writes a free firmware upgrade for Sony players that plays DVDs from all vendors PLUS adds VCD and MP3 support. Philips and Sony negotiate a contract to ship the new firmware in all Sony players. However Sony pulls a swifty and ships a buggy Sony firmware with Philips branding all over it. Philips is understandably pissed but tries to resolve the problem with Sony. However in an unbelievable piece of spin doctoring Sony manages to convice 99% of the population that the Philips firmware was crap in the first place. Philips sues Sony and the judge agrees that Sony has to ship the Philips firmware like the contract said they would.

See, it doesn't seem so silly when you make the analogy work properly.

Re:I have the karma to burn

[Danathar]

Uh...

factoring out that there is'nt a DVD manufacturer with 90% market share, some DVD manufacturers DO bundle competing player software. My DVD player came with both PowerDVD and WinDVR.

Re:I have the karma to burn

[ryanvm]

Microsoft wasn't preventing java from running on their os, they simple did not BUNDLE a competing product. What the hell? I don't see the problem.

The problem is that Microsoft was using its operating system monopoly to elbow .NET into Sun's territory. Bundling a bastardized/defunct version of Java with Windows was extremely damaging to Java on the desktop.

Being a monopoly isn't illegal, it's using your monopoly to force your way into other markets that is supposed to piss off the DoJ.

Re:I have the karma to burn

[ReelOddeeo]

Although MS deserves it... as a whole, this is not the right thing to do.

What!?! You say, it's NOT the right thing to force Microsoft to honor a legally binding contract that they signed?

Of course, you could blame Sun instead. Sun should have known better than to sign a non agression pact with Hitler. It's Sun's own fault -- after all, they expected Microsoft to honor the binding contract that they signed. Silly Sun.

What Microsoft did was okay. They should not be penalized. After all, Microsoft gained commercial advantage by signing a contract and then doing the exact opposite of what they signed. Therefore, it must be okay. Profit is all that matters, not right and wrong. This is business. There is no low too low. This is Microsoft we're talking about. They are above the standards that everyone else must live by. (Or would it be below?)

Re:I have the karma to burn

[sandow]

What a great sig. But shouldn't it read.

Programming is like sex. One premature release and you're supporting it for the rest of your life.

spreading the wealth

[Anonymous Coward]

Acholi - Mot ki Yomcwing Botwo Me Mwaka Manyen Adhola - Wafayo Chamo Mbaga & Bothi Oro Manyeni Aeka- Keremisi jai be Afrikaans - Geseende Kerfees en 'n gelukkige nuwe jaar Ahtna - C'ehwggelnen Dzaen Albanian - Gëzuar Krishlindjet Vitin e Ri! Aleut - Kamgan Ukudigaa merry christmas, christmas, countdown to christmas, chanukah, kwanzaa, season's greetings Alsatian - E gueti Wïnâchte & E glecklichs Nej Johr! Alur - Wafoyo Kado Oro & Wafoyo Tundo Oro manyeni Alutiiq - Spraasnikam & Amlertut Kiaget! Amharic - Melkam Yelidet Beaal Amuesha - Yomprocha' ya' nataya Play our Holiday Concentration Game, click here Angami - U kenei Christmas mu teicie kes a-u sie teicie kesa-u sie niepete keluo shuzaie we Apache (Western) - Gozhqq Keshmish merry christmas, christmas, countdown to christmas, chanukah, kwanzaa, season's greetings Arabic - I'D Miilad Said ous Sana Saida Aragonese - Nabidà! & Goyosa Añada benién. merry christmas, christmas, countdown to christmas, chanukah, kwanzaa, season's greetings Aramaic - Edo bri'cho o rish d'shato brich'to! Aranés - Bon Nadau! Arawak - Aba satho niw jari da'wisida bon Armenian - Shenoraavor Nor Dari yev Soorp Janunt Aromanian - Crãciunu hãriosu shi unu anu nãu, bunu! Asturian - Bones Navidaes & Gayoleru anu nuevu! Assamese - Rongaali Bihur xubhessaa lobo Ata - Maroyan na Pasko woy kaopia-an ng Bag-ong Tuig kaniyo't langon mga sulod Aukan - Wi e winsi i wan bun nyun yali Aymara - Sooma Nawira-ra Azeri - Tezze Iliniz Yahsi Olsun merry christmas, christmas, countdown to christmas, chanukah, kwanzaa, season's greetings Bafut - Mboni Chrismen & Mboni Alooyefee Bahasa/Malaysia - Selamat Hari Natal dan Tahun Baru Bamoun - Poket Kristmet & Poket lum mfe Banen - Enganda ye hiono mes & Hion Hios Hes Bandang - Mbung Mbung Krismie & Mbung Mbung Ngouh Suiie merry christmas, christmas, countdown to christmas, chanukah, kwanzaa, season's greetings Basque - Zorionak eta Urte Berri On! Bassa - Ngand Nwi Lam & Mwi Lam Batak Karo - Mejuah-juah Ketuahen Natal Bemba - Kristu abe nenu muli ino nshiku nkulu ya Mwezi Belorussian - Winshuyu sa Svyatkami i z Novym godam! To view the flags and hear the anthems of these countries, click here. Bengali - Shuvo Baro Din - Shuvo Nabo Barsho Bhojpuri - Naya Sal Mubarak Ho Bicolano - Maugmang Capascuhan asin Masaganang Ba-gong Taon! merry christmas, christmas, countdown to christmas, chanukah, kwanzaa, season's greetings Bislama - Mi wisim yufala eerywan one gutfala Krismas & mo wan hapi New Year long Blaan - Pye duh di kaut Kristo klu munt ug Felemi Fali! Blackfoot - I'Taamomohkatoyiiksistsikomi Bohemian/Czech - Prejeme Vam Vesele Vanoce a Stastny novy rok Brahui - Arkas caik xuda are Play our Holiday Concentration Game, click here Breton - Nedeleg laouen na bloav ezh mat Bulgarian - Chestita Koleda i Shtastliva Nova Godina Bulu - Duma e bo'o Bura - e be Zambe e Usa ma ka Kirisimassu merry christmas, christmas, countdown to christmas, chanukah, kwanzaa, season's greetings Catalan - Bon Nadal i feliç any nou! Cantonese - Seng Dan Fai Lok, Sang Nian Fai Lok Carib - Sirito kypoton ra'a merry christmas, christmas, countdown to christmas, chanukah, kwanzaa, season's greetings Carrier - Zoo dungwel & Soocho nohdzi doghel Carolinian - Ameseighil ubwutiiwel Layi Luugh me raagh fee The World's Main Languages Cebuano - Malipayong Pasko ug Bulahang Bag-ong Tuig! Chamorro - Filis Pasgua & Filis Anu Nuebo Chaha Bogem h n mh m & Boxem as nana-h m Chamba - Wi na ge nyare Su dome Kirismass Cherokee - Danistayohihv & Aliheli'sdi Itse Udetiyvsadisv Cheyenne - Hoesenestotse & Aa'e Emona'e Chichewa - Moni Wa Chikondwelero Cha Kristmasi Chiga - Mwebare khuhika - Ha Noel merry christmas, christmas, countdown to christmas, chanukah, kwanzaa, season's greetings Choctaw - Yukpa, Nitak Hollo Chito Cornish - Nadelik looan na looan blethen noweth Play our Holiday Concentration Game, click here Corsican - Bon Natale e Bon capu d' annu Cree - Mitho Makosi Kesikansi Creek - Afvcke Nettvcakorakko Merry Christmas Creole/Seychelles - Bonn e Erez Ane Croatian - Sretan Bozic Merry Christmas Dagbani - Ni ti Burunya Chou & Mi ti yuun Damara/Nama - Khiza Danish - Glædelig Jul og godt nytår Click on any language Name for detailed information Dibabawon - Marayaw na Pasko aw Bag-ong Tui g kaniyo tibo na mga soon Dinka - Miet puou yan dhiedh Banyda tene Yin Dine/Navajo - Ya'at'eeh Keshmish Divehi - Ufaaveri aa ahareh Happy New Year Dschang - Chrismi a lekah Nguo Suieh Duri - Christmas-e- Shoma Mobarak Happy New Year Dutch - Vrolijk Kerstfeest en een Gelukkig Nieuwjaar! Egyptian - Colo sana wintom tiebeen English - Merry Christmas & Happy New Year The History of The Christmas Card Eritrean - Rehus-Beal-Ledeat Esperanto - Gajan Kristnaskon & Bonan Novjaron Estonian - Rõõmsaid Jõulupühi ja Head uut aastat Éwé - Blunya na wo Ewondo - Mbemde abog abyali nti! Mbembe Mbu! Faroese - Gledhilig jól og eydnurikt nggjár! Fali - Use d'h Krismass Farsi - Sal-e no mubarak Fijian - Me Nomuni na marau ni siga ni sucu dei na yabaki vou Finnish - Hyvää Joulua or Hauskaa Joulua - 0nnellista uutta vuotta Flemish - Zalig Kerstfeest en Gelukkig nieuw jaar French - Joyeux Noël et Bonne Année! Frisian - Noflike Krystdagen en in protte Lok en Seine yn it Nije Jier! Friulian - Bon Nadâl e Bon An Gnûf Fulfulde - Jabbama be salla Kirismati Gaddang - Mangamgam Bawa a dawun sikua diaw amin Galician - Bon Nadal e Bo Ani Novo Gari - !Soalokia God i gotu vasau, mi lao ke ba na rago vanigira ara dou i matana! Gciriku - Mfiyawidi yaKrisimisa & Marago ghaMwaka waUpe Georgian - Gilotsavt Krist'es Shobas & Gilosavt akhal ts'els German - Froehliche Weihnachten und ein glückliches Neues Jahr! Gikuyu - Gia na Thigukuu njega Na MwakaM weru wi Gikeno Gitskan - Hisgusgitxwsim Ha'niisgats Christ gankl Ama Sii K'uuhl! Golin - Yesu kule nongwa kaun umaribe ongwa ena mone di mile wai wen milo Greek - Kala Christougenna Ki'eftihismenos O Kenourios Chronos Greenlandic - Juullimi Ukiortaassamilu Pilluarit Guahibo - Pexania Navidadmatacabi piginia pexaniapejanawai paxainaename Guambiano - Navidadwan Tabig tugagunrrigay & Sru pilawan kasrag utunrrigay Guarani - Avyaitete ahi ko Tupa ray arape qyrai Yy Kapyryin rira To view the flags and hear the anthems of these countries,click here. Guarayu - Imboeteipri tasecoi Tupa i vave! & Ivve ava Tupa rembiaisu toyuvirecoi turpi oyeaisusa pipe! Gujarati - Natal ni shub kaamnao & Saal Mubarak Gwere - Osusuku Omusa & Masuke Omwaka Gwich'in - Drin tsal zhit shoh ohlii & Drin Choo zhit zhoh ohlii Han - Drin tsul zhit sho ahlay & Drin Cho zhit sho ahlay Hausa - Barka da Kirsimatikuma Barka da Sabuwar Shekara! Hawaiian - Mele Kalikimaka & Hauoli Makahiki Hou Haya - Waihuka na Noeli & Waihhuka n 'Omwaka Hebrew - Mo'adim Lesimkha. Shanah Tova Heiban - Ati kalo gathje uwa gigih Herero- Okresmesa ombwa Ombura ombe ombwa Play our Holiday Concentration Game, click here Hiligaynon - Malipayon nga paskua & Malipayon Nga Bag-ong tuig Hindi - Shubh Naya Baras Holo - Seng-tan khoai-lok! Hmong - Nyob Zoo Xyoo Tahiab Hungarian - Kellemes karácsonyi ünnepeket és Boldog újévet! Hungduan - Maphon au nitungawan. Apo Dios Kituwen baron di toon Iban - Selamat Ari Krismas enggau Taun Baru Ibanag - nga Pascua Icelandic - Gle©£ileg Jól og Farsaelt Komandi ár! Igbo - Ekelere m gi maka Keresimesi na ubochi izizi afo ozo Ikiribati - Te Mauri, Te Raoi ao Te Tabomoa nakoimi nte Kirimati ao te Ririki ae Bou Ilocano - Naimbag a Pascua ken Naragsac nga Baro nga Tawen! Imbongu - Gotenga malo Jisasi Karaist Indonesian - Selamat Hari Natal & Selamat Tahun Baru Inupiaq - Annaurri Aniruq & Paglaun Ukiutchiaq Inupiatun - Quvianaq Agaayuniqpak Iraqi - Idah Saidan Wa Sanah Jadidah Irish - Nollaig Shona Dhuit Iroquois - Ojenyunyat Sungwiyadeson homungradon nagwutut & Ojenyunyat osrasay Italian - Buon Natale e Felice Anno Nuovo Japanese - Shinnen omedeto. Kurisumasu Omedeto Javanese - Sugeng Natal lan warsa enggal Jèrriais - Bouan Noué et Bouanne Année Kabyle - Assegwas ameggaz Kadazan - Kotobian Tadau Do Krimas om Toun Vagu Kahua - Na vagevageha surireua na Kirisimasi ma na harisi naoru Kala Lagaw Ya - Ngi ngayka Koei trimal Kaz Kambaata - eman haaro wegga illisholce Kamba - Ithiwa na Kisimsi Kiseo & Na Mwaka Mweu Museo Click on any language Name for detailed information Kannada - Hosa Varushada Subhasayagalu Karelian - Rastawanke Sinun, Uvven Vuvenke Sinun Kaqchiquel - Dios tik'ujie' avik'in Kashmiri - Christmas Id Mubarak Kawalib - Amirnar Krismas Gi Khasi - Krismas basuk & Snem thymmai basuk Kinyarwanda - Umunsi Mwiza Kirundi - Noeli Nziza & Umwaka Mwiza Kom - Isangle Krismen & Isangle beng i fue Konkoni - Khushal borit Natalam Korafe - Keremisi ewewa Korean Sung Tan Chuk Ha Kosraean - Tok Tapeng & Engan ya sasu Koyukon - Denaahto' Hoolaank Dedzaanh Sodeelts'eeyh Krio - Appi Krismes en Appi Niu Yaa Kuanua - A Bona Lukara na Kinakava Please send us your additions or corrections. Kurdish - Seva piroz sahibe u sersala te piroz be Kwangali - Kerekemisa zongwa & Erago moMumvho gomupe Kyrghyz - JangI jIlIngIz guttuu bolsun! Ladin - Bon Nadel y Bon Ann Nuef Lakota - Wanikiya tonpi wowiyuskin & Omaka teca oiyokipi Lamnsó - Kisheri ke Kisimen & Vijung ve kiya kefiyki Lango - Afoyo Chamo Mwake & Apoyo Mwaka Manyeni Play our Holiday Concentration Game, click here Latin - Pax hominibus bonae voluntatis Latvian - Prieci'gus Ziemsve'tkus un Laimi'gu Jauno Gadu!+ Lausitzian - Wjesole hody a strowe nowe leto Lebanese - Milad Saeed wa Sanaa Mubarakah Lithuanian - Linksmu Kaledu ir laimingu Nauju metu Livonian - Jovi talshpivdi un Vondzist uto aigasto Lower Tanana - Bet'oxdilt'ayi bedena' ch'exulanhde dranh ninoxudedhet To view the flags and hear the anthems of these countries, click here. Lozi - Kilisimasi ya nyakalalo & Silimo se sinca sa tabo Luganda - Amazalibwa Agesanyu & N'Omwaka Omujaa Ogwemirembe Luhya - Isuguku Indahi & Nu Muhiga Musha Luo - Sikuku Mar Higa Kod Mor & Mar Kiga Manyien Luritja - Wai! Nyuntu Larya? Luxembourgeois - Schéi Krëschtdeeg an e Schéint Néi Joer Macedonian - Srekan Bozik I Nova Godina Madura - Pada salamet sabhala bengko areja Makassar - Salama' Natal & Selamat Tahun baru The History of The Christmas Card Malagasy - Arahaba tratry ny Krismasy Mambwe - Kristu aye namwe umu nsikunkulu ino iya Mwezi Malayan - Selamat Hari Natal Malayalam - Puthuvalsara Aashamsakal Maltese - Nixtieqlek Milied Tajjeb u Sena Tajba Mandarin - Kung His Hsin Nien bing Chu Shen Tan Mandobo - Mepiya Pagasaulog sa pagka-otawni Jesus aw maontong kaling Omay! Mangyan - Mayad paq Pasko kag Mansaka - Madyaw na Pasko aw malipayong Bag-ong Tuig kamayo, mga lumon The World's Main Languages Manx - Nollick ghennal as blein vie noa Maori - Kia orana e kia manuia rava i teia Kiritimeti e te Mataiti Ou Marathi - Shub Naya Varsh Margi - Use aga Kirismassi Marshallese - Monono ilo raaneoan Nejin & Jeramman ilo iio in ekaal Mataco-Mataguayo - Lesilatyaj ihi Dios ta i ppule ye, Letamsek ihi wichi ta Dios ikojejthi ta i honat e Maya/Yucateco - Utzul mank'inal Click on any language Name for detailed information Medlpa - Enim Mutuiyo! Meithei - Krismas Hlomum & Kumthar Lawmum Mingrelian - k'irses mugoxuamant & axal ts'anas mugoxuamant Mongolian - Zul saryn bolon shine ony mend devshuulye Monégasque - Festusu Natale e Bona ana noeva Moro - Nidli pred naborete nano Moru - Medu amiri ovuru Yesu opi amaro Muyu - Lip Ki amun aa Natal Kowe Naasioi - Tampara Kirisimaasi Naskapi - miywaaitaakun mikusaanor & kiyaa maamiyupiyaakw minuwaach pipuun Ndjem - Mbeya mbeya Ebiel & Mbeya mbeya mbu Play our Holiday Concentration Game, click here Ndogo - Esimano olyaKalunga gwokombandambanda! & Nombili kombanda yevi maantu e ya hokwa! Ndonga - Okrismesa iwa & Omude Mupe wa Punikwa Nepali - krist Yesu Ko Shuva Janma Utsav Ko Upalaxhma Hardik Shuva & Naya Barsa Ko harkik Shuvakamana Newari - Nhu Da Ya Vintuna Nii - Nim Ono Niuean - Monuina a Aho Kilisimasi mo e Tau Foou Norweigan/Nynorsk - Eg ynskjer hermed Dykk alle ein God Jul og Godt Nyttår Norweigan/Bokmål - God Jul og Godt Nyttår Notu/Ewage - Keremisi dave be Nyanja - Kristu akhale ndi inu munyengo ino ya Christmas Nyankore Mukhulukhe Omwaka Occitan - Polit nadal e bona annada Ojibwe (Chippewa) - Niibaa' anami'egiizhigad & Aabita Biboon Oneida - Wanto'wan amp; Hoyan Oriya - Sukhamaya christmass ebang khusibhara naba barsa Orokaiva - Keremisi javotoho Oromo - baga wagaa hara isinin gaye Palauan - Ungil Kurismas Pompangan - Malugud Pascu at saca Masayang Bayung Banua! Pangasinan - Maabig ya pasko & Maliket ya balon taon Papiamento - Bon Pasco i Feliz Aña Nobo Pashto - De Christmas akhtar de bakhtawar au newai kal de mubarak sha. Pennsylvania German - En frehlicher Grischtdaag unen hallich Nei Yaahr! Pohnpeian - Peren en Krismas & Peren en Parakapw Polish - Wesolych Swiat i Szczesliwego Nowego Roku. Portuguese - Boas Festas e um feliz Ano Novo Punjabi - Nave sal di mubaraka Pashto - Christmas Aao Ne-way Kaal Mo Mobarak Sha Q'anjob'al - chi woche swatx'ilal hak'ul yet yalji Komami' Quechua - Sumaj kausay kachun Navidad ch'sisipi & Mosoi Watapi sumaj kausay kachun Quiche' - Dioa kkje' awuk' Rapa-Nui - Mata-Ki-Te-Rangi & Te-Pito-O-Te-Henua Rarotongan - Kia akakakaia te Atua i runga i te rangi Teitei, e ei au to to teianei ao, e kia aroaia mai te tangata nei. Rengma - Anu keghi Christmas nu amapi kethighi wa salam pi nthu chupenle To view the flags and hear the anthems of these countries, click here. Rheto-Romance - Bella Festas daz Nadal ed in Ventiravel Onn Nov Romani - Bachtalo krecunu Thaj Bachtalo Nevo Bers Romanian - Craciun fericit si un An Nou fericit! Rongmei - Mei kathui nata neila mei Khrisrmas akhatni gai mei tingkum kathan tu-na arew we Roviana - Mami tataru Kirisimasi koa gamu doduru meke qetu qetu vuaheni vaqura ia Russian - Pozdrevlyayu s prazdnikom Rozhdestva i s Novim Godom Salar - YangI yilingiz gotlI bulsIn! Sambal - Maligayang Pasko at Masayang Ba-yon Taon! Sámi - Buorit Juovllat ja Buorre Oddajahki Saamia - Muwule Omwaka Enjaya Samoan - Ia manuia le Kilisimasi ma le tausaga fou Sango -Gloire na Nzapa na ndouzou aho kouè, Na siriri na ndo sessé na popo ti ajo so amou nguia na Lo. Santali - Raska nawa Serma Saramaccan - Nuan wan suti jai o! Sardinian - Bonu nadale e prosperu annu nou The World's Main Languages Scots Gaelic - Nollaig chridheil agus Bliadhna mhath ur! Secoya -Sihuanu'u Ejaerepa aide'ose'ere & Sihuana'u huaje ametecahue Semandang - Selemat gawai Natal Seneca - a:o'-e:sad yos-ha:-se:' Serbian - Sretan Bozic. Vesela Nova Godine Sicilian - Bon Natali e Prosperu Annu Novu ! Sinhala - Subha nath thalak Vewa. Subha Aluth Awrudhak Vewa Slavey - Teyatie Gonezu Soga - Mwisuka Sekukulu Songe - Kutandika kua Yesu kuibuwa! & Kipua kipia kibuwa! The History of The Christmas Card Sorani - Newroz le to Piroz be Sorbian - Wjesole hody a strowe Nowe leto. Somali - ciid wanaagsan iyo sanad cusub oo fiican. Sotho/North - Mahlatsi a Matswalo a Morena le Ngwaga o Moswa Sotho/South - Litakalerso Tse Monate Tsa Kere Semese Le Mahlohonolo a Selemo Se Secha Slovakian - Vesele Vianoce a stastny novy rok Slovene - Vesele bozicne praznike in srecno novo leto Sorbian - Wjesole hody a strowe Nowe leto Spanish - Feliz Navidad y Próspero Año Nuevo Click on any language Name for detailed information Sranan - Wan switi kresneti nanga wan bun nyun yari! Subanen - Piak Pasko Pu Piag Bago Tawn Sudanese - Wilujeng Natal Sareng Warsa Enggal Happy New Year Suena - Kerisimasi kokopai Surigaonon - Malipayon na pasko sanan bag-on tuig! Happy New Year Swahili - Krismas Njema Na Heri Za Mwaka Mpya Swedish - God Jul och Gott Nytt År Tagalog - Maligayang Pasko at Manigong Bagong Taon Tahitian - Ia ora i te Noere e ia ora na i te matahiti 'api Tagakaulu - Madyaw Pagsalog sa Pagka-otaw ni Jesus & Aw mauntong na bago Umay! Tala Andig - Maayad ha pasko daw bag-ong tuig merry christmas, christmas, countdown to christmas, chanukah, kwanzaa, season's greetings Tamazight - Asseggwas Ameggaz merry christmas, christmas, countdown to christmas, chanukah, kwanzaa, season's greetings Tarifit - Asuggas Asa'di Tamil - Nathar Puthu Varuda Valthukkal Tanaina - Natukda Nuuphaa Please send us your additions or corrections. Tayal - Pqaquasta ta. Pquasta hentang na Jesu Telugu - Nootana Samvatchara Subhakanshalu Thai - Suksan Wan Christmas lae Sawadee Pee Mai Tlingit - Xristos Khuwdziti kax sh kaxtoolxetl Tok Pisin - Meri Krismas & Hepi Nu Yia Tokelau - Ke whakamanuia te Kirihimahi & Tauhaga Fou fiafia Tonga - Kristo abe anduwe muciindo ca Christmas Tongan - Kilisimasi Fiefia & Ta'u fo'ou monu ia Toraja - Salama' Natal & Selama' taun baru Trukese - Neekirissimas annim oo iyer seefe feyiyeech! Tshiluba - Diledibua dilenga dia Mfumu - Tshidimu tshipia - tshipia th silenga Tswana - Keresemose o monate le masego a ngwaga o montsha Tubetube - Yayaliyaya Yesu sikabi kaiwena Tumbuka - Kristu wabe namwe munyengo ya Christmas Turkish - Noeliniz Ve Yeni Yiliniz Kutlu Olsun Tutchone/Northern - Ut'ohudinch'i Hulin Dzenu & Eyum nan ek'an nenatth'at danji te yesohuthin ch'e hadaatle sh'o Ukrainian - Veseloho Vam Rizdva i Shchastlyvoho Novoho Roku! Umbundu - Natale, Natale, Oyo O Natale & Eteke Lio Bowano, Illimo Ciwa To view the flags and hear the anthems of these countries, click here. Urdu - Naya Saal Mubarak Ho Uvean - Italo fa ide tau fou nei eseke Uyghur - YanghI yiling ahlqIs bolgey! Valencian - Bon Nadal i millor any nou Vespi - Rastvoidenke i Udenke Vodenke Vietnamese - Chuc Mung Giang Sinh - Chuc Mung Tan Nien Happy New Year Votian - Yvaa rashtagoa! & Yvaa uutta vootta! Season's Greetings Waray-Waray - Maupay nga Pasko ngan Mainuswagon nga Bag-o nga Tuig! Warlpiri - Miri Kirijimiji & Nyuntunpa Ngurrju nyayirni yapa The World's Main Languages Welsh - Nadolig LLawen a Blwyddyn Newydd Dda Yup'ik/Central - Alussistuaqegcikici Yupik/Siberian - Quyanalghii Kuusma & Quyangalleq Nutaghamun Aymiqulleq Xhosa - Siniqwenelela Ikrisimesi EmnandI Nonyaka Omtsha Ozele Iintsikelelo Namathamsanqa Happy Chanukah Yiddish - Gute Vaynakhtn un a Gut Nay Yor Happy Hanukkah Yoruba - E ku odun, e hu iye' dun! Zarma - Barka da Issa hay-yan hann & Barka da djiri barey-yan Zaza - Newroz'a tu Piroz be Zia - Kerisimasi wosewa Zime - El ma ka bar vra aso vei Lu & El ma ka kim na mireu Zulu - Sinifesela Ukhisimusi Omuhle Nonyaka Omusha Onempumelelo

This is the logical extension

[drhairston]

This is the logical extension of "Airbag Politics". Despite the fact that airbags kill more children than school shootings, the government continues to legislate guns out of existence and airbags into existence. So too shall the government legislate Microsoft out of existence and Sun into a monopoly. Arbitrary conclusions fueled by non-facts are costing hard working enterprises their very existence.

Poppycock!

Re:This is the logical extension

[LostCluster]

Arbitrary conclusions fueled by non-facts

Yeah, that's basically what this is... it's an injunction. They'll hold a real trial to sort this out when they get a chance, but for the time being this will have to do.

Re:This is the logical extension

[Anonymous Coward]

airbags kill more children than school shootings

Choking to death on light bulbs probably kills more kids every year than school shootings.

Don't believe all the media hype. School shootings are not a viable threat to your childrean, marijuana will not kill you and there is not a terrorist hiding under every bed.

Re:This is the logical extension

[Anonymous Coward]

Despite the fact that airbags kill more children than school shootings

Yeah, as if schools are the only place that kids can get shot. Real good argument.

Re:This is the logical extension

[Anonymous Coward]

It's a false argument. Airbags also save lives (including children's lives). Not once has anyone's life been saved because someone shot them with a gun.

Re:This is the logical extension

[TeraCo]

Air bags kill so many of you yanks because you don't wear seatbelts, so your air bags have to deploy at some incredibly dangerous speed.

Although I suppose forcing the population to wear seat belts would break one of those unalienable human rights that you guys seem to have truckloads of.

Hmm.. now is this off-topic? troll? flamebait? Who will decide!

Re:This is the logical extension

[antistuff]

what about keanu reaves..."shoot the hostage"?

Re:This is the logical extension

[Snowhare]

Excerpted from your own reference:

17,000 people a year who die by gunfire

3,000 of them are criminals shot by the public or police

Bedard said that the statistics show that some 177 people have been killed by airbags and about 5,000 have been saved since 1993.

So, for every 1 'legitimate' use of guns, there are 4 'illegitmate' uses of them to kill people. As compared to 27 saved lives for every 1 lost for airbags.

By your own numbers.

It was also dis-ingenuous to include police shootings in the numbers - since they run 3 to 1 in the justified direction and are not relevant to the personal ownership argument as they are official government agents. Once police shootings are excluded, the illegitmate to legitimate gunfire deaths ratio rises to about 5 to 1.

And those gun death numbers are around a decade old - current gunfire death numbers are approaching double that.

People like you are why I question whether 'higher' education has any future in the US.

Re:This is the logical extension

[thasmudyan]

Yeah that's like saying pox vaccination is killing people - not guns! Airbags save FAR FAR MORE lives than they take - even though there are stupid people who put their children's head in front of airbag hatches!
How can you get by pretending to be an educated person and even bragging about your education when your post is really just stupid ranting to make your point that "with guns people are safe and free"???

yeah, I know, flame away...

Re:This is the logical extension

[greenrd]

Despite the fact that airbags kill more children than school shootings [forthepeople.org], the government continues to legislate guns out of existence and airbags into existence.

This is not arbitrary. Both compulsory airbags and gun control are argued to have greater benefits than costs. That's not inconsistent or arbitrary, that's just a utilitarian argument.

So too shall the government legislate Microsoft out of existence

Ridiculous hyperbole. The chances of that happening are zero point zero percent.

Arbitrary conclusions

like yours, fueled by illogical arguments, are making you look like a troll.

Re:This is the logical extension

[scd]

Most U.S. states have laws that require the everyone to wear a seatbelt.

Re:This is the logical extension

[TeraCo]

Well, that's good news! If I could edit posts, I'd change it so that it only says 'some'.

Seriously though, thanks for the tip!

Re:This is the logical extension

[platipusrc]

yes question the higher education....

or did you miss the point that he was making that compared the 17000 (where maybe 3000 are legitimate) gun deaths to the 2500000 people per year that use a gun to prevent a serious crime.
for guns:
lives saved:deaths-->147:1 (2500000:17000)
for airbags:
lives saved:deaths-->28:1 (5000:177)

maybe now you can understand that he wasn't talking about legitimate uses vs. illegitimate uses of guns as compared to saved lives vs. deaths with air bags, because, well, that wouldn't make any sense because there's no basis for comparison...maybe if he'd included the number of legitimate airbag deaths and the number of illegitimate airbag deaths then your post would be relevant.

Re:This is the logical extension

[platipusrc]

here is an interesting case of gun control (banning handguns) vs. gun ownership (basically requiring the ownership of a gun). It seems that both towns are small and both are suburbs, one near Chicago and one near Atlanta. It's not strictly fair to compare Kennesaw, GA to Washington, DC as I have done before because of racial factors and size of the town, though DC is the one with strict gun laws and is consistently the murder capital of America. This comparison, however, appears to be more fair.

Re:This is the logical extension

[greenrd]

vs. gun ownership (basically requiring the ownership of a gun).

That's fascist! (At least in peacetime.) I wouldn't live there, personally.

Re:This is the logical extension

[Anonymous Coward]

That's a dumb argument. Airbags may kill more people than guns, but that's not the point. The point is (presumably) that if you compare the number of road deaths with airbags fitted to the number of road deaths without airbags fitted then there will be fewer deaths when airbags are fitted.
I don't have the figures to back this up and I don't particularly care about the matter; I'm just pointing out that saying "airbags kill X people per year" is not an argument, it's half an argument. You need to compare that figure with the figure that you get keeping everything else the same but removing the airbags.
Hell, traffic lights probably kill people each year (cars getting wrapped around them in a crash, gridlock around a red light holding up an ambulance so that the patient is DOA) but I don't see forthemorons.org campaigning against them.

wow..

[compwiz]

There's something I never actually expected to read, given the prior settlement of the giant MS lawsuit and the way things were going.

Next up on the list of things to piss off the giant behemoth - making Microsoft include Netscape as its default browser.

hehe

[SparkyMartin]

MS is being forced to carry and install software they don't want and won't use. They've been doing that to us for years, now let's see how much they like it!

All I can say is

[Anonymous Coward]

LOL!!!!!!

What about other VMs?

[TummyX]

How are other Java vendors supposed to compete when Sun's VM is going to be bundled with Windows. What about IBM?

The ruling is screwed.

Re:What about other VMs?

[sjvn]

What about IBM? They didn't sue. Sun did. To the victor goes the spoils.

Not that any of this really matters. It's only a prelimary injunction. Microsoft will appeal it, the wheels of the justice system will slowly grind on, and there still won't be a working Java bundled with shipping with Windows anytime soon.

Steven

C#

[Anonymous Coward]

The future is C# not this Java stuff that works on multiple platforms.

Good Thing (TM)

[alpharoid]

Yes, this is a good decision. Many places were pulling Java applets from their sites and switching to Javascript where they could or -- gasp! -- ActiveX. And everyone not running IE missed out on functionality and options.

Since Javascript is usually only programmed to look good (or work) in IE and ActiveX is insecure and MS-centric, it's nice to see Java back by default. Until someone comes along with a better idea, and one that works on as many platforms as Java does, we're much better off with it.

Re:Good Thing (TM)

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, this is a good decision. Many places were pulling Java applets from their sites and switching to Javascript where they could or -- gasp! -- ActiveX. And everyone not running IE missed out on functionality and options.

You're absolutely right, except that this had nothing to do with Microsoft. Sun has ignored the applet space for too long and it festered out of existence while Macromedia flew in with Shockwave, which is grossly superior for the purposes of web-based multimedia. Sun put so much effort into J2EE that they forgot that J2SE existed.

So?

[El]

Yes, but have they been ordered to make it work properly in Windows???

Re:So?

[Anonymous Coward]

I guess not because no one's ordered them to make Windows work properly in Windows, and it's their own damned product.

Re:So?

[WasterDave]

Heh! It does seem a little steep, eh?

Dave

1th Post

[Anonymous Coward]

I got 1th Post!!!!

Appropriate coercion?

[MacAndrew]

It's interesting to guess whether others are submitting a given story. I guess this was a no-brainer.

Coercion: the power to require Microsoft to include Java is the same that allows the gov't, or any successful antitrust plaintiff, to force them to do anything different. Because of their market power, which puts them on nearly every desktop in America, their default config has a lot of promotional influence. Up to now, that influence has entirely favored Microsoft, which sounds appropriate ... until you get back to that monopoly abuse.

Whether THIS particular coercion is a good idea, we'll see. Whether coercion is never the right thing, well that's much broader.

A partial analogy would be Microsoft owning the default Yellow Pages distributed to everyone's door and selecting who can be in it -- say, virtually everyone but "Sun." Now, anyone can go get one of the other free directories, but will they? Advantage: Microsoft.

Also, Java isn't exactly a competitor's product; it's also an attempt at an industry-wide open standard that Microsoft wants to subvert, dominate, and exploit. Hey, they already tried.

It's a difficult problem to set things right in the wake of antitrust problems. Market forces generally do a decent job of figuring these things out (the "invisible hand"). But when some clever party makes the market its own, and then abuses it, the rules have to change, and gov't regulation, or a breakup, are the most common remedies.

If you don't think MS should have been sued in the first place, you will not believe any of these rationales, and probably not that antitrust is necessary in the first place. Many think some market failures need correction, but not everyone.

Re:Appropriate coercion?

[TummyX]

A partial analogy would be Microsoft owning the default Yellow Pages distributed to everyone's door and selecting who can be in it -- say, virtually everyone but "Sun." Now, anyone can go get one of the other free directories, but will they? Advantage: Microsoft


Escuse me? Nothing in Windows prevents Java from running and Microsoft DOESN'T bundle every other software package in the world with Windows.

What a fucked up analogy.

Re:Appropriate coercion?

[jedidiah]

The end user doesn't have to be bothered with installing the "monopolyware" solution themselves. Why should they be forced to execute an extra step themselves. Why even expect that they well be able to when everyone appears to claim that PC's must be built to cater to absolute morons.

Microsoft's middleware enjoys an ILLEGAL advantage. They are a conviceted Monopolist, this gives their competitors a right to the "fruits poisonous tree". In any area that Microsoft abuses it's OEM channel, Microsoft's competitors are entitled to the same "advantage".

Re:Appropriate coercion?

[MacAndrew]

No, what a fucked-up comment. Geez, learn to read -- and think.

Re:Appropriate coercion?

[inode_buddha]

Ummm, true; Microsoft DOESN'T bundle every other software package in the world with Windows.
However, the only thing that prevents Java from running in Windows is -- Microsoft itself.
IMO, it's all case of the corporate "NIH" (Not Invented Here) syndrome.
"Dang! Here's this thing we didn't invent, so let's use it before we disable it as much as possible!"

Re:Appropriate coercion?

[Shelled]

It's also worth clearing up the mistaken impression that Microsoft gets nothing back from the government. Laws which prevent selling pirated copies of XP are enacted and enforced by the government. The DCMA was enacted by the government at the behest of the software industry. Microsoft couldn't be Microsoft if it and other closed source businesses didn't have a wall of federal and civil law protecting them. That all this is taken for granted doesn't mean it isn't there.

Now it's Microsoft's turn to obey the law. Saying it's none of the government's business is atruly one-sided perspective.

Re:Appropriate coercion?

[Alien Being]

"Microsoft owning the default Yellow Pages"

Hmm, I thought "The name Yellow Pages is a registered trademark in the United Kingdom of British Telecommunications plc, and may not be used without permission."

Re:Appropriate coercion?

[MacAndrew]

Nicely put. I hadn't thought of it that way. Microsoft has benefitted enormously from being in the U.S., not least because of the size of the market here. And, believe it or not, from the decent legal system that is has used to go after others plenty of times.

Of course, Microsoft wouldn't be Microsoft if the gov't had sought serious enforcement years earlier, as in their earlier investigation (here is a timeline of earlier and now forgotten legal activity).

Which way will the wind blow in Europe?

A minor addendum, the judge in this case, Judge Motz in Baltimore, is a bright and politically moderate guy, likely a good person for the difficult task (I assume he was assigned the case randomly?). Expect him to get reversed and affirmed a couple of times, MS litigates aggressively.

*

This is OT, but have y'all noticed that everyone mistypes DMCA? Me too. Congress should rename it DCMA when they get around to fixing it.

Re:Appropriate coercion?

[jratcliffe]

Absolute morons??? That's, frankly, a comment I resent. Computers don't need to be designed for absolute morons, but they should be designed so that the intelligent layperson, for whom the computer is a _tool, not an end in itself_, can use them easily and readily. My parents are anything but morons (a PhD and a JD between them), but handling computers isn't easy for them, because it's a very different paradigm. Do you think that the fact that cars don't come in a kit, requiring you to install your own fuel injectors, means that they are built for "morons"? Watch your language, and escape from your Slashdot bubble on occasion.

Re:Appropriate coercion?

[MacAndrew]

I don't think he *did* say that. The "absolute morons" referenced "everyone appears to claim" -- a prevalent view, not necessarily the author's.

The writer's point is that computers are increasingly turnkey. That makes it less likely users will go looking for some plug-in or add-on that didn't come with the package. Frankly I think that's a blessing, I hate trying to keep up with that low-level stuff, even if I understand it -- and of course Java isn't something I worry about getting.

*

Hate to tell you, but PhD's and JD's are not insurance enough against moron-hood. Heck, even I have a JD. :) And I used to work with a PhD who always joked it stood for "piled high and deep." Unfortunately in his case it was sorta true; nor was he unique. I'm sure your parents do fine on their own merits.

Re:Appropriate coercion?

[blowdart]

Also, Java isn't exactly a competitor's product; it's also an attempt at an industry-wide open standard

Java? Open standard? Step away from the crack pipe . Java isn't open. It's controlled by Sun, who refuse to release it for standardisation to ISO or ANSI. The Java "standard" is whatever Sun says it is. Hell, even the .Net framework and C# are ISO standards now but Java is not.

Re:Appropriate coercion?

[Slime-dogg]

Yeah, the concept goes as such:

An operating system is the core, the set of programs that run the hardware, and operate as the interim between the hardware and the rest of the software. When Microsoft ships an Operating system, they ought to ship it with either one of two configurations:

• No middle-ware. This means no .NET, no Messenger, no Outlook Express, no IE. Nothing. Just the operating system (And maybe the gui. It seems that the gui is tied directly to the OS in MS's case.).
• Every single peice of middle-ware that is suffiecient to run every peice of Windows compatible software out there. This includes Java programs, as they are Microsoft compatible.

The problem is that MS decided to bundle in .NET, Passport, IE, Outlook Express, etc., but skimp on the Java support. This gave .NET a better looking future, for one. The Java support that they do provide is minimal (sucks), and doesn't support a lot of things... swing, JDBC, JMX, JNDI, yada, yada.

Once I can run JBoss on my windows machine without a Sun Java SDK, then I'll consider MS playing 'fair.'

The one thing that they did wrong was to combine the middleware with the OS. If you ship an OS, you are shipping a foundation. You are shipping something that could possibly run on every machine. You have a responsibility to the rest of society to ensure that this peice of software works correctly with everything else out there. If it doesn't, and it is found that it doesn't because there is a product shipped with the system that is competitive with that which is broken, then there is definitely something foul.

Re:Appropriate coercion?

[ClosedSource]

"They are a conviceted Monopolist"

As I and others have pointed out on many occasions on Slashdot, the case against MS was a civil one and thus MS was not "convicted" of anything. This might not change the core of your argument, but by using the word "convicted" where it's not appropriate, you undermine your credibility.

Re:Appropriate coercion?

[sql*kitten]

Also, Java isn't exactly a competitor's product; it's also an attempt at an industry-wide open standard that Microsoft wants to subvert, dominate, and exploit. Hey, they already tried

But it is a competitors product. You want to talk about standards? Read about C# and ECMA. Have Sun turned over control of the Java specification to a neutral standards body? Nope, Sun control it fully.

Make no mistake: Sun don't want to compete with Microsoft, they want to become Microsoft.

Re:Appropriate coercion?

[Anonymous Coward]

This is exactly why lifting OEM restrictions was so important in the settlement. The user doesn't have to download AND Sun doesn't have to have Microsoft force it upon the user. Why can't Sun have the OEMs include it? That way Sun can actually compete with other JVM implementers, like IBM, who gets royally screwed in this bullshit injunction.

Re:Appropriate coercion?

[mark_lybarger]

i'm not quite sure what you have against Sun's Open Source Java SDK, but i'll leave that alone for now. and why you would want to run JBoss on a Microsoft platform outside of a "i'm at work and i need to learn this" i'll never really understand, but that's your choice.

an OS vendor should have the right to choose what software it distributes with its os. monopoly issues asside, RedHat shouldn't be "required" to distribute every library that make every "compatible" software run on its os any more than Microsoft should. conversely (sp?), they shouldn't be required to ship a stripped down os any more than microsoft should be. microsoft OS most likely doesn't require a calculator to execute any more than RedHat requires bash to boot. should sun be required to distribute samba as a base part of its os since it allows interopertaion with the Microsoft nodes that are most probably on the network as well?

the definition of an OS has been changing over the years, but continues to include "the software which provides an api and user software to operate the underlying hardware" (self definition). if i've got an ethernet card as a basic setup, then the OS should provide use of it. a digital camera is currently an accessory and the software for it should not be present in the OS, though the vendors might in the future change that.

Re:Appropriate coercion?

[Anonymous Coward]

In addition, having a monopoly isn't even illegal; only abusing monopoly powers is grounds for court action.

Re:Appropriate coercion?

[jedidiah]

A US COURT OF LAW determined that Microsoft is an abusive monopoly under the Sherman Anti-Trust act.

Your hairsplitting is rather irrelevant.

microsoft should be ordered...

[Stanley Feinbaum]

to remove or at least fix up outlook.

Worms spread thanks to outlook have caused the world millions of dollars in damage

Re:microsoft should be ordered...

[spongman]

i'd say that x86 processors are as much to blame for the spread of viruses than outlook, ie not at all. the real culrpits are the virus writers. don't blame the messenger.

Re:microsoft should be ordered...

[geekoid]

Sure, the virus writers are the culprtis, but don't people who make a product that will go into a 'hostile' enviroment have the resposibility to make sure that there product can survive without propagating the problem?

If I was a general, and you came to me and said "There are 10,000 troops coming!" I would not kill you, however, if in the process you knowingly let them in, than I would probably kill you.

Re:microsoft should be ordered...

[nicodaemos]

Uhh ... I don't think you understand.

Outlook is an application that must balance features likes scripting (which help sell the app) and security (which helps protect the user from viruses). Now Microsoft specifically chose to let the default Outlook support unsafe scripting so it appeared that it had a lot of capability -- this is also the most insecure setting as people are finding out.

Microsoft could have chosen to have scripting off by default and informed the user that they could turn scripting on, but that it might be a security risk. But hey, why burden the user with facts and information when you can divert the blame to someone else.

It worked on you, didn't it?

Oh and by the way, if your house has an insecure access door that is available to thieves will you: a) blame the thieves b) blame the architect c) blame your builder. The question is did you have a expectation that the product you purchased (house or OS) was defaulted to a reasonably secure setting?

Re:microsoft should be ordered...

[spongman]

not really. as long as they don't fraudulently claim that it defends 100% against virus attacks then I don't see they've done anything wrong. it's like blaming the manufacturers of boxcutters for the 9/11 attacks.

Re:microsoft should be ordered...

[spongman]

if microsoft sold outlook as 'a 100% secure' product then I'd be pissed off, and I'd probably sue for fraud. but they don't so I take it upon myself to avoid viruses.

besides, it' not like outlook is the only product that viruses writers use to spread their wares. the argument that it need special legal attention because it does so (allegedly) more than other products is fatuous and against the guiding principles of the judiciary.

Re:microsoft should be ordered...

[Anonymous Coward]

actually, i'd argue that virus writers are barely responsible.

the culprits are all those idiots who mindlessly open whatever executable shit they get sent in their email...

Re:microsoft should be ordered...

[spongman]

yeah certainly they deserve to be called stupid fools but since it is the virus writers express desire to have the user open the message and unknowingly propagate said virus the blame falls squarely on the writer and not at all on the receiver.

you can't trick someone into killing for you and then expect to get away with it.

Reservations on the Ruling

[Henry V .009]

This is more or less a good thing, but I don't like the precedent.

Why should Sun get special treatment? Does this mean that every Joe, Dick, and Harry, gets to include his platform independant runtime with windows?

And how is Java different from, say, Mozilla or Phoenix? It's simply another application that Microsoft is using its monopoly powers to crush.

With the conditions as they are, all Sun is doing is grabbing onto the coat-tails of Microsoft's monopoly. The only way this is good, is if Microsoft is Sun's only competitor. Otherwise you have just created a second monopoly where there was only one at first.

If this isn't overturned, get ready for about 1,000,000 lawsuits from software makers clambering to get their product included with Windows. Worst case, I can imagine a future where the government decides which software companies survive and which don't, all by deciding who gets to be included on the common platform.

Re:Reservations on the Ruling

[Anonymous Coward]

Why should SUN get special treatment? Because the core language and environment features which make up Java are exactly what you find in C#/.net, i.e. the very things MS claims are its future. Why do you think they wanted Java beaten down? Because its the first REAL threat to MS domination on the desktop, and possibly more importantly, something to woo the broader development community away from them -- a general purpose, network centric, cross platform language. In terms a of being a genuine competitor harmed by Microsoft's monopolistics practices, I feel SUN potentially had more to lose than even Netscape. How do you put a price on the damage? Don't. Give SUN the same advantage MS has (its distribution channel) and let the competition begin.

Re:Reservations on the Ruling

[00_NOP]

Why should Sun get special treatment?

Becuase MS are shipping a broken version of their product.

Re:Reservations on the Ruling

[greenrd]

And how is Java different from, say, Mozilla or Phoenix?

Point of fact: Java is being used (right now) to write far more cross-platform code than the Mozilla.org codebases. (Although the two needn't be mutually exclusive.)

If this isn't overturned, get ready for about 1,000,000 lawsuits from software makers clambering to get their product included with Windows.

1,000,000 software makers haven't been specifically targeted by MS antitrust violations. And for Java, bundling is an appropriate partial remedy - but obviously this approach doesn't scale, and no judge in his or her right mind would think it does.

Re:Reservations on the Ruling

[71thumper]

You should be concerned.

While we all chatter about "monopoly" and "abuse" and so forth from Microsoft, the truth is that Sun, Apple, and Netscape were, until the emergence of Microsoft and Windows, the three great RAPISTS of the common consumer.

Remember how brutally expensive Sun workstations were? And how Macs were three and four times the cost of a PC?

And what about Netscape charging 10 THOUSAND dollars for their HTTPS-capable server?

All three of these companies want to hurt Microsoft, not to compete, but to get their HUGE, MASSIVE PROFIT MARGINS back!

While we chatter about Microsoft, the TRUTH is, they've never bent over and drilled nearly has hard as the 'injured' parties.

All I can say is, with judges like this, LUBE UP!

Steve

Ludicrous Decisions

[FreshFunk510]

I can't believe the court ordered Microsoft to include Java in their OS. That's just plain ludicrous.

While I do think it's evil to "sabotage" Java working in the Windows environment, how is there any justification to be obligated to include a competitor's piece of software in your environment? Perhaps we should start forcing Linux/*nix to come packaged with the .Net framework.

If anything, Microsoft should be punished for unfair practices but they shouldn't be forced to make another company's piece of software more visible.

In the end, this all means nothing. All it really means is that Microsoft will find another way of making Java not work with their OS. So I hardly call this a victory for Sun.

Re:Ludicrous Decisions

[Anonymous Coward]

If M$ were to provided a fully functional and noncrippled .net framework for my linux box I would be happy to install it.

Re:Ludicrous Decisions

[FreshFunk510]

But doing it because you want to versus doing it because you MUST are 2 different situations.

I'm wodering...

[Squidgee]

Does the ruling force MS to include an up-to-date fully functional version of the JVM, or just an old cruddy version?

It seems to me if the judgement doesn't specify, MS will choose the latter.

wouldn't worry

[v(*_*)vvvv]

like everything else on windows, it's probably broken to begin with.

user's would either have to fix it themselves, or never know it's there.

and of course, it will surely break again with every new service pack.

That's what happens when you take lunch money..

[bADlOGIN]

It's not a question of stopping, it's a question of starting. They didn't start slipping down any slope until they refused to play nice and got slapped with the Monopoly sticker. Now, they don't get to play like the other kids do. They have to serve detention, and will be singled out for discipline when things go wrong that nobody else can be blamed for. Didn't you spend any time playing on the playground?

Hello people?

[graveyhead]

Is it just me, or is this thread boiling over with ignorance?

This is *exactly* what MS did to Netscape a few years back, and a court found them guilty. They bundled their own technology and made it inconvienient to use competing products. *cough* .NET *cough*

It seems to me that this judge is basically just upholding that ruling and *not* allowing MS to do the same thing to Sun.

Re:Hello people?

[ad0gg]

.Net isn't bundled with anything, you have to download it. Windows Update doesn't even auto download it for you have to pick it out of the software addons. Personally I don't want anything on my computer I don't need, Java, .Net. My box meant is only for playing games and this excess crap uses up resources.

Re:Hello people?

[mrkurt]

It's more like, if Judge Motz hadn't ruled in Sun's favor, what you're talking about is a distinct possibility-- .net is still new and hasn't received the level of adoption from Windoze customers that MS would like. And from this developer-- not at all. :) If they were to continue to peddle the POS they call the MS VM, that would be trouble for Java. And as far as putting .net on Win XP, that would be prima facie evidence for Sun that they were trying to drive them off the Windows platform. Hence, it's not included. We'll see whether they can now bundle .net with the OS-- it'll probably require another legal proceeding to decide that matter.

Re:Hello people?

[powerlord]

They don't need to bundle it, they bundle it after the fact.

Every time you run the Windows Updater (which is rather neccesary, and quite regularly, due to MS Security holes), MS persistently offers to install the .NET framework onto your system, in their "Suggested Downloads" section. Certainly they don't force you to install it, but how many users would simply check off everything that MS had under "Suggested Downloads" since they wouldn't really know any better?

Re:Hello people?

[brightertimes]

Acutually they don't at all.. They don't even reccomend you download it *unless* you have an app that specifically requires it. It actually reads: "The .NET Framework is a new feature of Windows. Applications built using the .NET Framework are more reliable and secure. You need to install the .NET Framework only if you have software that requires it." Although it does come up in the suggested downloads section, it's quite clear it isn't recommending you download it. I do agree tho, most users would just download it because thats what people who are not in the know would do. :)

Re:Hello people?

[oldenough2knowbetter]

This thread, like nearly every other thread on nearly every other subject, is, indeed, boiling over with ignorance.

I'm beginning to think that only about 40% of all /. posters have actually read any article they're reacting to. And most of them didn't understand it.

The large percentage of posts are mindless rants for/against Linux or Microsoft or Sun or some other vendor or product and seem written by semi-literate and/or knee-jerk and/or free-market and/or Libertarian high school dropouts. Yes, there is a reason to know how to spell. Yes, punctuation is a good thing. No, the current state of U.S. capitalism doesn't resemble a free-market economy.

Yes, there is a role for government in squashing monopolists who ultimately do a huge disservice to the populace (that would be me and you), ensuring that the stock market is run honestly (or that the dishonest go to jail), that banks and other financial institutions don't steal your money (or at least have to give it back when they do), and that the air is breathable and the water drinkable.

Those who think otherwise really need to go back and study history. Not ancient history, recent history. Find out about the state of the country, and the laissez faire capitalists who thought they owned it (and damn near did), prior to the presidency of Teddy Roosevelt.

Re:Hello people?

[Florian Weimer]

It seems to me that this judge is basically just upholding that ruling and *not* allowing MS to do the same thing to Sun.

Yes, but why Sun? Why not other Java implementations? Why not the implementation of your favorite toy language?

If Microsoft is guilty of any wrongdoing, they should be punished. Rewarding some random competitor is not a proper solution.

Re:Hello people?

[Anonymous Coward]

This is *exactly* what MS did to Netscape a few years back, and a court found them guilty. They bundled their own technology and made it inconvienient to use competing products. *cough* .NET *cough*

You're so right! It's so much more inconvenient to download a 5 MB JRE than it is to download a 22 MB CLR. It ain't bundled. Not even the Service Packs bundled it when they very well could have. Yeah, there's ignorance in this thread, and it's emanating from you.

Re:Hello people?

[MeNeXT]

What in the above statement says do not download???

Applications built using the .NET Framework are more reliable and secure

I want security and reliability so I will download it. SH1T I do not even know what .NET is and I keep reading all about it. It seems that .NET is, and can do everything and anything. Do you know that if you download it and send this as an email to all your contacts. Microsoft will pay you $100USD for every email sent?

Re:Hello people?

[Ayende Rahien]

You need to install the .NET Framework only if you have software that requires it

There's a good reason for that...

[intermodal]

it's because there are no good precedents for the computer industry, especially as far as operating systems go. Where does the operating system and the programs/runtimes/etc. begin and end? where does an OS become unethical and/or abusive? where is the line that must be crossed before an operating system is. With the courts trying to prevent this abuse, the problem is that there is no good line. Due to the existing monopoly, there's no way to do anything that won't totally screw Microsoft unjustly that will make a real dent in their power to abuse their position. The best they can hope for is to preserve competition outside the operating system market itself, and to keep the path clear for Java and any of dozens of other things that aren't standard on Windows without allowing them to be negated by Microsoft products that clone them and won't allow the original to be even realized by the user, much less the original creator have any power over their creation. So, since the only true answer is making it all free as in beer (since otherwise, it'll always be a fight for profit rather than just credit), all we can do is pray that they don't screw too many things up with court precedents.

Read the Judge's Opinion

[Carnage4Life]

The Judge's opinion is available as a PDF obtained via the C|Net article.

Re:Read the Judge's Opinion

[Rimbo]

Surprisingly easy to read.

This guy gets it.

Of course, that doesn't mean he won't be overturned, as common sense and the law have little to do with each other.

Keep it in perspective

[jjohnson]

A lot of posters have gone on about the pros and cons of this as a victory for sun. But remember, Sun will benefit very little from this. In the Java software space, they're nowhere. They don't sell the language. They have next to nothing to offer for development tools at a price. About all they get is bragging rights.

It's IBM who's probably tipping the bubbly right now. And, a lot of Java developers.

Re:Keep it in perspective

[Kwil]

You missed one important thing they get.. ..some brakes on .NET.

Re:Keep it in perspective

[jjohnson]

Which still doesn't benefit them directly. The only sales that will be affected for Sun are Java books and training courses.

Re:Keep it in perspective

[Slime-dogg]

Except that it probably isn't about money. Sun wants to see Java succeed, because they are Java's daddy. I want to see Java succeed because I like it.

Java has an open spec. You can download open-source JDK's and JRE's (blackdown, Kaffe). I know that Mono is on it's way, but it still doesn't cover the entire language base and runtime. The others do. Sun doesn't hide things from the economy, they may not give out source code freely (though you can obtain it easily), but at least I've got a few options. It doesn't seem that Sun is bitching about that, either.

Sun has a lot to gain from this too. If Java is recognized as a universal base, there will be little incentive not to use it. Why build something in C# and have it run only on MS software, when you can build it in Java and have it run on nearly everything? Sun sells Unix boxen. Sun sells application servers. There is a LOT of money to be made on Application servers.

For those that may say "JBoss exists, why pay anything?" : Realize that Sun is a fantastic name to blame. That's what people are really buying there... "IBM never got someone fired... Sun never got someone fired..." They don't get someone fired because they provide an outlet for frustration. They must provide user / developer support. They must face that fact that there may be lawsuits boiling in the background. If an App server that provides all of the business logic that keeps a multi-billion dollar company afloat goes down, you'd better be sure that you have a big (and rich) entity to sue.

JBoss, JoNas, and others just don't provide that big entity - big money background.

Re:Keep it in perspective

[Anonymous Coward]

Anyone who sells non intel computers has an interest in a workable cross platform solution.

Ha Hah!

[Anonymous Coward]

You know the voice ;)

Re:Ha Hah!

[marcushnk]

The kid from "The Simpsons"?

That's it?

[I Am The Owl]

I think it's an outrage that something like Java gets to be put into Windows at M$'s expense, and we still have to deal with the crappy Windows interface.

Let's face it, they stole it from Apple. When will they be forced to use their own interface? Sheesh, even free projects like KDE and Gnome have been able to come up with their own look and feel. How hard could it be for a commercial software company with full time programmers?

And when does Apple get paid reparations for this theft of look and feel? I just think that if Sun gets theirs, Apple should be able to, too.

Re:That's it?

[thasmudyan]

I usually don't say it that directly, but you are either trolling or misinformed.

Let's face it, they stole it from Apple.
I know, I know, it's a great handy dandy point used over and over by some people instead of solid arguments. Here's how it really happened: In the late 70s Xerox/PARC labs has some revolutionary ideas about creating *graphical* user interfaces: windows, icons, mouse pointer - things like that. Apple and Microsoft *both* visited PARC and took the technology with them to implement it, mind you, they were actually very close to one another at the time!
And I'm sure you agree that ideas like having a GUI should not be patented *at all* because there would be no Linux desktop then. Which takes me to another point:

Sheesh, even free projects like KDE [kde.org] and Gnome [gnome.org] have been able to come up with their own look and feel.
How is KDE different from Apple's GUI if Microsoft's is not? Let's face the truth here: *all* desktop environments use the same principles and look alike! And it's my personal opinion but I think KDE is actually leaning more toward MS style than Apple style.

And when does Apple get paid reparations for this theft of look and feel?
So if you think look and feel should be copyrighted/patentable even given the design makeover differences between MS and Apple: how much do you think ALL other desktop environments (like GNOME/KDE...) should pay to compensate Apple? This is getting nowhere.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not usually a MS advocate, quite the contrary. But this is sillyness born from misinformation. Let's keep with the hard facts and work with that. Anything else doesn't make sense.

Re:That's it?

[Anonymous Coward]

And when does Apple get paid reparations for this theft of look and feel? I just think that if Sun gets theirs, Apple should be able to, too.

Apple already sued Microsoft over that and lost. (Mainly because they signed a contract licencing their look-n-feel to Microsoft.)

Re:That's it?

[geekoid]

"Apple and Microsoft *both* visited PARC and took the technology with them to implement it, mind you, they were actually very close to one another at the time!"

Actually, Apple paid(with stock) Xerox/PARC for the rights to the GUI, whereas MS did not pay Apple, who had the right before MS started writing "Windows".
Based on the fact that Apple paid for the rights to use a GUI, MS definatly should have paid Apple liscensing.

Re:That's it?

[thasmudyan]

That's right and there was a law suit and a settlement. I didn't say MS plays nice as a rule, but the whole thing was settled at the time. That and, MS actually gave Apple some developers to help roll out their OS at the time, so they worked pretty close together when the whole GUI thing was hot. Later, of course, MS decided to screw Apple over and do their own thing with GUIs, but at that point they really did it together - they couldn't do it alone.

Re:That's it?

[Anonymous Coward]

You forget that Apple stole its gui interface from Xerox Parc back in the early '80s. That is why the one Apple / Microsoft lawsuit failed prior art. Any ways SUN lost the desktop not because of MS but because JAVA on the desktop was slow, buggy and surpassed by better technologies like Flash.

For those who don't understand or can't remember..

[oldenough2knowbetter]

Microsoft has been ordered by the court to ship Java with their OS(s) as a remedy for their past performance.

Remember: Microsoft contracted with Sun to ship untainted and current versions of Java with their OS products. Microsoft then corrupted their version of Java in order to make it no longer cross-platform compliant. Then they quit updating their version. The result was that many, who think that Microsoft keeps them up to date with the latest and best, came to regard Java as buggy, incompatible with other platforms, and out of date.

Sun sued Microsoft for breach of contract for developing the corrupt version and then stopping updates. Microsoft retaliated by pulling Java completely.

Sun is suing Microsoft to live by the terms of the contract. The court has ordered Microsoft to do so as the legal process continues.

Is it the same one you can download from Sun?

[Mikesch]

If it is, this is going to do more to hurt Java than anything else. I had to install Sun's a while ago when MS pulled theirs from Windows Update. It's the most obscenely slow piece of software I've ever run. I mean, like, quicktime video flicker on a 486 slow. It was like this on every single machine I ran it on, so I don't think it was just a fluke.

Re:Is it the same one you can download from Sun?

[Anonymous Coward]

Considering that plenty of benchmarks at the time Microsoft's VM were released showed that it was the fastest one out there, switching away from it must have hurt.

Microsoft did a pretty decent job with their initial Java support.

What Microsoft wanted to do was add Windows hooks to Java. You can do that using JNI, but Microsoft did it a different way. Sun basically won on a technicality - Microsoft could have done what they wanted to do completely within the Java spec but the Java specced way to do it didn't exist when Microsoft started their work on it.

Consider what things would be like today if Sun hadn't stopped Microsoft. Sure there would be a lot of Microsoft-specific Java applets out there, but it would also be technically POSSIBLE to write a cross-platform app with a decent GUI if you stuck to the Java standard stuff.

Instead Java on the desktop is dead and Microsoft moved the stuff they were doing over to .NET which works pretty well on the desktop.

Sun won the battle but IMHO everyone lost in the end.

Re:Is it the same one you can download from Sun?

[The Bungi]

Not only that - their software can't uninstall cleanly to save its life. Try upgrading from one version of the JRE to another one... sheer fright caused by monumentally incompetent "cross-platform" design.

Re:Is it the same one you can download from Sun?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah...it's real difficult to uninstall there windows boy.

Delete the install directory.

Reset the $INSTALL_DIR/bin directory in your PATH statement and any CLASSPATH variables you may have set.

That's it.

Maybe you got confused looking for an uninstall program.

You don't need an uninstall program when your program installs intelligently in the first place.

Re:Is it the same one you can download from Sun?

[The Bungi]

Hi there, AC! Boy, that was some piece of insight you provided!! Does your method get rid of the control panel entry? The registry settings? Nooo? Wow!

So, next time, perhaps you could log in and post like a "Linux man" and perhaps I can make you look even more ridiculous!

Good

[BlackHat]

Then Java will be hyper-optimised for WinLand and fade off the radar for good.
High level protocols are the future not P/B/X/J/JS* crap.

Thbbbb!
* Pcode, VBasic, ActiveX, Java, MoMetaBetta, Com Dom It's all crap!
But be sure that some idiot will introduce a new one seconds from now.

JVM Not Optional

[zipwow]

Here's how I understand it:

Sun is suing MS in a civil case, saying that Microsoft used their monopoly(1) on desktop operating systems to illegally compete with Sun's Java, in the form of a browser plugin. MS used their OS to hinder Sun by including an out-of-date and broken JVM version for many years, despite better software available (for free) from Sun.

The judge agreed that this was likely an illegal use of their monopoly(2). MS already attempted to say that browsers (and their plugins, which Java is in this case) are part of the operating system, but that was already rejected in the DOJ case. Because of this precedent, the case looks very strong for Sun, so...

As a preliminary injunction, the judge ruled that Microsoft has to include the latest version of the JVM from Sun, so that as the case is argued in court (no doubt over a period of years), further damage is avoided.

I don't read it that Microsoft can 'opt out' of carrying any sort of JVM, especially since that's already their tactic with WinXP.

-Zipwow

1: Monopoly, not illegal in itself. MS has argued that no monopoly exists. The DoJ case's findings of fact specifically described MS' hold on Desktop OS's as a monopoly.

2: Using a monopoly in one area to hinder competition in another is illegal, and is what Sun is complaining about. Using your desktop power to break into the web-plugin market (and hence the related server market) is what's illegal.

Re:JVM Not Optional

[Dimensio]

I'd heard somewhere that there was also a contractual dispute, where MS had violated an agreement that they had made with Sun, though I'm not

Re:JVM Not Optional

[geek]

Gotcha, that does make more sense.

Re:JVM Not Optional

[greenrd]

That's correct. That was the subject of a prior lawsuit, which was settled by MS paying Sun on the order of $1m, and agreeing not to ship their old "broken" version of Java after a sunset date (2004?), and agreeing that their contract with Sun (which allowed them to hack on their own version of Java) was terminated. (But IANAL and this is from memory.)

Note that out-of-court settlements like the above do not set any precedent either way.

Re:JVM Not Optional

[bubbha]

Sun is suing MS in a civil case, saying that Microsoft used their monopoly(1) on desktop operating systems to illegally compete with Sun's Java

The way I read it is that the judge's findings of fact says that Microsoft's intention from the very beginning was to take control of Java by subverting one of it's key "inventions" - that of being cross-platform (write once run anywhere.) They intended to create a "polluted" version, and deceive developers about it's Microsoft-only nature.

Because it has been shown to be a fact that Microsoft is a monopolist these actions are illegal.

Next...because of Microsoft's actions WRT "polluted Java", Sun was placed in a position where it HAD to restrict Java upgrades to Microsoft because Microsoft was distributing JRE that was not cross-platform - as required by their agreement. The judge ruled that Sun can not be punished for Microsoft putting them in that position.

Lastly, the judge ruled that in the seven years it took to come to this point today, Microsoft has destabilized Java on the PC, while at the same time, creating a competing product - .NET. Now it wants to use it's monopoly position to make .NET "ubiquitous."

The "must-carry" ruling indicates that the court recognizes the criminal intent of this strategy and intends to remedy the situation by forcing Microsoft to make the Java platform as ubiquitous as .NET and then to allow the two platforms to compete on merit.....which for some reason, Bill Gates seems to be terrified of doing (see "Breaking Windows" by David Bank.)

Re:JVM Not Optional

[Anonymous Coward]

>>The way I read it is that the judge's findings of fact says that Microsoft's intention from the very beginning was to take control of Java by subverting one of it's key "inventions" - that of being cross-platform (write once run anywhere.) They intended to create a "polluted" version, and deceive developers about it's Microsoft-only nature.

I belive you are confusing the rulling about J++ which was thier compiler tool etc, which had custom language extensions "delegates etc", I think this is what was refered to as pollution, ms was forced to release an update which threw up a warnning if it attempted to compile any code which had the extensions enabled. The only thing that was missing from the run time AFAIK Was JNI and RMI (RMI was avaialabe as a seperate download)

uhh...no it isn't

[megacia]

that's why sun made such a fuss about MS creating a version of java for windows

For those that don't understand

[bluestar]

...why Microsoft is being required to carry a competitor's product.

Microsoft is now competing with Java (with .NET).

Microsoft has a monopoly in a different market.

Using a monopoly position in one market to influence another is illegal.

Microsoft has been distributing an incompatible version of Java.

Monopolies are required by law to play by different rules.

Re:For those that don't understand

[WildBeast]

Fair enough, so I can force MS to bundle my text editor program with Windows.

Re:For those that don't understand

[Dimensio]

You left out the bit about Microsoft having a contractual obligation to distribute the current untainted Sun Java with their product (something that MS has been violating for years now)

Re:For those that don't understand

[Dan Guisinger]

Um, that contractual obligation was superceeded by a short-sighted settlement drafted by sun's lawyers bonehead.

It obligation was removed, but the limitation that MS could no longer create new versions of java, and that MS would only be allowed to distribute the old version for a few more years.

They followed that one by the letter.

Re:For those that don't understand

[Joe Tie.]

I was just about to post an exasperated message trying to say something similar, and then I see this very clear, concise explanation...with a reply by someone still not grasping why Java is a special case.

Re:For those that don't understand

[Anonymous Coward]

The only thing you can force is a fist up your ass, ya tosser. Do some research.

Re:For those that don't understand

[FreshFunk510]

I see what you're saying as far as monopolies are concerned and I do think Microsoft should be forced to play fair (meaning no purposeful sabotage of Java running on Windows).

However due to the nature of OSs and software, it's not as if Java could not be used if it were not included. Ergo I do not see why it must necessarily be included (and shipped) with Windows. That's ludicrous. If people want it they should download it or buy it just like any other piece of software.

Otherwise perhaps we should convince the courts that Windows should also be shipped with Sun Office.

Re:For those that don't understand

[Eric Damron]

" Um, that contractual obligation was superceeded by a short-sighted settlement drafted by sun's lawyers bonehead."

I sense that you take this subject personally...

Re:For those that don't understand

[Eric Damron]

The problem with bundling anything with an OS that has a monopoly presence is that it renders any competing product irrelevant. The average user will not surf out to SUN's web site, download and then install JAVA if Microsoft has bundled a competing product that gets installed automatically. This is also an abuse of Monopoly power and one that the courts need to revisit.

Re:For those that don't understand

[Alsee]

Fair enough, so I can force MS to bundle my text editor program with Windows.

You sure can!
Just so long as you had a CONTRACT with microsoft about them distributing your text editor. And just so long as they VIOLATED that contract.

www.google.com/search?q=microsoft+sun+java+violate d+contract

The first step was to prevent Microsoft from distributing Java, the second step was to force them to distribute Java. Does that sound contradictory? It isn't.

The first step was to prevent microsoft from distributing a broken and incompatible version of Java in violation of the contract. The second step was to force them to include a correct and compatible version of Java. Like they agreed to do when they signed the contract.

-

Re:For those that don't understand

[RussP]

Give that man a huge cigar.

Re:For those that don't understand

[ClosedSource]

"Monopolies are required by law to play by different rules."

Yes, and those rules, as far as Slashdot posters are concerned, are infinitely restrictive. In the real world, however, the restrictions won't end up being all that great. I suspect the injunction will be reversed before any changes are made to MS's products. Keep in mind that this exact remedy was rejected in the antitrust case given the same set of facts.

Maybe they should be required to include Linux?

[zoid.com]

This sets the stage for some really ugly lawsuits. If the courts can order them to include java then can other companies request that their software be included? The next thing you know Redhat will be required to ship with .net.

Re:Maybe they should be required to include Linux?

[MillionthMonkey]

Read the article, or the verdict. Microsoft and Sun had a pre-existing contract and Microsoft broke it. Since Redhat has not ever entered any contractual relationship with Microsoft, nobody will be forcing Microsoft to bundle Redhat.

Missing the point

[bstadil]

The ruling is based on the agreement MS and Sun made under which MS initially licenced Java. Nothing to do with "Look and Feel" of anything.

A little anti-trust history

[b17bmbr]

a long time ago, a company named reynolds was the only producer/developer of aluminum. not only that, but they were going around the world buying up all thye bauxite mines they could find. the feds stepped in and the final decision forced them to set up a whole, new company, (ALuminum COmpany of America, or ALCOA), give them plant and equipment, AND had to forfeit to them some bauxite mines. one of the motivations for this was that aluminum was considered a necessary material, not just for war, but for manufacturing.

while i don't like government intrusion, there is a very important issue to consider. with its already established monopoly, and many abuses thereof, microsoft has gone way beyond the scope of normal business activity. this is not only a case of insuring competition, but prevents control of the market in a vital sector. economists from all sides, in particular free market champion milton friedman, argue that the role of government in the economy is to prevent monopolies and protect the market system. this doesn't pick winners and losers, just makes sure that the odds are even.

Re:A little anti-trust history

[donutello]

Yes, but the big difference here is that since Reynolds owned all the bauxite mines there was no way for a competitor to exist.

The same is not true for Windows. Witness Apple, Linux, FreeBSD, etc. There is nothing stopping someone else from building a competing OS and selling it. With Reynolds owning all the bauxite mines that was physically impossible.

Re:A little anti-trust history

[b17bmbr]

There is nothing stopping someone else from building a competing OS and selling it.

microsoft has used its position in very similar ways. how about oem contracts that strictly forbid any competing OS's, or that require all new computers be sold with windows. it's not just about building and selling. think BeOS. also, wherever there is a potential market, especially if it leverages windows' position, they set out to destroy the company/software. they did this with netscape, they are doing this with real player, they did it with WordPerfect, and they did it with Novell NetWare. We all know what they did with netscape, and most konw about real, but by hiding specific API's, OLE never worked quite right in WP, AND, they required volume license and oem deals to include Office or works. and there are specific incompatibilities with Novell NetWare that make implementing a novell network a PITA. i know, my school district is still trying to get it right. there are parallels between the two.

Re:A little anti-trust history

[cgleba]

A similar case was a long time ago their was an airplane manufacturer who also offered plain service. The US government didn't like where this was going and feared too much market power in air transport by this company which would be bad for air mail -- so they split them up.

That company was Boeing and the company that split off was United. Imagine where we would be today if Boing had the massive market power of both air service and airliners. They would have completely squahed all of their competitors.

This was grossly summarized, but the point is the same as the ALCOA story -- companies should not be allowed to get too vertical or else they will use that market power to subvert the entire industry. Over and over again throughout history the US government split up large corporation for getting to vertical and using market power in one industry to squash another one.

This all seemed to have ended in the late 80s after the Japanese keiretsus kicked some American corporation's asses because they were far more vertical. The US corporations screamed "murder" and weeped to the governemnt. Ever since, it seems, the govt' has had no problem with corporations getting massive and eating entire markets.

The ideology seems to be "who cares if the domestic market gets screwed by unfair pricing and lack of competition, the US will be able to compete on a global level".

This is why, I beleive, the govt' has done little over the likes of MS and the RIAA and allowed such jaw-droppers and the reunification of the Standard Oil company (Exxon and Mobil), the approaching reunification of Ma Bell (SBC, Verizon and ATT pratically now own telecomunications and they are getting larger).

As for MS, the verticalization that I see as the *most* scary is MSN + Windows + Xbox. I can see MS using Windows to subvert all other ISPs and making everyone use MSN on their hardware, the Xbox in the not too distant future. But who cares if MS owns the entire US, they'll own the rest of the world also and that can only be good for the US, right?

This is globalization.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Remember MS-Office for the Mac?

[earthforce_1]

I remember hearing once that MS deliberately slowed the Mac implementation of MS-Office before, by sprinkling in a few strategic nops and delay loops to make it run more sluggish under the Mac OS than under a similarly equipped x86 Windows machine. I am sure that they could find a way to ensure that even if they were forced to include Java support, they could find a way to cripple it, thus obeying the letter of the judgement while avoiding its intent.

Re:Remember MS-Office for the Mac?

[Anonymous Coward]

Any slowness encountered with the initial office:mac was probably due to architecture differences like cache alignment being off so it take 2 cycles to do something that takes 1 for x86.

Re:Remember MS-Office for the Mac?

[Anonymous Coward]

They don't need to find a way to cripple it, this is windoze we're talking about.

Re:Remember MS-Office for the Mac?

[Anonymous Coward]

jesus christ! you are a fucktard...did you even read the post before you trolled.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Everyone who wonders why MSFT has to do this

[IanA]

From Reuters

Sun contends Microsoft sabotaged its Java software in order to fend off a threat to its Windows monopoly. It has asked Motz to impose the "must-carry" Java provision to remedy Microsoft's antitrust violations.

They violated the law. This is their punishment. Please read the article :-/.

Errr.

[anarchima]

Shouldn't it be 17232nd and not the 17232th? Oh well, with that many submissions coming in, I suppose the Slashdot editors don't have time to check grammar, spelling, etc.

In other news...

[Anonymous Freak]

General Motors, Inc. (GM) has been ordered to install Sony brand stereo systems, compatible with the XM satellite radio network, in all new vehicles. GM's custom radios, which use the incompatible Sirius satellite radio network, were declared to be an illegal use of monopoly power in one market (automobiles) to influence another market (satellite radio standards.)

That's what this announcement sounds like to me. Java isn't a legally required piece of technology, there is no reason Microsoft should be FORCED to include it. I, for one, would rather see Microsoft drop ALL Java from their OS than have this ruling go through.

I'm not a fan of Microsoft's tactics, and even agree with the judge that Microsoft is including a 'broken' form of Java specifically to encourage people to use .NET. But, that doesn't mean a court should have the right to force MS to INCLUDE a competitors product. They shouldn't be allowed to PREVENT it from working, but they shouldn't have to include it, either.

Re:In other news...

[Anonymous Coward]

This is an invalid comparison.GM doesn't sell 90%of the cars in the world. As well, you can have Dealer installed systems to the specifications that you want.

Re:In other news...

[Anonymous Coward]

Does GM own Siriusradio (or the other way around)?

Does GM have anything remotely resembling a monopoly in automobiles?

Has GM broken licensing agreements and standards by creating their own "version" of the radio?

Does GM "bundle" the non-standard radio with the car, or is it a seperate item that can be changed or removed from the purchase?

While I agree that ordering MS to include Sun's VM is a bit odd, and possibly overreaching.. your analogy to it is seriously lacking.

Re:In other news...

[Anonymous Freak]

Okay, so I may not have picked the perfect analogy, but it still shows the silliness of this ruling. As for having a dealer install a system with the specifications you want? You can do that with computers, too. See Walmart/Lindows for a high profile example; and most small shops will put Linux on for you as well.

Still, my main point is the fact that the U.S. government has just crossed the most invasive line yet. Restricting tech to include, removing already included tech, and demanding separation of tech is one thing. Demanding INCLUSION of a tech that is made by a different company is totally different.

I run my own business, and if the goverment said I couldn't do something, that would be okay, if annoying. If they said I had to do something a certain way, that would be obnoxious, but still acceptable. If they said I absolutely have to use one certain product, made by one specific company, to do it, that's a problem.

MOD PARENT UP!

[Anonymous Coward]

PUHLEEZE. This is the real dealie!

Re:MS has the right to sabotage Java?

[jsab]

There is no slippery slope. This is a targeted finding related to actions that Microsoft has taken against Sun. Anyone who wants their program "xyz" included in Windows would have to go through years of expensive legal hassel. You ask where this sort of legal action stops. Well it stops if MS ceases anti-competitive practices.

Do not forget that their J++ was tantamount to sabotage of Java.

Re:For those who don't understand or can't remembe

[spongman]

no longer cross-platform compliant

tell me exactly what cross-platofmr code the Microsoft JVM was unable to run?

Is that reasonable?

[sean23007]

Doesn't that give Sun an opportunity that would be unavailable to its competitors? Mandating that the monopoly-holder must include a product in its own product stifles competition even more. well, maybe not more, but just as much. they might as well be required to include everyone's programming language into Windows. I think we should tread lightly when we deal with this monopoly. Just because something might hurt microsoft or help one of its competitors, it is not guaranteed to be beneficial to the industry.

Re:Is that reasonable?

[bstadil]

Doesn't that give Sun an opportunity that would be unavailable to its competitors?

Did you read anything other than scan the headlines?

There is a CONTRACT between MS and Sun relating to Java. They are under contractual obligation to include Jave, The judge ruled in favor of Sun regarding interpretation of this contract. To the extend there is a contract between MS and any other competitor they can do likewise. IE file suit and hope for a favorable ruling.

Re:Is that reasonable?

[Dan Guisinger]

Wrong........ARE MULTIPLE CONTRACTS.

MS and SUN settled, hence the latest contract where Sun terminated MS's license on Java, and stated that they could only distribute their old version of Java for a specified length of time.

Re:Is that reasonable?

[sean23007]

Yeah, anyway so back to what I was talking about, is such a contract even reasonable? If the court is going to make a ruling, why not rule that such a contract isn't fair?

Great except...

[MtViewGuy]

...Sun's own Java VM is dog-slow in many ways. I've tried JVM 1.4.1 on Windows 98 and when it loads the first time and/or run any Java applets it takes a long time to run. It's better in Windows 2000 Pro and Windows XP, but I still think Sun needs to speed up their Java VM to better work with Windows 98 to Windows XP.

Now, if the judge's order specified any Java VM that meets Sun's compatibility tests, maybe Micosoft could use IBM's excellent Java implementation instead.

Re:Great except...

[CynicTheHedgehog]

You people really need to expand your horizons. Applets are unimportant; they were the most effective way Sun could spread awareness of Java and if they could take it back I'm sure they would. They are the reason for nearly all of the criticism Java has suffered, little if any which applies to the language as it was intended to be used: in applications.

Let's take a look at a few apps:

JBoss - 100% Java open source J2EE application server, rated best in its class by several authorities

Oracle EAI - Oracle J2EE application server (also, most of Oracles UI components are Java-based)

IBM WebSphere - IBM's stab at a Java-based J2EE application server

Iona E2A Application Server - Same thing, from Iona

Novell (SilverStream) Application Server - Another J2EE application server from Novell

Tomcat - Award-winning open source reference implementation for Sun's J2EE servlet and JSP container

Looking at that list, doesn't it appear that Microsoft has a lot to gain by making it as difficult as possible to install Java apps on its servers? Wouldn't Microsoft much rather its customers used the .NET framework rather than J2EE? Do you think Microsoft is bothered by the fact that Iona, Novell, IBM, Oracle, JBoss, and many other corporations have and support Java-based J2EE application servers?

Not to mention that Microsoft, Sun, IBM, and Oracle all compete on other levels. Currently Microsoft dominates the client-side market and they are trying their hardest to establish a foothold in the server market. Excluding, or worse, crippling Java would help tremendously.

And with projects like Log4j, Xerces, Xalan, Tomcat, and JBoss, Java has become synonymous with open source. Good, yes?

Crappy MS JVMs have bitten us more than once. This decision is a great boon to me and my company, and I believe it was the right one.

Re:Great except...

[mick129]

i wish i had points to mod this up.

Re:Great except...

[ender81b]

Any additional information about the IBM JVM would be greatly appreciated - i.e. where to find it and does it run java right, at least most java.

Re:Great except...

[mattypants]

Remember that Sun's offerings are the *reference* implementations. Correctness and purity before performance.

Also, does it not surprise you that the offerings of 2002 are bulky on (a poor example of an) operating system of 1998.

Re:Great except...

[Ilgaz]

MicroJava J2ME It made kind of revolution on cell phones. Not expensive too...

Now I downloaded a unit converter to my Siemens C55 for instance. A Nokia owner can download and run it too.

I have some network configuration problems on my carrier but when I verify it works, I'll download a pop3 mail checker to my device.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

numbering scheme...

[statikuz]

Wouldn't that be 17,232nd? =)

Coming up next...

[The Bungi]

Judge Judy orders RedHat to bundle BonziBuddy with Linux, film at 11

Great...

[Stonent1]

Now I'll have 1/2 a dozen little coffee cups sitting in my tray that won't go away any time I load a java applet. Anyone know how to make them annoying little buggers go away?

Re:Great...

[Anonymous Coward]

Switch to decaf.

Re:Great...

[Anonymous Coward]

go to windows control panel
open java plug-in options there
choose 'do not start console'
hit ok

that stops the stupid coffee cup.

Re:Great...

[darien]

1. Start -> Settings -> Control Panel -> Java Plug-In
2. Untick "Show Java in System Tray"
3. Click "Apply"

Voilà.

Re:Great...

[Stonent1]

Thanks! BTW to the ACs that replied. I love coffee! Just not a full systray.

It's a start.

[Viewsonic]

Maybe 5 years from now there will be 10 or more... We can only hope. Personally, I wish they'd just break Microsoft up already. They're using their profits leverage in the OS platform to fuel their mega-profit-loss XBox initiative to try and snuff out Sony and Nintendo by sheer loss of revenue hoping Sony and Nintendo just throw the towel in by not being able to compete with such profit losses. It's lame.

Something Related?

[MoThugz]

This might set a precedence on other areas that MS has decided to bundle in Windows...

My case: In Windows XP Pro (possibly even in XP Corp) MS includes IIS in the default installation. Can other web server producers (eg. Apache) sue them for this? Why? Because it is pushing their own product within an OS that is not meant to be a web server in the first place. IANAL, but I would appreciate any comments from those with a firm understanding of US laws.

Another case: Since the release of Windows 2000, Outlook Express has been integrated so tightly in the Windows code that it is near impossible to remove it (from a typical user's standpoint, n00b?). I have installed The Bat! as my default email client, but OE always retakes files with .MSG extension everytime I close The Bat!. Isn't this, too, considered misuse of monopoly in one area to gain market leverage in another?

Mildly offtopic, I know, but I do hope that there are people out there who can give their views on this.

Re:Something Related?

[NineNine]

Another case: Since the release of Windows 2000, Outlook Express has been integrated so tightly in the Windows code that it is near impossible to remove it (from a typical user's standpoint, n00b?). I have installed The Bat! [ritlabs.com] as my default email client, but OE always retakes files with .MSG extension everytime I close The Bat!. Isn't this, too, considered misuse of monopoly in one area to gain market leverage in another?

I hate to break it to ya', but it's Control Panel, Add Remove Programs, Add/Remove Windows Components. True, there isn't an icon on the desktop saying "Click Here to uninstall Outlook Express", but it's far from "impossible".

Re:Something Related?

[Dynedain]

XP Pro Corp. Ed. does include IIS - the only difference between it and the boxed retail version is the lack of the dial-home authentication stuff.

IIS is included because other packages are dependent on it (Terminal Services via the web for instance)

Re:Something Related?

[MoThugz]

I hate to break it to ya', but it's Control Panel, Add Remove Programs, Add/Remove Windows Components. True, there isn't an icon on the desktop saying "Click Here to uninstall Outlook Express", but it's far from "impossible".

This is in what? Windows 98? Didn't you see the Windows 2000 part? That's impossible, because you pasted it yourself. FYI, removing Outlook Express in XP (via control panel, add/remove progs/windows components, even to see this you need SP1) will only remove the shortcut to it, and not the program itself. Want to see the procedure on how to fully remove OE manually? Check this page out... from MS itself, no less.

And I didn't say it's impossible... I said it's near impossible from a typical user's standpoint. Again, you pasted this yourself, so most likely you did read it.

Check your posts and reference, man... Hate to break that to ya :P

Re:Something Related?

[Anonymous Coward]

Congrats, as a "The Bat!" user, you're blocked from sending me email! The Bat! has been so horribly misused by spammers anything you send will be rejected.

Don't worry, be happy, and unheard!

I, for one, am glad

[Anonymous Coward]

The time has come for a serious discussion on whether or
not to continue using C for serious programming projects. As I will
explain, I feel that C needs to be retired, much the same way that
Fortran, Cobol and Perl have been. Furthermore, allow me to be so bold
as to suggest a superior replacement to this outdated language.

To give you a little background on this subject, I was recently asked
to develop a client/server project on a Unix platform for a Fortune
500 company. While I've never coded in C before I have coded in VB for
fifteen years, and in Java for over ten, I was stunned to see how
poorly C fared compared to these two, more low-level languages.

C's biggest difficulty, as we all know, is the fact that it is by far
one of the slowest languages in existance, especially when compared to
more modern languages such as Java and C#. Although the reasons for
this are varied, the main reasons seems to be the way C requires a
programmer to laboriously work with chunks of memory.

Requiring a programmer to manipulate blocks of memory is a tedious way
to program. This was satisfactory back in the early days of coding,
but then again, so were punchcards. By using what are called
"pointers" a C programmer is basically requiring the computer to do
three sets of work rather than one. The first time requires the
computer to duplicate whatever is stored in the memory space "pointed
to" by the pointer. The second time requires it to perform the needed
operation on this space. Finally the computer must delete the
duplicate set and set the values of the original accordingly.

Clearly this is a horrendous use of resources and the chief reason why
C is so slow. When one looks at a more modern (and a more serious)
programming language like Java, C# or - even better - Visual Basic
that lacks such archaic coding styles, one will also note a serious
speed increase over C.

So what does this mean for the programming community? I think clearly
that C needs to be abandonded. There are two candidates that would be
a suitable replacement for it. Those are Java and Visual Basic.

Having programmed in both for many years, I believe that VB has the
edge. Not only is it slightly faster than Java its also much easier to
code in. I found C to be confusing, frightening and intimidating with
its non-GUI-based coding style. Furthermore, I like to see the source
code of the projects I work with. Java's source seems to be under the
monopolistic thumb of Sun much the way that GCC is obscured from us by
the marketing people at the FSF. Microsoft's "shared source" under
which Visual Basic is released definately seems to be the most fair
and reasonable of all the licenses in existance, with none of the
harsh restrictions of the BSD license. It also lacks the GPLs
requirement that anything coded with its tools becomes property of the
FSF.

I hope to see a switch from C to VB very soon. I've already spoken
with various luminaries in the C coding world and most are eager to
begin to transition. Having just gotten off the phone with Mr. Alan
Cox, I can say that he is quite thrilled with the speed increases that
will occur when the Linux kernel is completely rewritten in Visual
Basic. Richard Stallman plans to support this, and hopes that the
great Swede himself, Linux Torvaldis, won't object to renaming Linux
to VB/Linux. Although not a C coder himself, I'm told that Slashdot's
very own Admiral Taco will support this on his web site. Finally,
Dennis Ritchie is excited about the switch!

Thank you for your time. Happy coding.

Re:I, for one, am glad

[Anonymous Coward]

"the
great Swede himself, Linux Torvaldis"

Linux Torvaldis, eh???? er, um: whatever else you are knowledge about, Mr Anonymous Coward, witht the greatest possible respect: Linux sure ain't one of them!

Re:I, for one, am glad

[Anonymous Coward]

Dude, this is an update to a classic troll. If you took it seriously, you probably judge the government an effective source of leadership and management.

Ummm.....Slashdot is at it again

[Dan Guisinger]

Very typical response from slashdot.

ZDNews is claiming that all products from MS that include .NET runtime must supply Sun Java.......this is ass-backwards. .NET is a runtime enviroment (as is java of course).....if an application uses .NET at its core, for example Visual Studio .NET, they need to include the runtime. Seriously, why not say if it includes MFC you must include Borland OWL?!?

That broad ranging declaration by the judge is key to getting this thrown out.

On to the next item......everyone claims MS shafted Java. Lets see:
1) MS signs Java agreement
2) MS produces better runtime
3) MS adds extensions for Windows only development, which are optional to developers depending on their target market (HINT: Apple has Cocoa extensions in Java......samething......they are optional)
4) Sun sues Microsoft
5) Sun offers settlement...terminate future licenses, puts a deadline on distributing the old java
6) Microsoft removes old Java well before deadline
7) Sun complains, puts large advertisements out showing disgruntlement with Microsoft
8) Microsoft decides .NET runtime is ready for primetime in WinXP SR1.....includes .NET runtime and the only version of Java they have licensed, although the license is soon to expire.
9) Sun cries fowl. Demands MS includes Sun's java because they limited MS's license to an old, obsolete version.
10) Judge grants sun's wish......for now.

This will be overturned. You can't sign an agreement which you wrote, which specifically states what you can and cannot do regarding terminating a license, and say hey, this didn't work out how we wanted.

And the fact is, most of the average users, including myself, don't run into client side java all that often........and the only ActiveX control I ever see is Flash. .NET? Its a great platform, I develop both client side and server side.....and its being cloned by various open source projects. Sun shot themselves in the foot by requiring Microsoft to cancel their distribution of Java......infact, what Sun should have done was work with Microsoft and others for CROSS PLATFORM UI and multimedia libraries that WORKED well....Microsoft's customizations were designed for mainly UI elements.....so are Apples. Whereas .NET was built ground up for GUI applications as well as web applications, and is much more what developers like myself want to deal with.

On the client side Java is becoming irrelivent.....and I for one do not want to be forced to see the Java icon flashing me from my tray. This is not furthering choice what-so-ever. I think if this settlement would take effect, Microsoft should counter Sun needs to carry .NET with Solaris and StarOffice, as they both include Java. (And MS has a BSD runtime now...for developers, not fully completed libraries yet).

Re:Ummm.....Slashdot is at it again

[Anonymous Coward]

BORING

Re:Ummm.....Slashdot is at it again

[Anonymous Coward]

Here, let me help you out since you missed a part:

> 1) MS signs Java agreement
> 2) MS produces better runtime
> 3) MS adds extensions for Windows only development, which are optional to developers depending on their target market (HINT: Apple has Cocoa extensions in Java......samething......they are optional)
3.1) MS *conveniently* omits some of the standard API in java 1.1
> 4) Sun sues Microsoft
> 5) Sun offers settlement...terminate future licenses, puts a deadline on distributing the old java
> 6) Microsoft removes old Java well before deadline
> 7) Sun complains, puts large advertisements out showing disgruntlement with Microsoft
> 8) Microsoft decides .NET runtime is ready for primetime in WinXP SR1.....includes .NET runtime and the only version of Java they have licensed, although the license is soon to expire.
> 9) Sun cries fowl. Demands MS includes Sun's java because they limited MS's license to an old, obsolete version.
> 10) Judge grants sun's wish......for now.

Re:Ummm.....Slashdot is at it again

[lgraba]

3) MS adds extensions for Windows only development, which are optional to developers depending on their target market (HINT: Apple has Cocoa extensions in Java......samething......they are optional)

This is inaccurate and very misleading. The MS JVM added keywords that were not part of Sun's Java, and which Visual J++ would use automatically, meaning that a developer might be writing what he thought was standard Java, when in fact non-standard, MS-only java would be produced. MS was ordered by a court to turn these off, making them an opt in, rather than an opt out. However, these keywords were still not part of the Java language as defined in the language spec. This leads to non-portable Java, and a Java different than the one Sun built and licenses.

Perhaps more important were the J/Direct extensions, which used special comments and the MS compiler to generate annotations the the class files, which the MS runtime used to link in native code, such as windows DLL's. THe problem is not that you could link in native, non-portable code, since standard JNI (Java Native Interface) provides a way for you to do this. THe problem was that the MS approach only worked with MS compilers and MS runtimes. Class files compiled in this manner would not work with Sun or IBM runtimes on Windows environments. Within the Java Virtual Machine specification, it is stated that the class annotations (which MS used) must not change the semantics of the class. In MS' JVM, the annotations would cause a certain behavior, while in the other JVM's, they would be ignored. Clearly, MS' use of the annotations violates the JVM specification.

MS had the option of taking an approach that obeyed the specifications. THere is at least one product that can analyze a DLL and produce the mapping code to make calls on that DLL, using standard Java mechanisms. With their billions in cash, surely they could have easily produced a product that used the same approach. Perhaps a clue came from evidence in the DOJ trial, in which a Microsoft engineer spoke of "blunting the cross-platform java market" by distributing a "polluted" java.

Re:Ummm.....Slashdot is at it again

[DunbarTheInept]

• 3) MS adds extensions for Windows only development, which are optional to developers depending on their target market (HINT: Apple has Cocoa extensions in Java......samething......they are optional)
  

The key point you leave out is that MS's extensions were in the same namespace as the core language, which is in violation of the spec, whereas none of the other extensions to java (such as Cocoa) did that. Why was such a thing put into the spec? Because the spec was written with platform portability as a goal and one step toward that goal was to make it blatantly obvious to the programmer which parts are standard and which are extensions, by using a naming convention that shows it.

• 
  9) Sun cries fowl. Demands MS includes Sun's java because they limited MS's license to an old, obsolete version.
  

Liar. MS was free to produce any modern version of JAVA they liked. What Sun told them they couldn't do was produce a non-compliant Java and call it "Java". MS had two possible ways to solve it: 1 - Fix their naming conventions to make their newer versions compliant, or 2 - go back to the older version from when it was still in compliance. MS chose to do #2, and then went on a smear campaign designed to make idiots believe this was the only option Sun allowed them to do and that this makes Java a language you should avoid because Sun is vindictive. Unfortunately idiots outnumber thinking poeple, so the smear campaign worked and now their big lie is believed in the IT community.

Re:Ummm.....Slashdot is at it again

[irix]

If you had a higher UID, I'd accuse you of being a Microsoft astroturfer...

all products from MS that include .NET runtime must supply Sun Java.......this is ass-backwards. .NET is a runtime enviroment (as is java of course).....if an application uses .NET at its core, for example Visual Studio .NET, they need to include the runtime

Are you being deliberately obtuse? Nobody is talking about applications - if MS wants to ship the .NET runtime with their O/S (future versions of XP, etc.) then they also have to ship the Java runtime.

MS adds extensions for Windows only development, which are optional to developers depending on their target market (HINT: Apple has Cocoa extensions in Java......samething......they are optional)

Another poster has pointed out how misleading this is. Java has a method that you can use to add extensions to the language - MS deliberaely chose not to use it, thus creating an incompatible Java implementation. This is not the "same thing" at all.

Microsoft should counter Sun needs to carry .NET with Solaris and StarOffice, as they both include Java. (And MS has a BSD runtime now...for developers, not fully completed libraries yet)

First, I don't see Microsoft shipping a .NET implementation for Solaris now or any time in the future. Second, even if they did, Sun is not a convicted monopolist, which means that they don't have to play by the same rules as MS. When will you MS apologists get this through your thick heads?

Re:Ummm.....Slashdot is at it again

[LarsWestergren]

9) Sun cries fowl.

Oh, a bird call? :-)

Sorry...couldn't resist.

Re:Ummm.....Slashdot is at it again

[i_luv_linux]

Most of the slashdot readers are average joe guys. They don't know much about what's going on other than what they are told to believe in the news.

They don't even understand what it means extending java for windows. They just say , oh Microsoft crippled java.

This ruling will definitely overturned in a higher court. We can't allow unsucessful, bad companies to dictate their technologies on us, just because they made poor decisions and Microsoft is there to blame for everything. It is just very bad that, you can't really trust American Justice System. It is obvious that it is totally random, whatever the judge reads on the news effect his/her decision.

Re:Ummm.....Slashdot is at it again

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, I refuse to run Java. It is a slow piece of junk. Sun wouldn't know how to create a GUI if it came up hehind you and bit you.

I actually liked J++ much better than Sun's Java. I really don't care about it working on other operating systems because they're all junk. I don't like Slowaris and I don't care about that toy named Linux. At least I could create nice GUI applications with J++ on Windows in no time.

Re:Ummm.....Slashdot is at it again

[melted]

This made it 10 times faster than Sun's implementation. At the time it WAS a big deal. I'm with Microsoft here. Even now, on 2GHz+ P4's Sun Java is VERY slow. Back then it was even slower. Nobody would ever have adopted this POS if it wasn't screaming fast. And MS VM WAS screaming fast.
*

Re:Ummm.....Slashdot is at it again

[toriver]

3) MS adds extensions for Windows only development, which are optional to developers depending on their target market (HINT: Apple has Cocoa extensions in Java......samething......they are optional)

I think you will find that Cocoa neither introduces new keywords (like "delegate") nor changes to the classes in the "java" package hierarchy, both of which Microsoft did. And which were violations of the license.

If Microsoft had put 100% of their "extensions" in the "com.ms" package tree (instead of 99%) Sun would not had any complaints. But they didn't.

On the client side Java is becoming irrelivent...

Really? I have used exactly one .Net client application (and it was dog slow) whereas I run and write client-side Java-applications a lot. Or are you using the false "client software = shelfware" definition?

Re:Ummm.....Slashdot is at it again

[Anonymous Coward]

>>This is inaccurate and very misleading. The MS JVM added keywords that were not part of Sun's Java, and which Visual J++ would use automatically, meaning that a developer might be writing what he thought was standard Java, when in fact non-standard, MS-only java would be produced. MS was ordered by a court to turn these off, making them an opt in, rather than an opt out. However, these keywords were still not part of the Java language as defined in the language spec. This leads to non-portable Java, and a Java different than the one Sun built and licenses.

Whoaaa,, this is mis-information, the Bytecode produced by the J++ compiler was just that standard Java Bytecode, even when it was compiling extensions such as delegates etc. Ie the same code could run on any VM. dont confuse the facts.

Re:Ummm.....Slashdot is at it again

[Anonymous Coward]

any attribute not defined as part of this Java virtual machine specification must not affect the semantics of class or interface types

Microsoft's VM does react to attributes their compiler sometimes adds to classes. No JVM may do that.

Re:Ummm.....Slashdot is at it again

[DunbarTheInept]

You are entitled to your opinion about whether java's GUI is good or bad, and whether or not the J++ extensions made for a better interface. However, there's no technical reason MS had to implement those extensions in such a way that they destroy the compatability of Java for people who want to avoid those extensions. But they did anyway. So your arguments about whether the J++ extensions were better or not are irrelevant, since if MS was playing by the rules they could have implemented those very same extensions you like using, but in a way that adheres to the spec. After all, it's what EVERYONE ELSE WHO IS MAKING JAVA EXTENSIONS is doing and not getting into any legal trouble for.

In other news...

[MavEtJu]

The BSA has just informed the US DoJ a letter saying they have three days to hand a list of all their computers, the software they are running and the licenses for the software. A spokesman for the BSA said "Of course this has nothing to do with the case against Microsoft, the law makers have to obey the law too. The normal patriotic courts in this beautifull country have nothing to fear, it's the ones which are against us we're after.".

But I don't want Java!

[nhavar]

But I don't want Java!

Re:But I don't want Java!

[MillionthMonkey]

But I don't want Java!

Then remove it and quit whining. Settings->Control Panel->Add Remove Programs->Click, click, done.

I don't want .NET either, any more than I wanted Internet Explorer, but I suspect the .NET runtime isn't going to show up in "Add/Remove Programs", will it? I'll need Ed Felten to come over to my house if I want to get rid of .NET.

Re:But I don't want Java!

[Anonymous Coward]

Hey, dumbass, the only way to GET the .NET runtime is to go to the Windows Update site and request it. At which point it does, as a matter of fact, show up under Add/Remove Programs.

Enjoy your upcoming Score:5, M$-Bash moderation. Don't spend all the karma in one place.

Re:But I don't want Java!

[Anonymous Coward]

Hello read his comment again, try thinking irony instead of whining... the OSS community and Sun are constantly bitching about MS forcing software on them so what's the solution... forcing MS to force THEIR software on others.

Re:But I don't want Java!

[Anonymous Coward]

I remember a day when I could remove IE as well. Do you honestly think you will be able to uninstall .NET runtime from Windows .NET ?

Re:But I don't want Java!

[Anonymous Coward]

Then fuck off. I hear bill gates is looking for a new piss boy, you would be perfect.

Re:But I don't want Java!

[MillionthMonkey]

Hey, dumbass, the only way to GET the .NET runtime is to go to the Windows Update site and request it. At which point it does, as a matter of fact, show up under Add/Remove Programs.

Enjoy your upcoming Score:5, M$-Bash moderation.

Only a few things to say about this:

1. I hit the "Excellent" cap already so neener neener neener. If I could trade my Slashdot karma for something real, like 50 cents, I might give a crap.

2. Early versions of IE also appeared in Add/Remove Programs. Seeing that Microsoft is deprecating C/C++ for Windows development and is furiously rewriting as much of their crap as possible in C#, I don't see how you think that the .NET runtime is going to stay on Add/Remove Programs for long. Their obvious goal is an OS where the absence of .NET will render your computer inoperable.

3. (This is a rant, not directed against your post in particular, but the 17,231 other posts I've read that are just like it.)
People say bad things about Microsoft all the time, for the simple reason that there are so many bad things to say about them. It's become chic recently to play "Let's defend Microsoft" every time someone bashes them, even if the basher has a valid argument. "Look at me! I'm so cool, defending Microsoft! I'm going to get modded down by all you hypocrites! I'm going to get a -1, pro-Microsoft! Huh huh huhuh huh huh!"
But the majority of these posts are all the same- each one is a straw man attack on what the poster thinks is a Slashdot stereotype of a Linux hippie who hates successful software companies because they make money and don't release all their software under the GPL. In fact you can't engage in any discussion about Microsoft around here anymore without some douchebag replying with the same pro-MS post I've read hundreds of times already! And this same post gets modded up all the time because moderators feel guilty for disagreeing with an unpopular opinion (even if it's unpopular for being wrong) and they want to be "fair".
But knee-jerk defense of Microsoft doesn't automatically make you cool. It doesn't make your post worth reading. Maybe it used to, but not anymore. Maybe you have an interesting defense of Microsoft we haven't seen 17232 times before. If so please share it. If you're just going to play the part of an antisocial pro-MS stooge then shut up. And if you're moderating, please try to recall for a moment whether you have already read the same post by a different author before you give it mod points just for expressing a sentiment in favor of Microsoft.

Re:But I don't want Java!

[Iamthefallen]

The reason I sometimes step in in defense of MS is simple, I tire of people making up fake arguments. There is no reason to make up bad stuff about MS, there's plenty there already to use against the giant. So from "Windows crashes every 5 minutes" to ".Net is just a Java ripoff", I tend to point out the small fact that if you need to invent bad things about MS, then maybe MS isn't all that bad.

Re:But I don't want Java!

[MillionthMonkey]

I agree with you; people do make some very confused arguments against Microsoft on Slashdot. Their OS doesn't crash anymore, that's true. Regarding .NET being a Java ripoff- there's a grain of truth to that one, sorta, especially if you're a Java programmer, although to be fair to MS that's an extremely harsh way of putting it. I guess you could say any virtual machine is a "ripoff of Java" but I wouldn't agree with that statement since p-code predates both Java and .NET. MS has put enough work and energy into .NET that to simply call it a ripoff is being overly simplistic, even if their original starting material was their Java implementation. It's their implementation, and they can do what they want with it if they're not going to call it Java anymore.

But there are plenty of nasty things to say that are completely true, like their abuse of their monopoly in the OS market to form monopolies in other markets, their embrace/extend/encrypt/extinguish approach to open protocols and file formats, the designed incompatibility, the ridiculous reverse engineering they make people do in order to interoperate with their products, the boneheaded decisions they make (like a mail client that executes any crap that shows up in your Inbox), their conspiring with Hollywood to destroy the general purpose computer, etc. If all they did was crash a lot (which they don't anymore) and create ripoffs of good technologies (which they still do) I wouldn't have any problem with them.

Forcing MS to carry Java means .NET at least has competition present on the same machine, and that can only be a good thing for both .NET and Java. If one wins out over the other, it shouldn't be because of something stupid like a 30 MB download being required for one and not the other. That would really suck.

Although Sun has made some very bad, very ideological decisions with Java on the client. Java has an albatross hanging around its neck called Swing. Everything is drawn in the Java layer. There are no buttons, just pictures of buttons pretending to be buttons. Before that they gave us AWT, which took the opposite extreme (using the lowest common denominator of all native widgets for EVERYTHING). No tree control on AIX? Then you can't have one on Windows/Mac/etc. Hopefully IBM's SWT will take off in the Java realm. You can write a real application with it- meaning it doesn't have that cheesy Java feel that Sun's GUI libraries impart to Java applications.

Slow down...

[pb]

I'm still trying to figure out why Outlook Express is a required part of Internet Explorer!

Re:Slow down...

[thasmudyan]

Hehe, I don't think it is. But as modularity goes, Outlook won't work with IE components just like 80% of the whole damn Win32 environment. Which makes sort of sense if only it would have been done right. But it wasn't done right, there's security holes and just plain buggyness all over the place! Well, BUT IN THEORY you should even be able to replace the IE component with an ActiveX version of Mozilla or something... ;-)

Re:Slow down...

[chaotica1974]

Ummm, correct me if I am wrong but Outlook uses the IE ActiveX engine to display eMail that is formatted in HTML.

Re:Slow down...

[pb]

required as in: try to install Internet Explorer without installing Outlook Express. If you do it, show me how. Microsoft's installer seems convinced that they're the same thing, or at least essential for IE to function...

Re:For those who don't understand or can't remembe

[oldenough2knowbetter]

Sorry, I don't feel like entering into this particular pissing contest. Suffice it to say that Microsoft is in breach of their contract with Sun and will (hopefully) end up giving Sun a few hundred million dollars in punititive damages.

Free Market Economy

[fizban]

I've seen a lot of comments here about how this is government intrusion and has no place in a free market.

That, dear friends, is complete bullshit.

People seem to equate "free market" with "freedom for companies to do whatever the hell they want." But it doesn't work that way. A free market is a market in which there are multiple companies all competing on the same level with the same rules. And it provides consumers with multiple choices so that they have the power to decide what's the best product to use.

The key point here is that if the product is a foundation for other products, such as telephone lines, cable service, computer hardware or computer software, you need to set some rules so that everyone has the chance to compete on the same level.

Think of it like a football game, where one team provides the playing field, the locker rooms and all the other assorted stuff that goes along with a normal game. The visiting team plays at a disadvantage because most of the fans are rooting for the home team, but they still play with the same rules, independent referees, the same size goal posts and end-zone. The home team doesn't get the ability to have things however they want it just because it's their field. There are rules, and they must be adhered to.

Remember, a free market economy's prime benefactor is the consumer, not the company. When companies become so large that they can influence the consumer's choices no matter what, you lose the benefits of free markets. That is why anti-trust laws were created and one of the reasons you need governments in the first place.

So, don't think that a free market economy needs no supervision. It needs lots of it, for the benefit of the consumer. In the end, everyone wins, not just one producer of products.

(BTW, on a completely different note, this is partly the same argument that can be made for affirmative action and programs like it, in order to create a level playing field so that everyone progresses and moves forward, rather than just a select group).

Re:Free Market Economy

[Arandir]

Think of it like a football game, where one team provides the playing field, the locker rooms and all the other assorted stuff that goes along with a normal game.

Yes, very good analogy. Think of it as a football game being played between Microsoft and Sun. The score is 78 to 3, Billy Boy's favor, at the start of the fourth quarter. So Sun bitches to the ref, the ref agrees, and makes Microsoft carry Sun's ball when Scotty Lad has possession.

Even in a level playing field, teams can still win and lose. The ref is there to keep people from cheating, not to ensure a tie game.

Re:Free Market Economy

[Henry V .009]

That is a horrible analogy. In the free market, the game is never over. There are no ultimate winners or losers.

Re:Free Market Economy

[sql*kitten]

Remember, a free market economy's prime benefactor is the consumer, not the company.

Actually, that's entirely incidental. Free markets are designed to favor efficient production and producers. This does make things better for consumers, true, but only to the extent that said consumers are also producers.

When companies become so large that they can influence the consumer's choices no matter what, you lose the benefits of free markets. That is why anti-trust laws were created and one of the reasons you need governments in the first place

Yes, those damn steam engine companies! Using their cursed monopolies and patents to suppress internal combustion and gas turbines! Why, if it wasn't for them, we'd have cars and airliners by now!

Re:Free Market Economy

[Anonymous Coward]

I think you're missing something -> If Microsoft were the steam engine company, they'd have enough $ (and the resulting political power) to keep cars and airliners from even *happening* until Microsoft wanted them to happen. Sure, things may eventually change, but for now that's what we have.

Re:Free Market Economy

[(trb001)]

this is partly the same argument that can be made for affirmative action and programs like it

I don't like affirmative action, so maybe I'm just destined to disagree with you. But...

I think your analogy to the football game is flawed. Or, at the very least, you're looking at it from the wrong angle. Let's say Team A is MS. They have a nice field, great seats, they sell good beer between quarters. Fans are, ofcourse, going to flock to their stadium because of these things (the fact that they marketed the hell out of the game and put ads up everywhere is beside the point). After awhile, other stadiums (IBM w/ OS2?) are having a difficult time because instead of the plush seats, they went for the hard aluminum ones because they are shiny...they sell different beer, not worse, but the people don't like it as much. Team A's profits go through the roof and the other teams can't afford to keep playing because their costs exceed their stadium's profit. They shut down, or get bought out by Team A and disassembled.

Team B can come play at Team A's field, but they have to go through paper work, get directions to the field, etc. Team A provides some of it's own workers, but it gets other people to come in and sell the beer (Blizzard, EA) and make the pretty signs everywhere (Adobe). Team A has gotten big enough that it can actually just scrimmage itself (.NET), but occasionally people want to see Team A play other teams (Java). Now, the field changes from time (Win98) to time (WinXP). Differnt contours, different lines, but both teams have to play on the same field. Granted, Team A practices there, so they have an upper hand, but if they were to go over to Team B's field (Solaris), they would have the same hard time adjusting.

Occasionally, the stadium will pop up that forces you to bring your own beer (XWindows) and the fans make their own signs (GIMP) and the seats really aren't all that comfortable until you get used to them (KDE/GNOME). But the game has free admission, and there are a LOT of people cheering it on. Team C plays here. Oh, and Team C doesn't get sick and barf in the middle of the game, ever. Team A has a tendency to do that about once a week or so.

The home team always has the advantage, but when it comes to apps, people ARE playing on a level field...they both have to develop for the same OS.

</analogy>

Getting back to the point, you know how pissed off I'd be if someone told me I HAD to bundle someone else's software with my app? That's ridiculous, absolutely preposterous, especially in this day and age of install wizards. Java takes two clicks to install, any moron can do it or have the desired program do it for them.

--trb

Re:Free Market Economy

[SETIGuy]

Now, the field changes from time (Win98) to time (WinXP). Differnt contours, different lines, but both teams have to play on the same field.

It's not so simple, not only does the field change from time to time, but the rules change at the whim of the home team. There are hidden passages from the 20 yard line to the end zone. An ever shifting maze moves to a pattern known only to the home team. The field also tilts so that the opposing team is always running up hill.

Granted, Team A practices there, so they have an upper hand, but if they were to go over to Team B's field (Solaris), they would have the same hard time adjusting.

You've forgotten that most of the spectators aren't there because they like Team A. They are there because ticket vendors are only allowed to sell cheap tickets to Team A's stadium. If they sell a ticket to Team B's stadium, the vendor still needs to pay Team A as if they had sold a ticket to Team A's stadium. So tickets to Team B's stadium are twice as expensive.

Team B tries to give tickets away so their hot dog vendors will make some money, but they need to distribute the tickets through licensed ticket vendors, who still need to pay Team A for the tickets.

The home team always has the advantage, but when it comes to apps, people ARE playing on a level field...they both have to develop for the same OS.

Not even close, especially when the OS contains hidden APIs and can change in an instant to break a competitors software. Remember "DOS ain't done till Lotus won't run." Remeber how WIN32S would immediately change every time IBM was able to make it run under OS/2?

Getting back to the point, you know how pissed off I'd be if someone told me I HAD to bundle someone else's software with my app? That's ridiculous, absolutely preposterous, especially in this day and age of install wizards. Java takes two clicks to install, any moron can do it or have the desired program do it for them.

Then you are certainly lucky that you don't have a monopoly. Bill Gates is lucky he's not in jail. (Yes, there are criminal penalties for abuse of a monopoly position. Far be it for A$hcroft to seek anything like that.) He's lucky he gets to sell his software at all.

Re:Free Market Economy

[pen]

A free market is a market in which there are multiple companies all competing on the same level with the same rules.

A free market is one that is not regulated by the government, whether there is a monopoly at the moment or not. If you are advocating government control, please don't say that you are interested in a free market. That is called bullshit.

Re:Free Market Economy

[J. Random Software]

A free market is supposed to allocate resources to producers in proportion to their current efficiency in using them to meet demand. When a monopoly appears, even the more efficient producers (if any) are unable to compete. This is a sign that the market has failed and that resources are being diverted out of the productive economy (wasted, hoarded, or predating in other markets).

Any market is a means, not an end. We shouldn't blindly continue relying on them in circumstances where they demonstrably don't work.

Re:Free Market Economy

[pen]

A free market is one that is free of government regulation. (Notice the pattern?) A free market is not "supposed to" do anything, though it usually does.

Claiming that the market has "failed" because there is currently a monopoly is extremely short-sighted.

Still ludicrous

[lseltzer]

The judge overstates the importance of the distribution channel. On the client this will change absolutely nothing, just as any inclusion of the .NET Framework would affect nothing.

Even if Microsoft had just shipped the Sun Java VM from the begining it would not have afforded Java any more success on the client than it got through Microsoft's VM, which was the fastest and most compatible around in spite of the few unimportant differences Sun sued over. Does anyone out there really think that ISVs will be more likely to write Java apps, or users more likely to use them, if MS is forced to ship Sun's VM?

On the server the idea that bundling will help is so dumb it doesn't deserve serious consideration.

Great

[sulli]

Now my browser will crash even more often, until I remember (AGAIN) to disable Java.

Re:Great

[Anonymous Coward]

You're probably using the MS Java, not the Sun Java.

Mozilla or IE5.5 + SunJava1.3+ has almost never crashed on me.

IE5.5 with MSJava1.1 crashed frequenty.

Take a step back, man

[kcb93x]

I still don't understand how Internet Explorer is required for Windows!

Re:Take a step back, man

[SuiteSisterMary]

For much the same reason that, say, glibc is required for most Linux apps; once you have a better than 5 percent chance that multiple programs will use the same functionality, you put the buggers in a library. Then you expose the library. The fact that the libraries happen to come with a little wrapper executable not withstanding; like the man says, removing iexplore.exe doesn't remove the underlying guts anymore than removing ls removes the underlying filesystem.

And, yes, at this point, exposing app-level libs for common TCP/IP protocols makes sense. Has for years.

Is the ruling Fair?

[Dolemite_the_Wiz]

I say no.

Sun's Java is slow as molasses and has the security of a slice of swiss cheese (full of holes).

Try downloading and installing Morpheus, the music sharing program. This program is written in Java and in the time that I gave it to test this program, I ended up giving a 'Sucks Ass' review because the code in the Java is so inefficient and slow. (Check out the download site and you'll see TONS of similar reviews).

Microsoft had the vision to remove Java from their systems because of the lack of stability and usefulness in their systems. If Sun had sat down like MS did and try to make the language more efficient you probably wouldn't see this case in court at all.

Also, in reply to a few different posts:

1) MS didn't kill Netscape. AOL did by continual focusing on the GUI (shop, shop, shop) and neglecting the backen of the browser. Get over it.

2) An Anonymous poster put a VERY exact and detailed argument about having either VB or Java replace C as a Standard Language. I have to totally agree with this for the exact reasons that the poster did. Sun Java (in it's current molasses state/form) is nowhere deserving of replacing C.

OT: Stop Java Terminal from popping up?

[g_bit]

Everytime I go to a website that has a Java Applet on it, this stupid Java Terminal thing pops up in my system tray and doesn't go away until I close every instance of IE.

Does anyone know how to stop that from happening?

Re:OT: Stop Java Terminal from popping up?

[AndroidCat]

At a guess, Tools/Internet Options/Advanced/Microsft VM and uncheck Java Console Enabled. Reboot.

Re:OT: Stop Java Terminal from popping up?

[Anonymous Coward]

Sure. Get rid of the poop called Java.

Re:OT: Stop Java Terminal from popping up?

[darien]

If you're using Sun Java, go to the Control Panel and run the "Java Plug-In" control. Change "Show console" to "Hide console" and click "Apply." Eccolò!

Re:OT: Stop Java Terminal from popping up?

[alyandon]

Restart IE not reboot.

Re:OT: Stop Java Terminal from popping up?

[AndroidCat]

Oops, right. I'm too used to MS software requiring a reboot when you change screen colours (exaggeration).

XP and IE have .NET??!?

[throx]

While I can understand the judge's opinion that Java should be carried on every system that ships with .NET to avoid the anticompetitive practices here's what I don't get from the ruling:

My copies of IE and Windows XP did NOT ship with the .NET runtimes - they were a separate download! I don't see why a product that Microsoft *hasn't* bundled the .NET runtimes with should be required to have Java bundled.

Re:XP and IE have .NET??!?

[AndroidCat]

At least we'll get a new Java runtime for Robocode. :^)

Thoughts...

[saikou]

From PDF one can see, that Sun asks not for mere "put us on desktop" but to be carried on any product, containing .NET(page 10 of PDF) which (allthough not specificly listed) would include all Pocket PCs and Server products. While having Java pre-loaded on desktop versions is, of course, reasonable, having Sun's environment piggybacking on pocket pc is not.
Arument about market tipping from Java to .NET (in terms of developers) is based on survey and projections from Evans Data ignores development tool availability and/or usability (in other words there's Visual Basic for Dummies, but I have not seen any IDE that would let a Dummy User to generate Java Application -- except for Macromedia FX).
Good things in this injunction for Microsoft are:

1. No more litigation. Once Sun supplied Microsoft with it's runtime environment it cannot sure Microsoft in regard of this matter (bye bye other lawsuit)

2. Microsoft will be able to blame problems on included Java platform and charge users extra to resolve them (if any).

3. Must carry does not mean "can't be removed". So it is possible that first question user will see after starting system will be "Would you like to remove Sun's Java Runtime environment, to save space and resources?" with button YES set as default :)

Get it together Slashdot!

[sryx]

17,232th person to submit
17,232 people and THEN you post a story, I know we get on your case about dupes but we aren't THAT mad about them ;P
-Jason

Unreasonable slashdotters, as usual

[Anonymous Coward]

Funny how just about every pro-Microsoft comment made on this topic is marked "Troll" and every pro-Sun comment is marked "5:Insightful"

Really, this is making me nauseous.

IN SOVIET RUSSIA

[CmdrTypo]

Microsoft bundles YOU!

In soviet russia...

[Anonymous Coward]

the government tells the companies what software they're going to ship!

Oh, hang on...

"few unimportant differences"? WTF? Grow a brain!

[Anonymous Coward]

Who in Microsoft's marketing department writes your copy, you astroturfing whore?

Those "few unimportant differences" just happened to be the latest (at the time) of a long line of "inadvertent bugs" that "oh so coincidentally" broke a competitor's product, which "oh so coincidentally" just happened to be a market Microsoft was trying to break into and/or dominate.

Just ask Lotus and their innovative spreadsheet 1-2-3. Oh wait, they're dead and buried because Microsoft killed them when they wanted Excel to succeed...

Oh, and the fact that about three trial judges of record disagree with you might also be somewhat important if you ever want to revise your warped view of the world.

A very fair remedy

[zipwow]

Zeinfeld wrote:

I don't think the claim that sun are harmed holds water. It was their previous action that caused Microsoft to stop shipping the Java VM.

A lot of people have missed why Sun was harmed in the first place. You mention the shipping of the defunct and broken MS JVM, but miss the real past harm: MS' illegal actions against Netscape.

Netscape, the then-dominant browser, also installed a Java VM with every installation. Its this inclusion that led to the MSJV in the first place. When MS illegally forced Netscape out of the market, they also harmed Java. Evidence that this is more than just a side effect is that Sun Microsystems is specifically mentioned in the DoJ findings.

I don't have much sympathy for Sun here. It may be the US way for failing companies to go to the government or courts to try to win there what they failled to win in the market but it didn;t do Netscape any good.

Several points can be made here. Sun "lost Java" (not really, but close) in the open market because Microsoft violated the rules of that market. The idea that monopolies are legal, but using them to extend to other markets is a pretty basic tenet of free market economics. That Java still exists despite this 'foul play' from MS is a testimony to its strength.

Next, you say that suing about this "didn't do Netscape any good". There's two important things that Sun has that Netscape didn't. First, an injunction that remedies the problem during litigation, and more importantly: a new product, based on the harmed one, that is also a strong competitor.

J2EE is competing with .NET. Sun is saying (and I think its justified) that .NET has a good chance of beating J2EE not because of technical merits, but because of MS's past illegal usage of its monopoly to fragment the Java user base, and because the promise of ubiquitous installation that the Microsoft monopoly makes. This injunction avoids the continuance of that harm while Sun seeks a permanent remedy.

All in all, I think its pretty reasonable. This is a new market, and we as consumers deserve a product created by competition free of monopolistic influences.

-Zipwow

Re:A very fair remedy

[Zeinfeld]

J2EE is competing with .NET. Sun is saying (and I think its justified) that .NET has a good chance of beating J2EE not because of technical merits, but because of MS's past illegal

Sun is saying lots of things, that does not make them true.

Sun is the DEC of the 2000s. Its hardware business is stagnant and its software business has no real connection to the hardware. They are under attack from Open Source and from IBM. They are likely to face a very stiff challenge from Apple. However they spend 65% of their time whining about Microsoft.

The guys at Redmond are laughing their asses off at Sun. They are winning the battle and losing the war.

OEMs already have the right under the federal settlement to add Java if they chose. They also have the right under the same settlementto remove components they don't want to ship. What do you think the probability is that Dell and HP will choose to ship the Sun code? They don't think any more of Sun than Microsoft does, they are competitors in the hardware business and the sooner Sun dies the better as far as they are concerned.

I doubt that it will come to that as Microsoft will certainly appeal and the chances of blocking the temporary injunction are pretty good, they can win simply by spinning out the appeal.

Java on the client is a pretty wierd idea. Very few sites have ever used Java. I don't think we will suddenly see a rush to switch from flash to Java on the basis that Microsoft will be shipping the latest version for the next year.

The judgement has no effect on server side java. If you are going to do java on the server you are big enough to load it youself.

So where exactly does this rulling have any effect - except on the size of Scott's ego.

The Sun lawsuit is simply a way for a failed management team to cover up their mistakes while they make good on their exit strategy. They will survive as is for maybe a year or so but in the long term they are going to be bought by IBM once their market cap has settled to a more reasonable level.

Re:A very fair remedy

[Tonetheman]

OEMs already have the right under the federal settlement to add Java if they chose. They also have the right under the same settlementto remove components they don't want to ship.

I am not sure what rock you are living under but MS has still not done anything to help this. AFAIK the PC maker (dell, gateway...) are still bowing under Microsoft's thumb. Though I do remember where one of them shipped FreeDOS with PC's to satisfy MS unfair contracts.

And even more importantly the problem is not with Java but MS screwed up half witted implementation. The security problems with the MS VM are long and well documented.

The damage has already been done. Your post is proof. You believe the crap that MS is feeding you. Java on the server is fine and Java on the client is fine too.

I do think you are right about the fact that you will not see that much changes over this. Your average web developer who already is competent with flash will not change. I wouldn't.

It does help people like me who have to work with the VM from MS and their really BAD OLD version of Java.

At least the ruling will help some.

Re:A very fair remedy

[bcc123]

Java on the client is a pretty wierd idea. Very few sites have ever used Java. I don't think we will suddenly see a rush to switch from flash to Java on the basis that Microsoft will be shipping the latest version for the next year.

And why is java on the client-side so unpopular ?
Oh yeah, that's cause MS shipped old JVM with windows and that prevented people from using Swing in applets. Sun is not going to recover now, it's too late. But the point is solid - MS hurt Sun by shipping old JVM.

Re:A very fair remedy

[zipwow]

Did you read the judge's decision? He/she lays it all out very well.

Client-side java was one of the most obvious harms of Microsoft's activities. In the judge's opinion, he/she repeatedly quotes Microsoft's own communications about its strengths, and its possibilities. Even now, ActiveX is not as fully featured (or anywhere near as secure) as a Java applet. And still, you can't be sure your java applet is going to run properly, because of Microsoft's earlier pollution. And, the judge concludes, that pollution also reduces the near-ubiquitousness that Java was achieving by being a part of all Nescape installations.

But that's not even the main point.

Why is it that as *soon* as .NET was announced, hordes of developers began talking about how to switch over and support it? The answer, the judge thinks (and I agree), is ubiquitous deployment and support. This ubiquitous deployment is due to a monopoly. This usage of a monopoly to break into other markets is illegal. Its at this point in the reasoning that we really don't have to go any further. Harm has been done, and it needs a remedy. Harm was done to Microsoft's competitor Sun in a previous but related market, and that harm is continuing to hinder Sun's ability to compete in this market. Since Microsoft's guilt was upheld on appeal, and since Sun was named *specifically* in the judgement, its pretty clear that Sun's chances of winning the case are good. Its also clear that in the years it takes to decide this, that the harm to Sun will continue, and will be unable to be undone after the trial. Hence the injunction.

Apart from that, I think you discount the difference it makes for something to be part of the default installation. Honestly, with the outcome of IE vs Netscape, I don't see how you can miss how important that is.

The judge's position describes how having Java with the OS changes developers' approaches very well. And even were that not the case, the granting of this injunction certainly gives Sun the perception in the developers' minds that Sun is going to win this challenge, and win the right for Java to compete unfettered with .NET.

That's the only effect worth talking about. To further answer my earlier question about the rapid adoption (or at least interest) in .NET relates to the perception that .NET is going to win hands down not because of better technology, but because of the advantages MS has from its OS monopolies.

Lastly, if I had a dollar for every time I heard "They will survive for a year or so" about Sun, I'd have all my money back from the stock market. Lets talk about the law and the technologies, rather than ad hominem attacks on executives.

-Zipwow

Re:A very fair remedy

[Zeinfeld]

Why is it that as *soon* as .NET was announced, hordes of developers began talking about how to switch over and support it?

Because dotNET is what people had hoped to get from Java framework but didn't.

dotNET is language neutral. So I can take advantage of the framework from within my old FOTRAN or COBOL decks without having to rewrite them. Sun is on a religious trip with its 100% pure Java I would much prefer to use my old codes without having to have someone rewrite them.

dotNET also eliminates the performance penalty that is inevitable with the bytecode approach. Java has switched to JIT techniques because it is the only way to get acceptable performance, but if you are going to do JIT you will do a lot better if you use a code optimized for JIT rather than a code optimized for an interpreter.

There was absolutely nothing in either Java or dotNet that was not well understood in the language research community. C# and Java are nice packaging jobs, nothing more. C# packs in a bunch more features and has the advantages of 5 years extra experience and much less dogma.

Re:A very fair remedy

[zipwow]

".Net is supposedly language neutral"

So is Java. JNI existed from the beginning, though it was one of the things that the MSJVM broke. RMI-IIOP exists. SOAP and XML-RPC are a very nice part of Java. Heck, you can use CORBA with Java as well, if you really want to.

Furthermore, Java is *platform* neutral. Java's track record with supporting alternate implementations is nearly flawless. Application servers are a fine example, with the admitted issue of JBoss' certification.

On the flipside, Microsoft fights alternate implementations of every part of their existing hierarchy tooth and nail. Furthermore, they subvert industry standards like IMAP and Kerberos to force lock-in with their own systems. And now you're telling me they're promoting free interoperation?

".Net will supposedly perform better"

This is based on old perceptions of Java. If you read some of the benchmark reviews, I think you'll see that there's enough controversy to assure you that that performance is comparable. If that isn't enough, J2EE's acceptance ought to also comfort your worries.

"Nothing in Java or .Net that was new to "language research comunity", and C# supposedly has more features and 5 years of 'extra experience'"

The former is true, Java's (and later, C#'s) language constructs were well researched. The comment about "5 years extra experience" is pure spin for "came five years later". A language that claims it is so similar to Java that it is advertised as easy to convert, but still "packs in a bunch more features" contradicts itself on its face.

I think it can be shown that what is driving .Net is a combination of fear and illegal actions. If the threat of the latter can be removed, then the former will disappear, and we'll have a fair competition.

-Zipwow

Re:A very fair remedy

[toriver]

dotNET is language neutral.

No, it's not. It sets forth requirements (the CLS) that a compiler needs to support in order to compile for the runtime (the CLR). Yes, a lot of languages actually do compile to the CLR, but e.g. C++ needs a lot of "tweaking" in order not to commit sins from its C past.

old FOTRAN or COBOL decks

Care to provide reference to anyone making .Net-targeting compilers for those languages? If you mean precompiled code (executables), you leave .Net's managed environment and start calling into "unsafe" code via COM+, and that's not .Net but its bridge to pre-existing systems.

Sun is on a religious trip with its 100% pure Java

but not everyone else is. There are several compilers already which target the JVM, for languages like Python, Smalltalk, ...

dotNET also eliminates the performance penalty that is inevitable with the bytecode approach.

No, it just eliminates one intermediate step between byte code and machine code, in that the generated machine code is cached for later use. There really is no other benefit over Java's Hotspot or other adaptive VMs.

Good, clear ruling

[Animats]

Nice ruling. The judge gets it. Writes well, too. His argument is that, regardless of the merits of the case, allowing Microsoft to continue its anticompetitive activity hurts Sun more than stopping it hurts Microsoft. Therefore, it's appropriate to require Microsoft to carry the current Sun version of Java while the case is litigated.

Microsoft can appeal this preliminary order, but they probably won't get it overturned. So 90 days from now, we should have a decent Java shipping with Windows.

I'd call this the wrong remedy.

[jcr]

IMHO, requiring MS to include a Java runtime (are they even required to pay for it?) is simply the wrong tactic. It won't keep MS from bastardizing Java with windoze-only extensions that the VB lusers will insist on (Java.NET, anyone?)

The right thing to do here was simply to make MS pay out a nine-figure judgement for damages.

-jcr

Re:I'd call this the wrong remedy.

[chaotica1974]

Actually, the articles state that MS should use a Sun compliant JVM and not Microsoft's old JVM. Sun is fighting to get their JVM into Windows which is the best way to go. If Sun was able to get into Microsoft's OS then that nine-figure payment would be made in profit and many developers would rejoice.

More details

[zipwow]

Two interesting details, the first being that I think the payment to Sun from MS was $20M, and the second that at that time, MS offered to exactly what Sun just got the injunction for: shipping Sun's JVM.

Sun didn't take it then because it had lots of nasty strings (I think it would've allowed MS to break it 'for security' or some other odiously broad clause).

However, that offer is one thing that the judge cites to refute one of MS' defenses against this injuction: that the Sun JVM would introduce security problems. The judge basically said that if MS really believed that, they wouldn't have made the offer in the other case.

-Zipwow

Apples to Apples

[Anonymous Coward]

Sun will have lost forever its right to compete

Possibly they should have started to compete at some point and they wouldn't be in the position of losing that right now.???

Personally I'm amazed that SUN stays in business. Their hardware goes down like I twenty dollar hooker, their support is second class, they're losing sales, their not developing products that the community needs and allowing competitors to fill in those niches. How exactly are they going to make mone.... Oh wait that's right sue MS every few years for some cash flow. I take it all back EXCELLENT business model SUN.

Taking a position in this minefield is like arbitrating between two convicted theives. Both refuse to admit wrong-doing, both point fingers at the other, both are wrong, both are jealous of the others abilities, and all you can do is sit in the middle and try to figure out which one is LESS vile.

PUKE!

And in other news...

[AndroidCat]

Microsoft announced plans that it was halting C# and .NET development. "Oh well, never mind" said Steve Balmer.

An anonymous reader was the 17,232th person...

[Anonymous Coward]

/. wrote:

"An anonymous reader was the 17,232th person..."

Is this a real metric for actual responses submitted?

Thanks,

There is no Slope

[exp(pi*sqrt(163))]

doesn't this open up a slippery slope?
Similarly when people commit a crime they can be fined or go to prison. But if we extend the powers of government to allow them to take money from people and lock people up won't everyone end up penniless in prison? No, of course not. There is no slippery slope because nobody has been given the right to arbitrarily impose conditions on companies. What has in fact happened is that a court, which is part of a complex system with many checks and balances, has imposed a condition in a very special and unusual situation.

On A Roll

[Anonymous Coward]

I think we're on a roll now. Any day we can expect a new ruling to enforce the existence of Netscape on the Windows for Workgroups desktop. The victory is ours! (PS Who gives a bad hoot about Java anyway? Yuck.)

windows update

[darekana]

And make them distribute the newest version with Windows Update. hah.

so what?

[devleopard]

Where's the value? Now I can run applets? This doesn't hurt MSFT - and has marginal benefit for Sun. MSFT can actually put added pressure on Sun now, to ensure that the Windows version of the JVM works perfectly with whatever features they put into Windows. Added cost for Sun. Additionally, how many Java-based applications do you actually install and run? The majority of the desktop application market is still MFC/Win32/COM/.NET. This is only a moral victory for Sun.

Not to mention that MSFT could probably engineer Windows/IE to run the JVM more slowly, and give the user a "Disable Java" option. Of course, it'd end up back in court - but how long? 2-3 years? Enough time to gain more ubiquity for .NET. Not to mention the additional 6-12 months that MSFT will appeal and maneuver.

Best scenario for MS: they advertise the fact that they have Sun's Java, make it run slow, and put an imprint in the mind of managers everywhere that Java is slow. No matter what the financial costs would be (Bill and Steve: "Fine us for $300 million! Oh please, don't throw us in the briar patch! Oh no!") What matters is the decision that those very same managers make, when they're deciding between Java and .NET (managers aren't programmers, they don't read Slashdot, and they don't give a damn about the politics of McNeely or RMS)

Re:so what?

[Anonymous Coward]

Double-click a .jar file and have it run. With no additional installations, other than to download the jar file from a site.

That has some serious value in the consumer market from Sun's perspective. I believe OS X supports this right now.

Watch out for sarcasm...

[Badge 17]

2) An Anonymous poster put a VERY exact and detailed argument about having either VB or Java replace C as a Standard Language. I have to totally agree with this for the exact reasons that the poster did. Sun Java (in it's current molasses state/form) is nowhere deserving of replacing C.

This poster also wrote:

Microsoft's "shared source" under which Visual Basic is released definately seems to be the most fair and reasonable of all the licenses in existance, with none of the harsh restrictions of the BSD license. It also lacks the GPLs requirement that anything coded with its tools becomes property of the FSF.

Hint, hint - if something's moderated as "Funny..." it might be sarcasm.

Microsoft had the vision to remove Java from their systems because of the lack of stability and usefulness in their systems.

Sure, Java may be slow... but lack of usefulness? You just wrote that Morpheus was written in Java... Morpheus seemed pretty popular for a while there.

Besides, if you contract with someone to use a particular protocol, then don't follow that contract, whatever the reasons - that's not vision, that's breach of contract.

Re:Watch out for sarcasm...

[Anonymous Coward]

He-he, ironically, Morhpeus was popular for a very definite while, while it was an MFC app running on FastTrack. As soon as it shipped the Java version, most of the people downloaded the app, like the poster above, but then went ahead and un-installed it.

Re:Watch out for sarcasm...

[Dolemite_the_Wiz]

My point Exactly. Morpheous, in its current java form, is a chunk-o-shit.

Simple way to fix

[msoftsucks]

Its simple! Lets all stp using Java and instead start using Microsoft5's .NET replacement! ;)

Yellow Pages & "the fingers" not �

[MacAndrew]

Nope -- at least not in the States.

That's neither trademark nor copyright.

Hey, that was almost interesting, wasn't it? :)

Ruling heralds: The return of the applet?

[DA_MAN_DA_MYTH]

With this ruling will this bring to the desktop a more unified Java VM. Developers can build applets using the latest technologies provided by the latest JVM.

Of course not. Applets suck.

(Just kidding, or am I?)

Natural monopolies

[smiff]

Market forces generally do a decent job of figuring these things out (the "invisible hand").

I don't think this is true when it comes to software, especially middleware and operating systems. With software, compatibility is a critical issue. People buy the operating system that has all the software. Developers write software for the popular operating systems. We end up with networking externalities. The end result: monopolies form naturally in the software industry.

To change the natural formation of software monopolies, we would need to drastically change copyright and patent law (which themselves, are government granted monopolies).

Re:Natural monopolies

[PD]

Monopolies might form naturally because of the mechanisms you describe, and I think there's a good solution to this. Not necessarily the only solution, but one of them.

A monopoly can be drawn in different ways, from a company having a monopoly on all the business for a particular platform, to a particular platform having a monopoly on all the hardware.

Examples: Microsoft has a monopoly on office software, but the UNIX operating system appears to be building towards a monopoly on servers and maybe even the desktop.

One monopoly is restrictive, and the other monopoly is not. I'm playing fast and loose with the definition of monopoly here, I know that. But my point is that open source software can be used to turn the first monopoly into the second. In other words, open source might have a moderative effect on monopolies, preventing a single company from locking up a market for too long a time.

I am not a die hard believer in the ultimate efficiency of the market - sometimes those markets do break down. But where markets do work, we should encourage them to work even better. The natural limitations on monopolies can be encouraged with the appropriate use of open source code so that a monopoly that might have stood for 25 years might only stand for 3 or 4 years, keeping the markets much more open than they otherwise would have been.

I agree with you that another step would be patent reform. Open source is just another tool we can use to improve how the markets work.

Ummm...

[stubear]

...this is a preliminary injunction. This means for the time being, at least the duartion of the trial, Microsoft will be forced to comply with this ruling. However, they can always appeal this decision and the final judgement could always allow Microsoft drop Java in compliance with the ruling from a year or so ago where MS was ordered to pay Sun $20m and phase out Java from their OS over the next 7 years. The fact that MS dropped Java much earlier was not in violation of the agreement.

Re:Unfair... Great Argument!

[Anonymous Coward]

" I don't think my tax dollars should be spent ensuring that Microsoft plays fair, because they aren't going to anyway."

What a horible argument... Our government should do nothing because Microsoft is going to break the law anyway? If for no other reason, that is why our government should do something. My God man (ChineseFood Jesus), have you no backbone?

Thank the Lord (Mr. Hot'n Sour Jesus) that more people are not like you!!! otherwise our police forces would have no funding (since criminal behavior continues on despite their efforts), our military would be nonexistent (we never need to fight if we are always going to lose), and in general the world would be a pretty horible place.

Happy Holidays!

Java Free Since Windows XP

[Anonymous Coward]

I have been free of Java since Windows XP. I will continue to do so.

The next version of Windows I get, I will make sure I don't install Java. If it does get installed, I will remove the software. I don't like being told what I can install on my computer.

Call me a troll or what, but i've yet to see java successfully download from the internet and install itself in Mozilla. It always fails for me... Why doesn't the Mozilla people make it easier for people by INCLUDING Java? Oh well, 4 years to create a crappy browser.

eh

[SweetAndSourJesus]

That was a bit of unjustifiable personal opinion there.

The way I see it, I've been Microsoft free for years, and I haven't had much difficulty doing it. I have a hard time seeing them as the threat that everyone else does. They don't play fair, so what? Nobody plays fair.

It's not because Microsoft going to do it anyway that I think they should be left alone. I just don't think our government needs to spend so much being a referee.

No double post?

[Jugalator]

An anonymous reader was the 17,232th person to submit ... and still, only *one* story was posted! The Slashdot editors are improving quickly!

Re:No double post?

[Kwil]

Give it time. It takes them at least 3 hours to double-post.

What, you expect them to be fast at being wrong?

Re:No double post?

[Jugalator]

Troll? Heh, this was supposed to be funny. Oh well. :-)

What if I don't want Java?

[Anonymous Coward]

Will I be given the option to not install Java or to uninstall it?

it is saving Java from the wrath of M$

[SHEENmaster]

Microsoft is trying to "kill off" Java by making an inferior and incompatible alternative.

My snowboarding game for example, will not work on M$'s virtual machine while it works perfectly on every version of Java2 from Sun.

Should Micro$oft be able to include(and advertise) an orange with every copy of windows while calling it an apple?

Re:it is saving Java from the wrath of M$

[ostiguy]

Java will kill itself as a broswer applet technology on its own.

I cannot successfully get IE configured with a JVM that works correctly for both Cisco's http switch interface (does kinda cool port utilization graphs real time), and HP Toptools (free windows management software). I've tried ms's, sun's 1.3xx, sun's 1.4xxx.

Write once, run *nowhere* has been my experience.

ostiguy

Re:it is saving Java from the wrath of M$

[sparkz]

Sounds like an IE problem, not a Java problem. Under Netscape, you can, for example, select either the built-in JVM, or the JVM plugin, for those instances where you need different versions for different tasks.

Re:it is saving Java from the wrath of M$

[Anonymous Coward]

You're just cranky cause when you were little your mother used to make you scrub the floor without your pants on, while her brother (who is also your daddy) would slap you on your bare arse with a studded leather strap. And you're bitter because when you cousin came to visit on the holidays she would sit on your lap and wriggle, but she would never let you kiss her 'down there' like you begged her to. And you are angry because your brother has moved out of home and you miss the free sex and buttock massages that he gave you when you got him drunk enough.

Re:it is saving Java from the wrath of M$

[Daniel Phillips]

Java will kill itself as a broswer applet technology on its own.

I have to admit it's been less than awe-inspiring so far, but that is due in large part to Microsoft's manuevering to prevent the obviously needed improvements to the browser-embedded version from happening, essentially freezing web java at 1.0, little grey boxes and all.

That will start to change now, at least it's a chance to show what Java can really do in a browser. I'd like to see a browser-embedded chat client that doesn't suck, for example. I can see a lot of uses on the easy-installer side, for example, you could provide a real hand-holding type of environment for a first-time Linux install over the web, but providing a simple browser-based installer in Java, enough to download a better installer. It hasn't been possible to seriously contemplate nice hacks like that until now, and of course there were the efficiency problems that had to be solved. Which are now pretty much solved, in fact, I was quite amazed when I ran some benchmarks a couple months ago and found Java (Hotspot) was running typical benchmark programs faster than gcc C/C++. Granted, gcc is not the greatest speeddaemon in the world, but still.

Personally, I won't suddenly start doing a whole lot of Java - I just do not like massive heavyweight things, even if today's hardware makes them usable. Then there is the fact that Sun still hasn't let the other shoe drop on the open source side. But all the same, I'm glad that those who do like programming and running Java are going to benefit from this. I suppose I'll be running more Java programs.

How about somebody write a Python installer in Java? Let's get something genuinely useful out of this :-)

Re:it is saving Java from the wrath of M$

[neonprimetime]

Exactly, Java works, it's just that M$ makes sure it doesn't with their stuff...

One reason nobody has written their sites in Java is because all the viewers use M$ products which literally try kill Java...

This is an awesome ruling...Someday down the road, Java will dominate the web like it was supposed to in the first place...They just needed a break like this to get the JVM into the households of the common folk who M$ hid it from...

hey M$, dodge this!

Re:it is saving Java from the wrath of M$

[sparkz]

Heh, only that..

If only 95% of the users didn't use MS stuff, wouldn't the world be a better place?

Sad fact - they do, and it isn't.

I already included it, and no one cared.

[Anonymous Coward]

Java is slow. Java apps are crappy. Sorry, it's the truth.
I included Sun's JVM in our corporate windows (NT/2K) builds. It was a waste of time. Very few applications use client side Java, those that do are much worse than native apps (slower, uglier, worse fonts, etc). Even more annoying, frequently applications need a different version of the JVM, because different Sun JVM's are incompatible. Maybe someday this will change, I seem to doubt it.

you're missing the key parts

[Anonymous Coward]

The key parts:

1. GM doesn't own Sirius (in fact, they own 5.6% of XM).

2. GM does not have an illegally maintained monopoly on automobiles. Last I heard, they only had around 20% of the North American market, maybe less now.

So a non-illegal-monopoly holding company IS free to cut a deal with Sirius.

Microsoft holds an illegally maintained monopoly and is using it to give .NET an unfair boost over Java. Remedy is to force inclusion of the technology in Windows.

NB. this is not unlike all the Compuserve / AOL links that got shipped with Win95/98/ME to sit beside the MSN icon; an antitrust suit was threatened by the other ISPs and MS allowed the competing ISPs space on the default desktop.

Re:you're missing the key parts

[Anonymous Freak]

NB. this is not unlike all the Compuserve / AOL links that got shipped with Win95/98/ME to sit beside the MSN icon; an antitrust suit was threatened by the other ISPs and MS allowed the competing ISPs space on the default desktop.

That is a good example. In that case, Microsoft SETTLED, by allowing those ISPs to have their icons on the desktop. They were not forced into it by the government. In this case, the government has declared that Microsoft must include someone else's technology. That means that Microsoft has to agree to Sun's license, wether they feel like it or not. Heck, Sun could now change their license to say that anyone who implements it in their operating system must give sun the entire source code to the core of the operating system. It wouldn't matter for Linux, it's already open. It wouldn't matter for OS X, as Darwin is already open. But, it could be used to force MS to give up their source code; as the government has just mandated that MS acquire a license for Java.

Again, I would have no problem with the government forcing MS to remove their faulty Java implementation. I would have no problem with MS being required to pop up a dialog box saying 'you must have Java installed to run this, please click the link below to be taken to www.sun.com to download it - warning, this link takes you to a website outside of Microsoft's control'. That would be just fine. But FORCING a company to include a competitor's product, with no end user choice, is wrong. Yes, no end user choice. The government has just declared that Java is a legally mandated part of Windows.

To quote the judge "If .NET proves itself to be a better product than Java, it should -- and will -- predominate in the market." But that's not true. If the govt. forces MS to include Java, Java will win just because it's already in use. There are alot of standards that fail just because another starndard was already in place, even though the new one is better. I'm not saying .NET is better than Java, I honestly have no idea; I'm just saying that the government is now showing prejudice FOR Java, rather than showing indifference.

Boon for Client Side Apps!

[/^Neil/]

This will be a huge boon for client side development. Complex, error prone dynamic HTML/JavaScript web apps can now be replaced with Java Web Start client side applications which are easy to deploy and provide Applet like security to run untrusted code. OS X ships with Java. Now we just need Sun to create an easy to install Java VM, plug-in, and Web Start for Linux. I'm guessing less than 10% of all Linux users have taken the time to install Java Web Start and the Java Plug-in. Also, Java developers will someday be able to use a modern version of Java for Applets and C++ developers can switch to Java for all but the most CPU intensive apps. Swing has made huge improvements in speed. I hear Java is faster than Windows Forms for .Net.

Neil

General Motors cars must now carry...

[Anonymous Coward]

...Ford motors' engines. A recent study reveals that when GM cars carry only GM parts, GM profits unfairly when compared to Ford. I just don't get it.

Re:General Motors cars must now carry...

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, there was once a case involving Ford and a competitors tires. Guess what? Ford cars need to work with competitors tires.

Re:So? and so..

[tuomoks]

A good question - there are many ways to make Java not to work, and, to blame Java for all the problems. Personally - bad decision, let the best system to win, it's not the question of forcing people to use or not to use - you really like the voting results every time?? give some credit to the users ( like me but also a developer over 30 years ) have a nice day - tuomo

Classic!

[first axiom]

From the Judge's opinion:

"According to Sun, if Microsoft had not committed its anticompetitive acts directed toward thwarting the implementation of Java, current and compatible Java runtime environments would now be ubiquitous on PCs."

This is hilarious.

how the hell is the parent a troll???

[Anonymous Coward]

how the hell did the parent get modded as a troll!!!, wtf is slashdot coming to

Plans for lawschool?

[sparkz]

.... after you get out of kindergarten?

It's Not An Issue of Fairness

[Anonymous Coward]

I know this is Redundant, but everyone is missing the underlying point here. Sun and Microsoft had an agreement to put the Java platform on Windows. Sun did NOT sue to "force" their competing technology onto the Windows platform. Indeed, they actually sued to "force" Microsoft to keep up it's end of the agreement, nothing more. It would be like me contracting with someone to create a software product, being paid, then delivering something that only meets 10% of the specs. I can't really argue that the rest is "my own version" of the product, because that wasn't the agreement. Likewise, Microsoft has effectively created something that isn't even Java, so it's in violation of the contract they agreed to with Sun.

I would agree that if the court were stepping in and saying something like "you must include Open Office on Windows" that would be wrong. However, in this case, there was an agreement that Microsoft didn't live up to, and all the court has decided is that "yes, they must honor the agreement they made with Sun".

Re:It's Not An Issue of Fairness

[neonprimetime]

Amen

Re:It's Not An Issue of Fairness

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, Microsoft pays Sun for Java, but that doesn't make Microsoft to be obliged to put Java into Windows.

If you buy a book, will you like to be forced to read it?

Re:It's Not An Issue of Fairness

[Anonymous Coward]

If you buy a book, will you like to be forced to read it?

No. That's why I wouldn't sign a contract with the bookstore that commits me to do so.

SUN Should be made to carry the .Net Framework

[micron]

Fair is Fair. If MS has to carry Java, then Sun should have to ship with .Net Framework. The only provision is that MS would have to write it to work on Suns OS, as Sun does for Java.

Seems like a fair shake to me.

Re:SUN Should be made to carry the .Net Framework

[saddino]

Although I see what you're saying, you're missing the point. Microsoft has been found to have a monopoly, Sun hasn't. Forcing Sun to carry .NET doesn't do anything to level the competitive marketplace (whereas forcing Microsoft to carry Java does) because Sun doesn't exert any real control over the marketplace.

Re:SUN Should be made to carry the .Net Framework

[micron]

I disagree with you. Just because MS was declared a monopoly, does not mean that they have a monopoly in every area. I want to see real competition in the area of cross platform environments. Java is one, .NET is sort of another. If the courts force MS to propogate Sun's version of Java (note, we are not talking about the MS VM version here, the courts actually dictate that the Sun VM must be included), then, let's see .NET forced on SUN. Users get to CHOOSE which version that they want to go with, and not the courts.

It is all supposed to be about consumer choice, isn't it?

Re:SUN Should be made to carry the .Net Framework

[mmacdona86]

I think Sun would be ecstatic if Microsoft offered a fully supported .Net framework for Solaris.

It's Called Contract Law

[Ho-Lee-Cow!]

...and Microsoft violated the terms of their contract with Sun by including a non-compliant Java in Windows. They also misused a Sun trademark and have sought to further break the original agreement by simply removing it altogether. But since there still is a contract in force, M$ is obligated to follow it.

The courts ruled in favor of Sun, and since that time, M$ has been trying ANYTHING they can to weasel out of the consequences, mostly by using their huge amounts of cash and monopoly power to push their own technologies.

Case closed, contingent upon appeals anyway.

Re:It's Called Contract Law

[Rinikusu]

And please note that I completely support the court's decision if indeed MS broke their terms of the contract.

Re:It's Called Contract Law

[Ho-Lee-Cow!]

Note also that it only makes sense, given the current circumstances, for SUN to latch on to M$ by the throat and make them follow the contract--including the demands for damages--because letting M$ walk away would otherwise give M$ a free hand to do as they please.

People should really quit rooting for the cheating monopolist and start rooting for the process of making them follow agreements that they freely entered into. This simply isn't about penalizing success; it's about making an arrogant company play by the rules everyone else plays by(and anti-trust law applies to everyone in one way or another).

Remember the $150 million?

[buckinm]

Remember all that cash Microsoft gave Apple a few years back? Part of it was to settle the look & feel nonsense...

Java Sucks!

[Anonymous Coward]

Why didn't the jugde force MS to include Python or *anything* besides Java?

Disable Java

[idamaybrown]

What good is it? I have the MS Java disabled under Internet Options - am I really missing anything? I hope I won't be forced to install Java, or anything else from SUN or there is a way to disable it once it's installed.

Re:Disable Java

[neonprimetime]

Java is very good, M$ has just killed it so bad that nobody thinks it can have any affect anymore...you'll want to make sure you enable Java in the future when it begins to dominate the net like it should've in the first place...

stupid M$ kills Java and all you folk give up and think Java sucks...well you're wrong

Re:Disable Java

[ClosedSource]

Actually, MS was the best thing that evey happened to Java. If MS had just ignored it, it would have died a long time ago.

On the other hand, Sun would probably have argued that MS was abusing their monopoly by not including Java.

Or if MS hadn't altered Java to make it work better with Windows, Sun would probably have complained that MS wasn't treating it as full-fledged language since it didn't work as well on Windows as VC++ or VB.

I think Sun's strategy was to fight with MS, even if it wasn't good for Sun's bottom line.

*How* will MS carry Java?

[Anonymous Coward]

I wonder if the inclusion of Java will be as well implemented as the other remedies made in the OS. Has anyone actually used that default-changing application?

Re:*How* will MS carry Java?

[inteller]

I know here is one person who will uninstall that trash given the chance. And they better give me the chance! If this is really allowing choice then the customer should have the choice to get rid of that shit. Java is a big dead hog that is bloated from being under the sun too long. It's day has come and gone. If a language can't survive on it's own merits (outside of any interference) then it deserves to go away.

its kindof like a hyper cube...

[Anonymous Coward]

picked mine up at the 7-11 the other day.

Taking steps...

[jmooney]

I agree with some of what you've said, especially about vendors working together for a cross-platform API and Sun being hurt by the cancellation of MS's java license... BUT there seems to be a crucial point missing about whether MS's Java license had a provision to carry the latest version. That would better explain why MS and Sun did what they did at each step. The usual provision for violation of a legal contract is automatic cancellation plus optional law suit.

What I've read sounds closer to:
1) MS signs Java agreement
... which includes provisions that they carry the latest version
2) MS produces better runtime
... for Java 1.1 ...
3) MS adds extensions for Windows only development, which are optional to developers
... but are opt-out rather than opt-in and violate JVM spec unless you specifically turn them off (another reply to the parent has explained that already)

Most importantly, you left out:
3.1) Sun releases enhanced JVM 1.2 with better enterprise networking features etc and the JNI for interfacing native code with Java. At a low level the JNI doesn't work the same way MS's native windows extentions do (although another post in reply to the parent says it would have been possible to support both in Windows).
3.2) Microsoft refuses to support 1.2, pushing on with its 1.1 branch, apparently in violation of their license (presumably figuring that the worst that could happen was that a court would order that they couldn't carry Java anymore, which would suit them anyway, with maybe a lawsuit for mere millions of dollars when this market is worth billions)
3.3) Judge finds that in fact MS illegally used their monopoly to hurt Sun & Java (even though Java still had some life left in it).

That changes the background for the rest of the steps:
4) Sun sues Microsoft
5) Sun offers settlement...terminate future licenses, puts a deadline on distributing the old java
I don't know if that was a settlement or just automatically triggered by a license violation.
6) Microsoft removes old Java well before deadline
7) Sun complains, puts large advertisements out showing disgruntlement with Microsoft
8) Microsoft decides .NET runtime is ready for primetime in WinXP SR1.....includes .NET runtime and the only version of Java they have licensed, although the license is soon to expire.
... because they violated the terms of their long term license to use the latest version of Java?
9) Sun cries fowl. Demands MS includes Sun's java because they limited MS's license to an old, obsolete version.
... it sounds like MS had the choice to keep their Java license long term, if they had supported the current version of Java, not just the 1997 Java API plus Windows API in 2000 and 2002.
10) Judge grants sun's wish......for now.
... stating that further harm would be done in future if the market wasn't adjusted back towards level immediately. If Java was as dead as some of the other technologies MS has crushed, there would be no point in trying to help.

Re:Taking steps...

[nhavar]

I think there's more to it too.

The agreement with Sun and MS was that all previous contracts in regard to Java were terminated. MS could no longer use the Java Compatible trademark. It was however allowed to continue to ship the existing Java technology developed prior to the agreement for a period of 7 years at the cost of 20 million dollars. SUN would allow for future licensing and distribution of Java technology (with additional charges/fees) on the provision that the end product meet SUN's compliancy criteria.

MS had a choice: continue to fund SUN, a competitor, with no forseeable return on investment. Help to popularize a competitors product line. Market against the companies own languages/api/development platforms. Be constantly accountable to a competitor. OR forget about it and pursue other more worthwhile goals that did have a return.

J++ development was basically dead. The developer community moved on. MS's revenue stream in regards to Java was in dissarray. It had a crap relationship with SUN and the constant lingering ANTITRUST threat (of which SUN was part of).

From a business perspective the safest route I can see is to dump JAVA (which was allowable per the agreement) and favor someone else or an internal product. Continue to ship the version on hand until the agreement runs out or it becomes so outdated as to be useless and eventually drop it all together.

Now from a business perspective on SUNs part I would see it this way. MS doesn't choose a the license option right away. The JVM it is shipping will become useless and discarded. I need to find a way to get the latest JVM into the peoples hands. Partner, partner, partner... hmmmmm... who could I partner with? How do I get the JVM out there without using MS? How do I solidify my market and revenue stream?

Four years later MS has a competing product. Java has moved very little on the client side and still has not found a reliable easy way or a good partner for getting Java into the consumers hands.

Is this MS's fault or simply poor business decisions on SUN's part?

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

yay!

[greymond]

one less thing i need to install when i reinstall Windows whatever their new version of windows is :) - as well as one more thing that works really well, that M$ can make NOT work really well - thanks to redmond engineering :)

"Secondly, I don't think that the judge's . . .

[kfg]

. . . mention of Tonya Harding helps"

Actually, I think if you "apropos" Microsoft you get refered to man Tonya Harding.

Looks like just a factual reference to me.

KFG

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

What would be more intelligent...

[Anonymous Coward]

... is to prevent Microsoft from bundling the .NET runtime with Windows, not forcing them to include the Java runtime. Preventing questionable behavior is less evil than forcing you to sell your competitor's products for them. The latter violates the very point of free market competition while the former only serves to level the playing field.

Another thing to note: The .NET runtime is a 20MB download. How big is the Java runtime? (Seriously, I don't know because I believe it varies from JVM to JVM) If Java is much smaller, then Microsoft would indeed have things to worry about if they were deprive of bundling rights.

You've got it wrong...

[bubbha]

It was their previous action that caused Microsoft to stop shipping the Java VM.

Sorry, that's not what the judge found as fact. The Judge ruled that Microsoft intentionally broke the platform-independence of Java in violation of their agreement and FORCED Sun into having to restrict Microsoft from receiving future versions in order to protect it's cross-platform nature. Further, the judge ruled that he would not allow Microsoft to then turn around and say (as you have in your post) that Sun caused Microsoft to not be able to provide up-to-date JRE.

Microsoft have a very strong case that Sun suffers no harm if the status quo continues and that they would suffer substantial harm. Java is active code and active code has historically been subject to lots of security risks - including Java.

Wrong again. The judge ruled that Microsoft uses other third party software vendors and the support and security risks with Java is similar to the support and security risks that Microsoft takes on with these other vendors.

It may be the US way for failing companies to go to the government or courts to try to win there what they failled to win in the market but it didn;t

This statement is just plain bizzare. Microsoft is seems to be terrified of stacking their products up against the competition and resorts to criminal behavior rather than the free market to succeed in business. This appears to be, as you put it, the "US way" (Enron, Worldcom, etc.)

You mean Jython?

[mwa]

How about somebody write a Python installer in Java? Let's get something genuinely useful out of this

Jythons an implementation of the high-level, dynamic, object-oriented language Python written in 100% Pure Java, and seamlessly integrated with the Java platform. It thus allows you to run Python on any Java platform.

Re:You mean Jython?

[Daniel Phillips]

"How about somebody write a Python installer in Java? Let's get something genuinely useful out of this"

Jython [jython.org]s an implementation of the high-level, dynamic, object-oriented language Python written in 100% Pure Java, and seamlessly integrated with the Java platform. It thus allows you to run Python on any Java platform.

Right, I know about that one but I haven't checked how well it works. I was thinking more along the lines of having a small Java program install something a complete Python platform that then runs independently of the Java Platform. There are a few reasons for wanting this, not the least of which is that the Python tool chain is completely open. Strange as it may seem, I'm also interest in Python for performance reasons, ever since I tried this Python specializing compiler. Before that I had my doubts about python, because I'd measured slowdowns of up to several hundred times vs optimized C. Now, with this work by Armin Rigo I feel Python is really looking like the tool that can do it all, as much as any tool can. With a fraction of the time and money put into it, Python+Psyco is now running within striking distance of Hotspot, which is in itself an impressive performer.

So I'd like to see a seamless way for the whole Python toolchain to be installed and then to operate independently of Java, and as I see it, Java is exactly the tool that can automate that, i.e., user sees |"Get Python" button, user clicks, user gets Python, user no longer needs Java for Python-scripted pages.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

microsoft is not a monopoly

[zelphi]

Listen to yourselves!

If Microsoft were a monopoly, you guys wouldn't be able to post to Slashdot using Linux. If Microsoft were a monopoly, apple wouldn't be able to sell OSX. If Microsoft were a monopoly, you wouldn't be able to buy machines without Windows installed.

A monopoly is defined as "A company or group having exclusive control over a commercial activity."

Microsoft may control a vast portion of the market, but they're no monopoly. Otherwise, there would be no competition (and therefore no linux).

I'm sure many a fanatic will mod this down.

Re:microsoft is not a monopoly

[zelphi]

Parent: Moderation Totals: Flamebait=1, Total=1. Yeah, I assumed no one around here had balls.

Re:microsoft is not a monopoly

[Anonymous Coward]

I'd mod it up if I had the points...

Re:microsoft is not a monopoly

[saddino]

You're confusing a dictionary term with a legal term. Legally, Microsoft has been found to have a monopoly -- this is not in dispute. So, yes, Microsoft is a monopoly, even though Linux, OS X, etc. are available to consumers. That may irk you, but it is indeed a fact.

Furthermore, having a monopoly in and of itself is not illegal. But leveraging that monopoly to adversely affect your competitors -- as Microsoft did with using its OEM licenses -- is illegal.

Remember that the findings of fact in the antitrust case survived on appeal. The question is no longer whether Microsoft is a monopoly, or whether it was anticompetitive. The question is what should be done about it.

Re:microsoft is not a monopoly

[Anonymous Coward]

I do and your a dipshit M$ troll. When your done jerking off Bill Gates I'll kick your ass.

Re:microsoft is not a monopoly

[zelphi]

I'll give you that, but you seem to be saying that ie, after the Dred Scott decision, I couldn't say that the a slave was a person legally.

I'm saying the law was interpreted incorrectly, just like in the Dred Scott decision.

What world are you living in?

[GunFodder]

Sun isn't very popular on the client because there is no consistency in the client-side VM. Gee, do you think Microsoft had anything to do with that?

I doubt that a consistent client JVM would seriously degrade the security of a product that already has weekly security patch releases.

And last time I checked Sun still does more than twice as much business as Apple. But since they don't sell desk lamps to starfuckers they don't get the same kind of press.

Re:What world are you living in?

[Zeinfeld]

Sun isn't very popular on the client because there is no consistency in the client-side VM. Gee, do you think Microsoft had anything to do with that?

Java isn't very popular on the client because the idea is stupid. It is only marginally more useful than VRML.

I have yet to see a java applet that does something that would not have been done better in HTML or need not have been done at all. I mean just how interesting is it to have a dancing java bean on your web page???

And last time I checked Sun still does more than twice as much business as Apple.

Who ships more boxes? At the end of the day it is the number of boxes you ship not the price per box that matters. The price per box will inevitably fall over time.

DEAD HORSE BEATS YOU

[Anonymous Coward]

The russia joke posted right after yours was funnier.

to the naysayers...

[MegaFur]

<rant>
For all of the "Microsoft apologists" proclaiming that this ruling unfairly punishes M$ and to all of you saying that this treatment would not be accepted if it were applied to some other company: you're right.
However, There's one itty, bitty, teensy, weensy thing you seem to be forgetting...

Microsoft is a

MONOPOLY!

If you don't know what that means, LOOK IT UP! Among other things, it implies that M$ is not entitled to the same treatment or protections as other corporations, nor should it be. To try and say, "M$ is just another corporation" is insane. Please, if you're going to argue against this ruling, find something else as a basis.
</rant>

P.S. If you don't understand why a monopoly deserves special treatment, you should study your history books more closely.,

Re:to the naysayers...

[neonprimetime]

Yeah, I totally agree, and I'd be willing to buy ya all a history book, but M$ took all my money...

Guess you'll have to get it yourself...

Re:(Another) American Revolution

[Anonymous Coward]

From what I understand, Sun holds some patents on the Java environment. Thus, if IBM is making a lot of money off of Java, Sun very well might be making patent licensing fees. Sun writes the Java API and a reference platform. IBM writes their own fast JVM from the spec.

Bullshit

[rsborg]

sun said "F$%k you" basically and refused to license it"

You got a link to back up your "facts"?

Re:Bullshit

[Lurker_2k]

Yeah actually, I posted a few.

You should really learn to use this nifty tool called "The World Wide Web" it has all sorts of great articles. If that fails, there's a thing called a "library" you can find old magazine articles there and books about law!

There's a nice search tool called Google that can help you search the web, in a library you can ask one of the librarians.

to an extent...

[pb]

I guess my point is, I would like to have a web browser on my system, and let's say that I use Internet Explorer on Windows for that (I don't, but that's beside the point...). Now let's also say that I would like to have an e-mail client on my system, but I specifically don't want Outlook Express (or anything with the word "Outlook" in it) on my system. Now the problem presents itself...

And actually, I wish that all of the 'functionality' that (only) Outlook Express exploits could be removed as well, to enhance system security. I agree with you that it's nice to have handy libraries to automate common tasks. But I don't want to have these ones, because one common task I don't want to automate is the macro virus.

So as long as glibc doesn't add that added, handy macro virus functionality, I should be fine. Windows users should still be careful, however.

Re:to an extent...

[RKBA]

M$ itself has a "Knowledge Base Article - 256219" on their web pages that describes how to uninstall Outlook Express.

Re:to an extent...

[Zathrus]

Well, I do use IE on Windows, and I don't use Outlook/OE... at least not at home. Never had a problem with system security as far as Outlook/OE is concerned because I simply don't run them.

Yes, I know, someone else could run it (my wife doesn't use it at home either), and it's still installed and eating "valuable" disk space (er yeah with 70+ gigs free...), but realistically those aren't concerns.

As for being careful - that's the watchword, and not just for Windows users. Yes, I am a Unix developer.

Versus

[Anonymous Coward]

not true... How about Quicktime vs. Windowsmedia who's winning. ActiveX failed miserably and it was the closest clear competitor to Java Applets. (well Java Applets pretty much failed miserably too). How about PowerPoint, a fairly signficant amount of machines come with it or get it later due to MS's office software, the viewer is free yet PDF is IT for portable documents. Flash seems to do pretty well and it's not installed by default. In fact Flash seems to be flourishing even though MS touted their technologies (HTC, VML, JScript) could do much the same things (all part of the OS).

Monopoly presence does not always and need not render a competing product irrelevant. It's not a forgone conclusion. The problem comes when companies rest on their laurals and/or throw their hands up in the air and concede defeat because there's "nothing we can do".

MS has a monopoly of the desktop and yet look at the broad range of desktop focused competitors crawling out of the wood work to compete.

The unfortunate thing is that MS's competitors should have caught up with and superceded any product that MS has right now, and yet they haven't. Usability is still a major problem working against any of MS's main competitors and accessibility is a close second (then there's portability between machines).

Linux used to boast speed, being lightweight, running on a 386sx25 with 8megs of ram. Now the closer that the kernel and the wm's get to emulating the good parts of Windows the closer they get to the bloated requirements everyone gripes about. People gripe about reproducing windows functionality and why can't someone inovate. Here's an idea Windows works, just like Mac just works, the UI ideas are pretty simple - recreate them but make them run faster. Fix the ones that are counterintuitive. Introduce new ones where needed but DON'T abandon an idea just because MS does it and you hate MS. That's being a dumbass. Innovation is really about taking something that people look at everyday and changing it to work better than people thought it could.

Too many of these companies would rather sue than to take a step back and look at their own shit practices and reform themselves. They'd rather gripe about who did them wrong then find how they did themselves wrong.

Sun is a prime example - crap hardware - crap support - they create a simple easy to learn cross platform programming language but fail to sell a good development tool for it. They loose money because they can't stop inspecting their own cavernous rectal cavity. And as others attempt to reinvent/repackage/redefine what they do Sun cries FOUL, as if they didn't see it coming and had no ability to react.

Is this the culmination of American ingenuity... SUN! Whining, extortionist, temper tantrum, bribing, lying, cheating, and lazy. If I performed a job like Sun does, I'd be fired. Hell I'd be unemployable. If every time I fucked up I pointed the finger at someone in Accounting or some CSA and blamed them for my poor choices - I wouldn't be working long.

But it will get dismissed. Everyone will hop on and say "MS SHILL" or some such bullshit and disregard that WE need to hold ALL of these corporations to the same standard and measure. As a shareholder I would be asking right now why didn't SUN get Java packaged with the OS a few years ago when they had MS over the ropes the first time.

You had an advantage then and you blew it. Even after blowing it you could have bounced back with some marketing and an easy to reach download site for your plugin (see Macromedia and Adobe and Quicktime) and filled the gap. You blew it again. You could have made deals with the OEM's - blew it. You could have encouraged the developer community to get involved and put up buttons to the JVM download - blew it. Then when MS announced to the world it was removing the tired ass 1.1 JVM you could have easily used the announcement as a stepping stone to push your much more compliant and faster JVM - you blew it.

All that came out of all those chances was complaint after complaint after complaint. No business decisions helped further Java on the client, no community support was created only community fear and anger. It's businesses like these that go under QUICKLY even with good products and things that can be sold.

Re:Versus

[Anonymous Coward]

If you need quicktime MSIE will "help" you to install it. Even though its not a MS product. Same as Macromedia Flash, its often bundled with IE (not installed by default, but its on windowsupdate.com) and pops up a dialog saying "hey, do you want to install flash".

Both instances there MS helps the user to install the official product. In the case of JAVA however, if nothing is installed MS says "hey, do you want to install microsoft java?", no option to install the official Sun Java VM or even a hint to the novice user that anything other than MS Java exists.

Microsoft aids the user in installing many non microsoft browser plugins, but for Java they help the user to install their own broken incompatable version.

As for your comment "windows works", windows doesnt work. Thats why the most expensive tech support shops are MS support shops. Windows is popular, documents are 95% guarenteed to be readable by whoever you email them too - staff wont have to be trained because they use windows at home. You're right in the fact that the Mac just works, its not very intuitive for a windows user, but great for a computer novice.Given 30 mins of basic training and a week or two to experiment everyone can work a Mac. It takes much longer to learn even the basics of windows (when did you first use windows? You've been learning since then!) and even longer for linux (*insert pro geek linux quote here*).

Linux vs. Windows, any linux geek knows that the desktop alternatives are only entering adolesence, and that to get the 95% of "dumb masses" to even consider the linux desktop it has to function at least somehow like the windows user expects.

The easy to reach download sites for plugins are easy to reach because microsoft made them so.

We dont need to hold these corporations to the same standard and measure because Microsoft has a monopoly. There are *many* things that other companys can do, but should Microsoft do them they are abusing their monopoly position.

eg. Pizza, Sun sell Hawiian as Ham, Pinapple and Cheese - and license the recipie to Microsoft. Microsoft then adds onion and mushroom by default... most customers will be annoyed when their non-microsoft pizzas come sans onion and mushroom, and their tastebuds arent compatible.

*redhat sux! LFS ROOLEZ UR MOM

[Anonymous Coward]

"It takes brains not to make money," Colonel Cargill wrote in one of the homiletic memoranda he regularly prepared for circulation over General Peckem's Signature. "Any fool can make money these days and most of them do. But what about people with talent and brains? Name, for example, one poet who makes money."
"T.S. Eliot," ex-P.F.C. Wintergreen said in his mail-sorting cubicle at Twenty-seventh Air Force Headquarters, and slammed down the telephone without identifying himself.
Colonel Cargill, in Rome, was perplexed.
"Who was it?" asked General Peckem.
"I don't know," Colonel Cargill replied.
"What did he want?"
"I don't know."
"Well, what did he say?"
"'T.S. Eliot,'" Colonel Cargill informed him.
"What's that?"
"'T.S. Eliot,'" Colonel Cargill repeated.
"Just 'T.S--'"
"Yes, sir. That's all he said. Just 'T.S. Eliot.'"
"I wonder what it means," General Peckem reflected.
Colonel Cargill wondered, too.
"T.S. Eliot," General Peckem mused.
"T.S. Eliot," Colonel Cargill echoed with the same funereal puzzlement.
General Peckem roused himself after a moment with an unctuous and benignant smile. His expression was shrewd and sophisticated. His eyes gleamed maliciously. "Have someone get me General Dreedle." he requested Colonel Cargill.
"Don't let him know who's calling."
Colonel Cargill handed him the phone.
"T.S. Eliot," General Peckem said, and hung up.
"Who was it?" asked Colonel Moodus.
General Dreedle brooded in ponderous speculation over the cryptic message he had just received. Slowly his face softened with an idea, and he curled his lips with wicked pleasure.
"Get Peckem," he told Colonel Moodus.
"Dont't let the bastard know who's calling."
"Who was it?" asked Colonel Cargill, back in Rome.
"That same person," General Peckem replied with a definite trace of alarm. "Now he's after me."
"What did he want?"
"I don't know."
"What did he say?"
"The same thing."
"'T.S. Eliot'?"
"Yes, 'T.S. Eliot.' That's all he said."
"Perhaps it's a new code or something, like the colors of the day. Why don't you have someone check with Communications and see if it's a new code or something or the colors of the day?"

just one simple question

[b17bmbr]

what the fuck is .NET? is a runtime, a platform, a toolkit, an API set, desert topping, or a floor polish? i don't think you can compare .NET and java. java is a specific language that includes a specific runtime interpreter, a specific UI kit, and specific API's. microsoft has been obfuscative with .NET. nobody i think knows exactly what it is. i guess that makes it a harder target?

Here's a riddle

[Anonymous Coward]

What do a motherboard, Saturn, a nut, Bill Gates, and an Atari joystick have in common?

They are all icons complete idiots see every day as they post complete bullshit.

Re: It's not optional - it's pollution

[phamlen]

For those who haven't read the judge's decision, it's definitely worth reading (as mentioned in another comment, it's online here. )

3) MS adds extensions for Windows only development, which are optional to developers depending on their target market (HINT: Apple has Cocoa extensions in Java......samething......they are optional)

Actually, the issue is that Microsoft was intentionally attempting to propagate a non-standard version of Java in order to kill it off. As emails from Microsoft state, their strategy was to:

"Kill cross-platform Java by grow[ing] the polluted Java
market." Microsoft, 253 F.3d at 76-77 (quoting Government Ex. 259).

The key issue is that Microsoft was deliberately trying to kill off Java using their OS monopoly to distribute a polluted version of Java and thereby fragment the Java market (as indicated by internal documents brought up in the court case.)

dumb developers....

[telstar]

"a developer might be writing what he thought was standard Java, when in fact non-standard"

• Maybe the developers should have known better. Developing isn't just manual labor. In theory, you've got to keep up with what you're actually doing when you press those little labeled buttons in front of you.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

bring up the solution guys !

[shankariyer]

I don't get this.

Everybody hates MS, but supports their OS.
MS screws up Java by giving a useless VM.
They needed Java when they want to've lead over Netscape.
They don't need it, when they had the lead( that's fine. Sun has to find its own way, not "hitch-hiking". They found a way.)
Then MS shouldn't have signed the contract. But they did.
MS breaks the contract, well, pay the penalty.
MS comes back, saying the 'great' OS XP won't include Java.
MS reverses the decision. WHY ?????

MS foresee's trouble. 1st let them explain as why they decided to NOT include Java and more than that why they DECIDED to include it.

So the point here, as and when they see some legal trouble, they'll change their tune, great.

Then, most among say, MS is a monopoly. But the judgement is wrong.

Come on guys, we accept and hate MS as a monopoly, but don't want Sun's Java to enforced, then what do we expect from MS. Go door-to-door and sing as how great Java is ! That ain't going to happen.

If you don't follow the law, it has to be enforced.

Then the questions here is how can it be done. Well, you screwed up Java, pay for it.

I don't think Judge Motz had a scewed view of the whole battle. This decision takes the whole arena of issues between these 2 technologies.

If they're going to shut down Java, Netscape and enforce IE, tomorrow they'll come and say "well, the next 'greatest' version of XP or YP or ZP, won't support any of the hardware on the market out there, but you can buy anything you want from MS processor, MS mother board, MS sound card etc. etc.( keep in mind they already are there in the market with network hardware )

I think that day is not far, when we start seeing MS machines in Costco, Wal-mart & Amazon.

Judege Koleen had one good observation, in the case of MS against 9 states.

Don't stop short of giving a solution to the problem. When you've the vigour to explain as what harm has been done, explain me the solution, you propose. Same problem in this case too.

Sun accuses MS to be a monopoly. Sun wasn't able to convince Judge Motz that it had incured full harm. So there is one small pocket of oxygen for MS.

Then for Judge Motz, what options are left. Well, he feels and accepts that MS is a monopoly but Sun's claim( even though its not sufficiently substantiaced ) to stop it is to enforce it on their OS. Ok, fine, there you go. That's where we're now.

But as far as other products Netscape or Mozilla, it should be a fight that they've carry themselves. Sun can't be given sweeping powers to fight for others. Afterall, what right do they've to tone others.

The only way you can stop a monopoly is to have a stellar product. I'm not fan of MS either, but what good options you've in the market. Linux - I agree, Mozilla - I agree, Java - 75% I agree. But how many of the end-user components are supported using these, "compared" to MS'. Few if not none. So in a monopolistic market, he who shouts the lie 10 time, makes it truth. The only way to shut his mouth is put a scotch-tape and say, you should've this tape for this time. That's what's happening.

In MS's favor?

[InnovATIONS]

This to me seems like one of those 'losses' that is really a win.

The remedy essentially costs MS nothing. They were going to be burning the CD's anyway. I am sure that there were a few extra bytes available on them.

It means that MS can skip trying to make a good JVM and put those resources elsewhere and nobody will have cause to complain.

If the JVM for Windows is buggy or slow it is Sun that catches the flak, not MS. Nobody can claim (as it is essentially was done in the suit) that MS is intentionally making the JVM bad because it is no longer Microsoft's JVM. On the other hand MS will no longer have to worry about having to jump through hoops when Sun ammends the Java Specification.

If then Microsoft makes their .NET clr run rings around Sun's JVM then it will be a matter of the products winning on their own merits, not a matter of MS putting more resources to one than the other. And frankly the odds are pretty good that MS could outprogram Sun. Dislike their business practices all you want but the programmers there are a fairly sharp bunch.

Re:In MS's favor?

[Dyolf Knip]

Do you have any idea how grateful some of are that MS is actually going to give up on embracing and extending something? More often than not they screw it up, much to the detriment of people who have to actually use it. Java, SMB, and Kerberos come readily to mind. They were certainly willing to try with TCP/IP/

If then Microsoft makes their .NET clr run rings around Sun's JVM then it will be a matter of the products winning on their own merits, not a matter of MS putting more resources to one than the other

Perfectly fine. That's all we really want, anyway. It's the constant dirty and underhanded business tactics that fuck up what shreds of compatability exist whilst bitching and moaning about protecting their own IP that really pisses everyone off.

Dislike their business practices all you want but the programmers there are a fairly sharp bunch.

Very likely. But remember that actual coders are usually pretty far down on the totem pole. If management says "make a broken version of this protocol which is already in use everywhere" or "put in annoying features that do nothing but irritate users", then it gets done regardless of what mere programmers want.

Correcting history...

[sheldon]

Actually you have your history all confused.

It was ALCOA who had the monopoly, not on mines but on smelting process and technology. They knew how to produce aluminum cheaper than their competitors. After WWII the US government sold plants that ALCOA had helped build, but they prevented Alcoa from bidding, they ended up going to Reynolds and Kaiser for pennies on the dollar.

There was also a lot of political wrangling, Alcoa had their initial case overturned on appeal, but then they lost again. Alcoa is still fighting off anti-trust issues to this day, some 60 years later. Back in like '99 they were going to buy a can making plant from Reynolds but it was blocked by the DOJ.

Of all the various anti-trust cases in the past, the ALCOA one has the most parallels to the Microsoft case.

Re:Correcting history...

[b17bmbr]

you're right. i got alcoa and reynolds backwards. but the principle stil applies.

..was the 17,232th person ...

[Loosetrash]

Should be: ...was the 17,232nd person...
For all you copy editors out there.

Java has had its chance

[jeti]

Java has been on the market for nearly 9 years. It was hyped, lots of money went into it. Java ports of a lot of a lot of major applications were announced. None of these were released as a final version. Java has found a nieche on some servers, but hardly anyone uses it on the desktop.

Do we have to blame MS for that? Or is it remotely possible that Sun has screwed on the tech side?

After more than 8 years Java 1.4 sped up Java GUIs to a decent speed. But startup times and memory consumption are still horrible on the desktop (Sun failed to implement memory sharing). And there isn't a clean way to terminate threads from the outside.

Personally, I'm convinced that it's not MS that is to blame for the lack of popular applications that bundle a JRE.

Jeez, SUFFIXES!

[KanSer]

The suffix for second is 'nd' not 'th'. Woops.

Only Scott's ego will benefit

[ClosedSource]

Well, I hope this injunction (if it stands, which I doubt) satisfies Scott McNealy's ego because it won't help Java and it won't help Sun's bottom line.

The problem with crafting an invalid argument to fight MS is that a judge might believe it and give you a remedy that is equally flawed. Since MS is not at fault for Java's problems, making them carry Sun's version won't change anything.

Go get them!

[miffo.swe]

This: http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/59/28677.html

They are still at their best shoddy practises. I say sue them into limbo for whatever stunt they pull. Microsoft have shown us time and time again that they themselves doesnt believe in their own offerings since they go to such great lenght to artificially stifle all and every sign of competition.

If Microsoft doesnt think their products is worth a rats ass, why should we?

Im totally "Anything But Microsoft" and my decision seems better and better each day.

Just read it.

[Anonymous Coward]

To Microsoft:

Neener.

Main point - IE must install Java Plugin

[SuperKendall]

After reading the judges decision from the PDF helpfully linked elsewhere, I found what I was looking for - the judge does not just generically demand that any .Net implmentation must also ship with Java, but also that in particular IE must ship with the Java Plug-In and Windows Update must notify MS users of Java to make it availiable for install.

That is huge. If the Java plug-in really is everywhere, it might well help stamp out crappy java programs everywhere that are forced to run in the shadowland between IE's VM and all others. It means that with a modern Java VM everywhere, you really might be able to develop and distriibute a nice Java application for web distribution much easier. Corperate developers do not have to weigh the choice between a good UI and features with a lengthy plugin download vs. just making do with a very limited interface, either AWT or pure HTML/DHTML.

Although this has nothing to do with my main point, I really liked this quote from the judge:

If, as Microsoft asserts, the granting of preliminary relief is extraordinary, the short answer is that extraordinary circumstances require extraordinary remedies.

Another very interesting point the judge makes is that (and this is the exact wording from the descision):

"Sun has no control over the JCP"

All of you out there who keep claiming Sun controls Java ponder that. The injunction would have Sun provide MS a VM to ship along with .Net (sorry for the buzzword bingo there), but that VM must pass tests from the JCP to insure the distrubited VM is valid (de-facto standard) java!!! (my own wording there). Repeat after me - the JCP defines what Java is, and sun does not control the JCP. Sorry for repeating that, but I thought it would be helpful as few seem to believe it and perhaps having a federal judge pointing it out to them will help. Responses arguing against this point will have to study the workings of the JCP and then provide specific examples of how sun "controls" the JCP or they will be ingored.

This is also a judge that knows what he is talking about, just reading the document he issued supporting the injunction provided a number of points that no poster here has managed to make in the course of 500+ comments, and also addressed a number of the arguments against the injunction that posters here have raised. After reading the PDF about 499 of the 500+ posts could probably be removed without any overall loss of content.

Re:Main point - IE must install Java Plugin

[ClosedSource]

Yes, I'm sure that this judge knows more about programming then most of us here. After all we know more about law then he does, right?

Re:Main point - IE must install Java Plugin

[Anonymous Coward]

Judges, generally are brilliant people.

Programming is not rocket science.

I learned all of my first University Computer science course in the half hour before the first
lecture. (Amazingly I read the documentation!)

I have coasted ever since, for 25 years, while learning 100 times as much trivial-but-archane knowledge.

However, I am probably not as brilliant as a Federal Court judge.

What makes you think that he would need to take much more than an hour, given good documentation, to learn the essentials for this case?

He has good law clerks that surely know their stuff, including "ours".

You arrogance that a group of computer hacks do, and will forever, know some fantastic measure of archane knowledge re Java better than anyone else can, with all of the resources of the Federal Court system, is astounding.

Java, and how it technically works, is not-a-big-deal. Its brilliance is in its standardization, portability (especially now to come), and its efficiency in being able to run an interpreted language fast enough on current hardware to not be considered an unacceptable resource hog.

Re:Main point - IE must install Java Plugin

[Anonymous Coward]

He is also requiring to ensure that the "most current" SUN JVM is "enabled by default".

Nice: all older and non-SUN JVM get nuked.

Re:Main point - IE must install Java Plugin

[ClosedSource]

I guess you failed to see any humor in my comment.

I'm sure that most Federal Court judges are quite smart but if you are arguing that they understand these issues better than we do I don't buy it. Likewise, although many Slashdot posters act like they are experts on the law, even a mediocre judge probably understands it a lot better.

As for your 25 year coast, sorry you didn't learn anything important. Perhaps your company should replace you with a cheaper new grad since you value your experience so little.

Hairston you prick!

[Anonymous Coward]

You're nothing more than a Microsoft-boot-licking shill, wasting our money, and everyone in this county knows it. When you're not passing over perfectly good and cheap to maintain Macs in favor of craptastic PCs, you're giving your old business cronies overpriced contracts to make them all richer.

We're just biding our time til we can convince the school board to oust your stupid fat ass.

Goodness knows it's poppycock when a judge enforces a legal contract that an illegal monopoly broke! GOODNESS!! BREAK OUT THE AIRBAGS!

Unfortunately

[Anonymous Coward]

If this person is who he insinuates he is, he is our county school board superintendent. He oversees the K-12 public schools so I'm not sure why it says CCBC.

He made his fame in the south using free student labor to 'rehabilitate' PCs running... take a guess! He's replacing plenty of good and cheap to maintain Macs in our school district with extremely fragile and confusing-to-teachers PCs running... take a guess!

But what is the point exactly?

[slantyyz]

I'm not siding with Microsoft per se, but what is the point of including the Sun JVM with Windows?

I don't think the masses are buying Windows to write their own Java programs, are they? The main benefit to the average user to have the Sun JVM would be what? To run some ugly Java applet? Don't even get me started on Swing applications.

Regarding Netscape, I would argue that this was Netscape's downfall as well. (Everyone knows how big a piece of crap IE3 was, and everyone knows how big a piece of crap Netscape 4 was. Netscape 4 was Netscape's downfall. Coming out with a competent browser now isn't enough to break the multiyear stranglehold given to Microsoft by Netscape 4.) In the earlier days of the browser wars, people were smart enough to pick the browser that did a better job. Today? I don't know.

Let's be realistic - most users don't need or care about Sun's JVM at this point in time.

In the grand scheme of things, I think most end users have more need for the Macromedia Flash plugin than the Sun JVM. Of course, The Register has a story talking about Microsoft making a hostile bid for Macromedia.

Ultimately, forcing Microsoft to add Java to Windows accomplishes little, since Joe Average won't be impacted in any meaningful way. This is as empty a moral victory as Sun can possibly have. And for the users who actually use Java, it will probably end up being more of an inconvenience, as they'll be upgrading to a more recent version of the VM anyways.

Re:But what is the point exactly?

[amolweb]

Here's the story so far:
Sometime ago Sun had a great idea to reduce MS dominance (or so they thought) by introducing java. MS saw thru it and acted to protect their interest. Sun didnt' like it and so what better than to file a lawsuit (cry and cry till you succeed).

Nothing wrong with it so far until enters some #$#@ judge who probably forgets that he is a judge in a lawsuit and pretends more like a superhero out to save the world from the evil influence(sic) of ... 'no java'. duh.

If Sun is so keen on getting Java to work on Windows, why don't they employ some programmers to do that instead of getting it done from MS programmers? It is that they don't have enuf good programmers in Sun or is it that those that are there are not good enuf? I had heard that Sun was not doing too well (outside the court, in the 'software business'). But this I had never imagined.

Ruling affects White House, too

[Anonymous Coward]

Apparently, the ruling also requires Bush to submit to brain surgery. Something about two lobes being better than none.

They didn't violate the contract...

[Otis_INF]

They just implemented some specs differently: COM components were possible and some interfaces were developed using native code. (the things Sun does too in the JVM for Solaris). Sun dit sue, won, and in the end, MS was ordered by a settlement to stop producing an own JVM and they had a limit amount of time (7 years) to keep distributing the JVM they had. (which is still distributed). Sun wanted that, but figured out that in the end the settlement wasn't very positive for Sun so they sued again with this ruling as a result. Did Sun win? No. All they will achieve is more hate among MS developers towards everything that's ever touched by Sun. More and more developers who produce software for MS-related platforms (.net/win32) will turn their back agains Sun.

After I've read the ruling, I've removed all JVM's from my machines, disabled Java whereever I could. I'll never ever do business with Sun nor using sun-related techniques. And with Mono around the corner I don't have to either.

_THAT_'s the true 'win' Sun will get and of course I'm just a lonely geek behind a keyboard ;) but I'm sure I'm not alone in this. Sun's whining in court is starting to get pathetic and it definitely hurts the already bad image of IT/software development in general.

Re:They didn't violate the contract...

[3030]

Hmm, I wish I had the liberty to remove all Microsoft products from my computer and still be capable of doing what I normally do. Hrm. wait a minute, oh, I guess I wouldn't be able to play alot of games then.... And if Sun's whining is so bad, then what about Microsoft's purchase of the DOJ? How do you think that affects the image of software developers?

Re:They didn't violate the contract...

[toriver]

They just implemented some specs differently: COM components were possible and some interfaces were developed using native code. (the things Sun does too in the JVM for Solaris).

A vast over-simplification. Granted, Sun were slow in specifying JNI so that both Netscape and Microsoft created their own APIs for "native". But Microsoft waited longer than 6 months with implementing JNI, which was a violation of contract.

Also, they added two unofficial keywords, plus made changes to classes in the "java" package hierarchies; if you tried to run code compiled with Visual J++ 1.1 on a Sun or IBM VM, it could fail because of this.

Injecting a little accuracy

[LinuxGeek]

Sun is saying lots of things, that does not make them true.

Zeinfeld says a lot of things, that does not make them true.

Sun is the DEC of the 2000s. Its hardware business is stagnant and its software business has no real connection to the hardware. ...However they spend 65% of their time whining about Microsoft.

Sun is #1 in UNIX sales , Sun sells a huge array of software, all of which runs on their hardware. I have to say you are completely wrong on this point unless you can point us to something besides your statement. Where do you get the %65 figure?

I doubt that it will come to that as Microsoft will certainly appeal and the chances of blocking the temporary injunction are pretty good, they can win simply by spinning out the appeal.

So the more mature technology can be squashed just by just playing the waiting game? I agree with the judge: Motz wrote that if Microsoft's system was to remain dominant, "it should be because of .NET's superior qualities, not because Microsoft leveraged its PC monopoly to create market conditions in which it is unfairly advantaged."

Java on the client is a pretty wierd idea. Very few sites have ever used Java. I don't think we will suddenly see a rush to switch from flash to Java on the basis...

So weird of an idea that it scared the crap out of MS, the whole make the OS irrelevant thing you may have missed. Hmmm.. I have seen Java applets and full applications on many sites. Please point us to something supporting your 'very few sites' contention. If you think that Flash is the main competitor for Java, then, well, your opinion weighs very little.

Most rabid MS supporters want to ignore that MS was found to be a monopoly in Jude Jackson's findings of fact. MS appealed the judges decision for break up based upon those findings of fact, but the FoF stand as does the monopoly declaration. That means that MS has a different set of rules they must adhere to now because of their dominance in several different markets.

This will only extend the 'holy wars'... :(

[Otis_INF]

There is already not a friendly atmosphere between .NET developers and Java developers when it comes to their technologies and this ruling will not be a startingpoint to open the minds and work together instead of against each other. I already moved away from sun 8 years ago and now I've decided throughout my company no-one should have java on their machines nor work with sun-related material. Why? Because I've had it with Sun. Totally. Java might be a nice platform, I don't care anymore. I also don't have to, .NET is also extremely nice and with Mono around the corner, my software will also run on Linux and other platforms Mono is ported to.

I'm all for fair competition, but this ruling is insane. What's next? RealPlayer bundled with XP because it's crushed by the unfair competition of WMP, which is bundled with XP? Apple Quicktime too? I surely hope not! I mention these two allthough MS hasn't signed a contract whatsoever with Apple nor Real Networks about distributing them, because Sun has settled a lawsuit with MS years ago (1997) so that MS was forced to stop distributing the latest java and had the option to distribute java in the last known good state for 7 more years (but there wasn't an option which forced MS to do so for 7 more years). So legally: MS didn't had the obligation to distribute java, it was Sun's wish, well, what's the saying? "Be careful what you wish for, you just might get it" ?

If I may add: the first lawsuit of Sun against MS about Java truely hurted developers on windows: after the lawsuit they weren't able to develop COM objects running in native code using Java, but had to fall back to VB for ease of use or to C++ which requires more in depth knowledge of COM to produce COM objects. If Sun hadn't sued MS for that, I'm pretty sure we wouldn't have had .NET today, but everyone on Windows was developing in Java for COM objects. Ah well...

Re:This will only extend the 'holy wars'... :(

[el_chicano]

If I may add: the first lawsuit of Sun against MS about Java truely hurted developers on windows... If Sun hadn't sued MS for that, I'm pretty sure we wouldn't have had .NET today, but everyone on Windows was developing in Java for COM objects.

Whatever it is you are smoking I want some! Eventually MS would have gotten jealous of Sun's control of Java and it would have created it own version of the technology. Microsoft will never support its "enemies". Embrace, extend and sometime extinguish, yes, but not cooperation.

Microsoft's competitors need to keep pressing Microsoft to uphold its agreements with them. If Microsoft had not broken its agreements with Sun, Sun would have not been able to successfully file the lawsuits in the first place.

If the federal government is not willing to put some teeth into the punishment as far as the antitrust trial is concerned, private companies should go ahead and file private lawsuits to gain individual relief from Microsoft's illegal actions.

It's like people keep forgetting that Microsoft was convicted of breaking federal antitrust law. Microsoft must have one of those Monopoly the game "Get Out Of Jail" cards, a gift from the Republican White House.

I wonder how much one of those "Get Out Of Jail" cards costs? I'll bet it wasn't cheap...

right lawsuit, wrong remedy

[g4dget]

A partial analogy would be Microsoft owning the default Yellow Pages distributed to everyone's door and selecting who can be in it -- say, virtually everyone but "Sun."

Lots of people aren't included in Microsoft Windows distributions, and the ones that are presumably have committed to some serious contractual obligations. Why should Sun have it easier than everybody else?

The specific harm to Sun in this case is that Microsoft ships a broken version of Java, not that they fail to ship Sun's product for them.

If you don't think MS should have been sued in the first place, you will not believe any of these rationales, and probably not that antitrust is necessary in the first place.

Oh, I think Microsoft should have been sued, and I think there should be a remedy in this case and others. But the remedy is to require Microsoft to stop shipping their broken version of Java, not to force them to include Sun's. If Sun wants to get their version of Java into Windows, they can negotiate with Microsoft and computer manufacturers, and create compelling Java applications that end users will actually want to download.

In general, the best remedy for anti-trust problems is to create the conditions under which market forces can operate again. And that may mean breaking up the company or forcing it to unbundle its products. Forcing Microsoft to bundle Sun Java just replaces one company that forces software people with another company that forces software on people.

Re:right lawsuit, wrong remedy

[MacAndrew]

If MS had simply implemented Java right in the first place, this wouldn't even been an issue, right? I speculate the court did not trust them to do it right on their own, but of course I agree Microsoft should in principle be able to do it itself. Oops, I put principle and Microsoft in the same sentence.

Microsoft wants Java completely dead, or co-opted, right?

then unbundle Microsoft's middleware

[g4dget]

Then Microsoft should be required to unbundle their middleware. But forcing people to include Sun's middleware is not the right solution because it just increases the club of companies that can use coercion to get market share by one.

right problem, wrong solution

[g4dget]

Yes, what Microsoft is doing is bad. But the remedy is wrong.

First of all, unlike IE, .NET really, really is not a separate solution. Microsoft is going to be basing almost its entire operating system on it. That's actually a reasonable thing for them to do. It's not a competitor with Java in that sense.

Second, Java is just another proprietary solution, one that happens to come from Sun. Why should Sun get special treatment?

Third, both Sun and Netscape's products were more hype than reality. Netscape's browser lost in the market because it increasingly sucked compared to IE: it was slow, buggy, and failed to be standards compliant. It wasn't until Mozilla that it became competitive again. And what Sun has been doing with Java isn't exactly pretty either: Java has become bloated, and Sun has failed to deliver on numerous important promises. I used to be a strong supporter of Java, but Sun has been lying and failing to deliver for so long that I just have to say: don't touch Java. And I also have to say: don't touch .NET--it's still shrouded in legal uncertainty.

The correct remedy is to require Microsoft to stop shipping their broken version of Java and to stop exclusive distribution arrangements with PC vendors. But, ultimately, to actually get Java pre-installed on end user PCs, it is still Sun's responsibility to do the hard work of negotiating with PC vendors and creating attractive distributions for end users.

you don't understand

[g4dget]

It's only other big corporations with a lousy product and a large legal staff that get to force Microsoft to bundle their products.

In any case, it would have been entirely appropriate for the judge to order Microsoft to stop shipping MS "Java"--Microsoft was violating Sun's trademark and engaging in unfair business practices. But it was inappropriate for him to order Microsoft to ship Sun's software: Sun has to figure out how to do that just like other companies. And AOL shows that companies can successfully do that (AOL software is pretty much everywhere, despite the AOL/MSN competition).

Monopoly x2

[Anonymous Coward]

So instead of Microsoft software having a sole monopoly, this Sun gets exclusive rights to having it's java distributed? IBM's java is better anyway - if the object is to be fair and stuff, why force another commercial product? The whole thing is asinine.

Re:Monopoly x2

[J. Random Software]

How is IBM's JVM better on Win32? VisualAge for Java isn't even up to JDK 1.3 yet, and their Developer Kit for Windows seems to still be in beta.

And This Is Important How?

[ONOIML8]

In a story about any other company I could see this being an important story. And I could discussing it on /.

The court orders Microsoft to do a lot of things.

MICROSOFT DOESN'T DO THEM!

The court doesn't follow thru with anything directed at Microsoft. There is no enforcement, no actual punishment.

You wouldn't raise your kids this way. You wouldn't tolerate this kind of behavior from your neighbors. You would expect/demand that the courts stand behind what they say in any other case.

But this is not what happens with Microsoft.

So some lawyers and a judge got their chests all fluffed up and announced that Microsoft will carry java.

If you think that actually means that Microsoft will include java....well, I've got some great real estate deals for you.

Wake up people!

some nit picking

[CodeMunch]

JAVA is not a true competitor to ActiveX in the sense that Company M makes car X and Company N makes car Y.

JAVA: is 1 language, many runtimes for different platforms with different vendors.

COM/ActiveX: is 1 technology/standard (not language) that allows interoperability between code generated from different languages & compilers/linkers. You can use a COM/ActiveX DLL generated by Delphi with MSVC++.

Check out 1 p.14, The COM and COM+ Programming Primer by Alan Gordon, Copyright 2000 by Prentice Hall PTR, ISBN 0-13-085032-2 - A VERY good book for understanding the COM/ActiveX fun.

Java on the Desktop

[apuku]

There are a lot of posts in this thread that say, in effect, "nobody uses Java on the desktop, so who cares about this decision". Well, I'm a developer who uses Java on the desktop. Why? So that I can deliver cross-platform apps (Windows, Mac OS X, Linux, etc.) from the same codebase. So I can use Java Web Start to securely deliver those apps over the Internet. So that I can use a language that is (IMHO) better than C++. Sure there are a few things that I'd like to see improved in Java, but it's an excellent platform with some unique advantages. Unfortunately, Microsoft's smear campaign has been effective - many users erroneously think that Java is 'dead' or 'bad' or 'slow'.

It's evil, I tells ya! Eeeevil!

[JonathanF]

Eeek, when I checked on this article this morning it said that there were exactly 666 comments. For those of you who wanted proof that anything associated with Microsoft is evil incarnate...

Doh! The obviousity of it all!!

[xigxag]

So the question is, why didn't Sun long ago make a bundling deal with AOL to include the latest JVM with those ubiquitous coasters? Frankly the two would be a perfect match. AOL gets to claim their disk comes with a free bonus OS upgrade, and through AOL Sun reaches exactly those clueless users who can't figure out how to get their hands on an up-to-date version of Java if they want it.

Stupid courts, what next? Burger kings in Wendys?

[pcx]

Java really has no place in windows and it certainly sets a very dangerous precident IMHO. Windows is Windows, if I don't like it I can use Linux, or Solaris, or one of the other dozen operating systems.

While I appreciate the staggering power MS has because the vast majority of people have elected to use their platforms. I most certainly do not agree that the courts have the power to let other companies ride on that popularity.

This decision is nothing more than ordering McDonalds to put a burger king counter in all their restraunts, or requireing the NFL make room for MLB to play a game during halftime.

It's stupid and very illconsidered.

I don't want Java in my Windows!

[Kenor]

I never use java for anything and I don't want that bloatware on my system! So now the government is forcing Microsoft to bundle? Java is useful for operating systems outside of Windows, but is totally useless for windows. Why would I choose to purchase/download a Java program when there is probably a better alternative available?

I hope there will be an option for me to remove it at least.

Re:I don't want Java in my Windows!

[Vegeta99]

Gee, maybe for something like.. java web applets?

Duopoly? Better? Exactly!

[Anonymous Coward]

That is the whole point!

As long as they do not, and are not likely to!, collude in the near future!

It is a minimum condition for a "free market" to have at least two "strong" competitors.

More would be better but there have to be two before there can be many.

next judge will orders MS to ship linux apps

[Anonymous Coward]

Wouldn't that be nice. Heck if they provided the source and allowed for users to close their blatent security holes, i'd give them 100$/year! I'm really sick of sites giving error messages like, "you are not running windows or mac" or "you must upgrade to windows media player 6.0". The more I run linux and surf the web, the more I hate microsoft and their capitilistic scum sucking verment partners who are putting up roadblocks to GPL code. If I were in Public Office, I would make a law that requires sites and all digital conntent therin to be accessible to all os's! and fine the living shit out of them if they didn't!

Re:For those who don't understand or can't remembe

[Anonymous Coward]

Fortunately for you, I *am* willing to get into a pissing contest.

The MS JVM does not properly implement the JNI interfaces. This answers your question.

Further, the MS JVM improperly extends the JAVA language with the RNI, J/Direct, and @COM interfaces.

Therefore MS screwed the JAVA language coming and going (not implementing standard interfaces and implementing non-standard, proprietary ones).

Questions?

Scott McNealy's alibi for failure

[Zeinfeld]

Sun is #1 in UNIX sales [com.com],

The report you cite does not mention either Apple or Linux. They are the two factors I identified as threatening Sun's position. Apple shipped more UNIX machine last quarter than all the other proprietarty suppliers combined.

So weird of an idea that it scared the crap out of MS, the whole make the ... yack yack

Self serving bullshit. Java died on the client because creating content as Java applets makes no sense. There are not that many Active X components either. Take out the flash component and the certificate enrollment plugin and you are left with a bunch of stock ticker applets.

Most rabid MS supporters want to ignore that MS was found to be a monopoly [internetnews.com] in Jude Jackson's findings of fact.

And rabid anti-Microsoft types completely ignore the fact that Jackson was found to have been biased by the appeals court who censured him for his conduct. They also stated that his 'findings of fact' contained many opinions that they are not bound by. So no, Jackson's findings of fact do not stand except in the most technical sense. The appeals court is certainly not going to reverse a lower court that rejects Jackson's opinions and has much more lattitude if it decides to reverse a court that depends on them without hearing evidence on an issue.

The monopoly finding by the appeals court does not rest on Jackson's opinion, they simply applied their own judgement to the evidence.

This whole Sun/Microsoft thing is a false dichotemy. You don't have to like the Democrats to loathe the Republicans. McNeally and Ellison are only upset at Microsoft for one reason alone and their complaints about Microsoft are largely projection.

Ellison is the guy whose company scammed $90 million out of the state of California and whose yatch cheated in the Americas cup by using a banned radar. OK so the other side was found to have cheated too, but a rational person says that both OneWorld and Oracle were cheating rather than saying that OneWorld cheated worse so anything Oracle did was OK.

Umm, have you ever used JNI?

[Anonymous Coward]

with Unicode?
at least JDirect worked.

Re:Umm, have you ever used JNI?

[lgraba]

1) At least one company has solved this problem, with an automatic tool (The name of the tool is J-Integra, from Linar systems, www.linar.com). I believe it uses JNI, but does not require you to write any JNI.
2) With either approach, there has to be a linkup between the DLL and the Java code. MS' approach used an approach that hid everything in the JVM. Could they not have generated JNI code that did this instead? This approach does not necessarily have to make the developer deal directly with the JNI code (i.e. write it). And, it meets the language and JVM specifications, and would work with other Windows-based JVM's.

I suspect that such approaches did not meet MS' business objectives (to kill cross-platform java by promoting a polluted version of java).

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Sorta like Al Capone...

[nicestepauthor]

being jailed for tax evasion. At least he did some jail time, so it was better than nothing.

Microsoft was found guilty of abusing their monopoly position to drive their competition out of business, yet they really weren't punished for it in any meaningful way.

I don't think forcing MS to carry the latest JVM is going to change much. On the other hand, it *is* forcing Microsoft to do something they don't want to do, and that's better than nothing.

Not about programming...

[SuperKendall]

Did you read what I said? He said taht sun does not control the JCP, a combination of an organization and a process. Not programming. I'm sure the judge knows less about programming than most of us, but about ownership and control of a process that is directly pertinent to a case he's overseeing, yes I'd say he knows that pretty well.

The fact are that the JCP stands outside of Sun. If Sun went away tomorrow (not likley) the JCP, and Java, would be just fine and continue on without a hitch.

Re:Not about programming...

[ClosedSource]

I was a bit sloppy. I should have said that the judge knows less about software development issues, not just programming.

The question is if Sun is not in control of Java, why should they have standing to sue MS? They have the standing because they own Java 100% and have full control of it. If Sun decided to abandon the JCP I doubt that any legal action could be taken to stop them. If there is any legal action the JCP members could take, I'd like to know what it is.

Re:Not about programming...

[SuperKendall]

Actually, from reading the document the judge had it down quite well! He seemed to exactly understand the issues involved and laid out very good arguments for the choice he made. He understood pretty well (after some explanation) what it meant for MS to drop RMI from the java distribution they put together.

If Sun decided to drop the JCP they could - just like for a while HP tried to develop thier own version of Java, and MS tried to do thier own Java. At this point Java really, honestly, is not under the total control of Sun (though of course because they spend a lot of money and time on the thing and devote resources to it they are listened to). If Sun was in control of Java, Generics would have been in 1.4 and not 1.5. If something does not go through the JCP, it will not go into "standard" Java and will not be used mainstream - period. That has good and bad sides, but it does mean that Java moves on controlled by a community and not a company.

But that is all beside the point. The reason why Sun is in a position to ask for MS to ship a VM is because they are simply the company Microsoft signed the original contract with, and in theory it is Sun's implementation of the Java VM (not the generic concept of a VM, but a specific implementation) that is being hurt through MicroSoft actions - to summarize what I remember from the brief, MS went thier own way with Java and for years stalled Java on the desktop to buy time in developing thier own Java - .Net. Now that they are poised to ship .net with every possible MS offering, they could possibly tip developer mindshare away from Java - simply because they are a monopoly in a position to force that (again, as many others pointed out the whole usign amonopoly to take over new markets thing, the new market being a Java-like VM based system). The judge rather liked the idea of making MS ship the Sun VM with all copies of .Net because it meant that the two technologies would have to compete on technical merit, and not just that fact that one was there and the other might not be. Even then of course MS has an advantage as they can provide all sorts of tasty tie-ins with Windows... which I hope they do because the less portable .Net gets the easier it is for Java to win people over.

Re:Not about programming...

[ClosedSource]

I disagree that a JCP version of Java would be considered a standard over a Sun version, but we'll have to wait and see if it ever comes up.

I think that .NET is a reaction to Sun's litigation over Java, not a reaction to Java itself. Had Sun not sued MS, MS would be continuing to support Java and would contiue to add functionality that made it more useful for Windows. MS's version of Java was really the best way to perform COM programming.

If Sun had left MS alone, Java would be a lot more widely used then it is now. Regardless of what the judge decides, Windows programmers having been burned by Sun, will continue to avoid Java like the plague.

Re:Not about programming...

[SuperKendall]

I frankly cannot believe that .Net is a reaction to litigation. They simply saw that Java was taking hold and drawing away developers - that's what worries them most.

It is true I believe that without the lawsuit MS Java would have become what the CLR and C# are now (and we would not even have the JCP), but the lawsuit was not the cause - loosing developers was the primary thing that scared them enough to develop thier own Java.

If MS had supported Java the way Apple now supports Java under OS X, there never would have been a problem and Java would still have been a great tool for windows development. I think the fact that MS did NOT go along with the Java standards of the day as Apple has speaks volumes for the respect they have for anything not developed at MS.

Re:Not about programming...

[ClosedSource]

"It is true I believe that without the lawsuit MS Java would have become what the CLR and C# are now (and we would not even have the JCP), but the lawsuit was not the cause - loosing developers was the primary thing that scared them enough to develop thier own Java."

So, you agree that without the lawsuit there would not have been a CLR or C#. So what part of .NET is left? Passport?

Re:Not about programming...

[SuperKendall]

No, I think that if Java had been taken up by MS there would have been no C#. The lawsuit is a symptom of MS's fear of having a non-MS technology become popular and widely used... What I am saying is that the lawsuit did not bring about the rise of C#. MS's fear of Java is what brough about C#, and the lawsuit was a side-effect of that.

I didn't word my last post very clearly, sorry about that.

Re:Not about programming...

[Anonymous Coward]

The lawsuit prevented them from making the J++ VM more and more incompatible until real JVMs became irrelevant. If they could have wrested control from Sun, there would have been no reason to clone Java--it's not as if .NET is substantially different (they just renamed everything, fixed a few of Sun's design mistakes, and added some of their own) apart from being under Microsoft's control.

Re:Not about programming...

[Anonymous Coward]

If Sun had left MS alone, Java would be a lot more widely used then it is now.

And almost all that code would only run in the J++ VM on Win32, completely defeating the purpose of Java. Why would Sun want to encourage that?

Windows programmers having been burned by Sun, will continue to avoid Java like the plague.

Windows programmers being cautious about being treated fairly by vendors? (Score:+1, Funny)

Re:Not about programming...

[ClosedSource]

Really? Then you can write VB code and C++ code and Java code can inherit from them. No.I guess something is going on in CLR that is not going on in the JVM.

Re:Not about programming...

[J. Random Software]

It seems like the platforms are equally able to support that. You'd just need compilers for VB and managed C++ that target JVM instead of CLR.

I have heard a few CLR instructions allow certain optimizations a JVM can't do, though I don't remember what at the moment.

Re:Not about programming...

[ClosedSource]

Sorry, you'll have to explain to me what's funny - I don't get it.

Re:Stupid courts, what next? Burger kings in Wendy

[Anonymous Coward]

Your arguments are "stupid and very illconsidered".

This must be why..

[wheel]

This must be why my (work) computer now starts up with "java.exe has caused an error and will be closed."

This illustrates the hypocrisy of SUN...

[waltc]

Microsoft was distributing SUN's java under license; SUN sues Microsoft for shipping the "wrong" kind of java; Microsoft changes java; SUN sues Microsoft again for not shipping a "compliant java,"; Microsoft has enough and strips all SUN java products out of Windows; SUN sues again to force Microsoft to *ship* SUN's java with Windows (because Microsoft making SUN's java available on the Internet for anyone who wanted it to download was not enough for SUN), and another computer-illiterate judge decides to play it safe and rule against Microsoft (without, it seems, ever understanding the issues involved.)

The wonder of it all is what SUN thinks Microsoft's shipping of their little java engine will do for SUN...? That's what's I find baffling. Microsoft never stopped shipping SUN's java on its own in the first place--the company simply sickened of lawsuits from SUN objecting to the way Microsoft is run and managed. Who can blame them? I certainly don't. But the irony here is sweet: Scott McNealy believes so strongly in the strength of the Microsoft operating system that he would sue Microsoft just to make sure his little java virtual engine gets shipped with each and every copy. What's the deal? Does he think it makes Windows a better OS?

Re:This illustrates the hypocrisy of SUN...

[amolweb]

The point is Sun doesn't seem to have enuf good programmers (or enuf money to hire good programmers) to write a JVM for Windows and wants MS to do it for them for free so that it can write off MS. That would require MS to have severe lack of common sense and extreme self destructive tendencies.
...but is the Judge listening?

BTW, the rate at which MS keeps losing these ridiculous lawsuits makes one wonder whether MS pays their lawyers enuf.

Re:This illustrates the hypocrisy of SUN...

[Anonymous Coward]

Sun did write a JVM for Windows. Microsoft then signed a contract to write and ship one (at which point Sun would no longer need to maintain their own). Now that they've proven themselves unwilling to write one, the least they can do is ship one rather than continuing to undermine the platform they committed to support.

Java Stinks

[Anonymous Coward]

At work, Java is disabled because its a security hazard. Am I going to be forced to use the buggy Sun Java? I hope not.

Hilarity ensues

[grundie]

A few moths back there was a story about NatWest (a UK bank) and their peculiar Java based online banking system. Someone tried to login using Mozilla with the latest official Sun JVM. They were presented with a message telling them they were using an incompatible JVM and they should use the proper M$ one as the one they were using 'lacked' important features.

Apart from the irony of the situation, this goes to shows the dangers of the actions of MS. Look at this way, MS adds ActiveX like features to Java, devlopers start using these features, users forced to use the MS JVM, a few years down the line MS suggests to developers "Why not switch from Java to ActiveX controls?, MS drops Java. As a result of this more users are locked in to MS systems as it will become a pain to have a Doze system on hand to access certain website or services.

The same thing happened with the browser wars and is still happening. MS may have pretty much killed off Netscape, but they will continue to add IE specific features to make it a pain for users of other OS's to access certain sites. How many sites fail to work in Linux? Quite a few, the more irritating it is for me to access popular sites the happier MS are.

Re:Hilarity ensues

[Radical Rad]

I didn't realize that would be news worthy. It happened to me just a week ago with a major USBank. Their tech support says that only IE with MS Java will be supported. So the user is forced to use a virtual machine which is only mostly compatible with Java 1.1.4. How old is 1.1.4? But IE has a bug in its proxy code so we still couldn't get it to work even working with their so called tech support. Another program that is designed to only work with MS's ancient version of Java is Ciscoworks 2000.

Re:Hilarity ensues

[amolweb]

Now, now... why not begin by placing the responsibility for the problems on the 'deserving' shoulders.
So the NatWest (or USBank) system didn't allow non MS systems to access their web site? Well, that's the problems of whoever developed the system in the first place. How can you blame MS for someone (Natwest or USBank or whoeever) using MS technology so that it 'harmed' their users when (hold your breath) the institution (Natwest or USBank or whoeever) had the choice to do it using some other version of Java? I think the whole debate is getting ridiculous to the point that if anything goes wrong with the world, you conveniently blame it on MS.

Open your mind. Think.

Re:Hilarity ensues

[Radical Rad]

Was your post in response to mine? I don't believe said anything about blaming Microsoft. Or did your tinfoil hat fall off and your imaginary conversations are bleeding through into the real world?

You are right that the blame should be placed on the bank for choosing IE/Ms VM only and doing so was about as smart as parachuting without a backup chute.

Several other tidbits I didn't mention in my original post: Finance people don't like driving in to work over the holidays due to a bug in IE or a poor choice by a bank, we are switching to a new bank, and we are not a small account.

Say hi to your imaginary friends for me.

huh

[Anonymous Coward]

An anonymous reader was the 17,232th person to submit....

woe is me. don't you just hate this site's popularity? and its readership? especially those who try to contribute. what the hell?

Re:For those who don't understand or can't remembe

[spongman]

ah, but JNI is inherrantly not cross-platform compatible, since it's a native code interface.

my original question still stands.

Re:For those who don't understand or can't remembe

[J. Random Software]

Competently written native code can be very portable. I can write native wrapper methods around useful libraries like zlib, openssl, libvorbis, or the Apache module API (I think most of these already exist, in fact) and my JNI code will compile and run with any available JVM on any platform those libraries themselves have been ported to.

RNI code will probably never run with anything other than Microsoft's old VM on Win32 (which is already at the end of its life AFAIK), mostly because it constrains optimization opportunities much more severely (the lack of write barrier support was one problem that leaps to mind).

I think Microsoft's VM also omitted RMI in favor of DCOM or something, though eventually they at least made that available as a separate download.

In Soviet Russia...

[A Gremlin In Kremlin]

...this would still be considered too soft on the capitalist bastards.

Seriously, forcing companies to carry their competitors product is stupid. To give a company tóo much CPR like this, would true capitalists do that? No. Would socialists? Sure.

---

Is Java discriminating some web users?

[Anonymous Coward]

Java VM is, after all, available to limited selection of platforms. If Java is to be included to Windows, then it should be available for MS-DOS and other DOS's too, in addition to non-Intel platforms of *n*x. I especially miss Java functionality when I use the DOS version of Lynx the www-browser. The implication could be that the court decision may lead the www development to increasingly Java client dependent web solutions, which would discriminate against those that don't have Java functionality in their computers. Could it be that somebody could even sue Sun for this in US? This "Write Once, Run Anywhere[tm]" simply does not sound plausible until the deeds match the words. A suitable yardstick should be the platforms to which NetBSD has been ported. Until that has been met, Sun does not sound too credible.

Re:Stupid courts, what next? Burger kings in Wendy

[toriver]

the vast majority of people have elected to use their platforms

Um, you are aware of the anti-competitive practices of Microsoft where they effectively banned vendors from offering other operating systems? Some choice: Windows or Windows.

let other companies ride on that popularity.

Funny, I seem to recall a certain Redmond, WA company that loves that other companies write software for their operating system and thus ensure its continued use.

It's stupid

Your misplaced allegories are. The choice between Burger King and McDonald's is real, the choice between Windows and other operating systems is not, because of secondary markets (read: software).

Re:Unfair: NOT!

[reggiehg]

The main issue is that Microsoft initially agreed to carry Java from Sun. And then AFTER that, subverted their agreement to their (Microsoft's) advantage. This has a long term destructive effect on Sun because to most of the unwashed, they think that Microsoft STILL carries Java, not knowing that it is Microsoft's own incompatible version. Any problems with that will now be related, unfairly, to the real version. Plus, NET becomes, by mere implication, the successor to Java. Had not Microsoft agreed to carry Java in the 1st place, it would not be required to continue carrying it. I believe this is fair compensation, in addition the $20M sum, plus any others awarded in the future ;-), for their very serious violation of the Java agreement. As THE dominant player, they have responsibilities.

Re:Stupid courts, what next? Burger kings in Wendy

[amolweb]

you are aware of the anti-competitive practices of Microsoft where they effectively banned vendors from offering other operating systems?
Oh...? So what were the 'other' operating systems makers doing? Sitting about waiting for someone to pick up their stuff? To sell something you have to do some hard work selling it. If you didn't reaslize it yet, marketing is also an industry. Get the point?

...that loves that other companies write software for their operating system and thus ensure its continued use.
Something wrong with that? I think something would be terribly wrong with you if you wanted other companies not to write software for your operating system. Why have it in the first place if you don't really want anyone to use it?

IMO, the bottomline is this: MS intentions may be to not allow Java to dominate. Nothing seems to be wrong with that. If Sun is really keen on making Java work, then why not do some work getting it running on windows rather than ask MS programmers to do it for them. Dont they have enough capable programmers at Sun? (I had heard Sun was not doing well, but this i never imagined!).

haha!

[pb]

...now if only they could automate that somehow... hmm.

This is ridiculous...

[Anonymous Coward]

Quoting someone whos thoughts were mine exactly...

"NOW, M$ must use a 'compliant' to Java standards JVM such that a program written on a another OS can run on the M$ OS!!"

Any Java 1.1 program written on any other JVM will also run on MS' JVM. This was never the issue. The issue is what you mentioned in your earlier paragraph, that a Java 1.1 program writen to run on MS' JVM may or may not run on any other JVM depending on whether or not the developer used any of MS' extensions which were for windows only. It was perfectly easy to write code using J++ that would run on any JVM, you just had to avoid MS extensions.

"Now do you understand the import of the court's ruling?!!"

No, this is still something that I'm not sure about. The original agreement MS had with Sun, like you said, they broke, got sued and lost. The agreement was over and the punishment resulting from that case was a new agreement saying that MS couldn't make any further changes to their JVM and had to instead either include Sun's JVM OR not include any JVM, although they could keep their current one for 7 years. Correct me here if I've missed anything or misrepresented anything.

To that agreement, MS thought fine, we're not going to include a JVM which at that time was far slower than theirs and one that they had no control over whatsoever. So they chose the option to not include java but support it for 7 years. This is why Windows XP originally came out with no JVM. Then they decided to include their JVM (for whatever reason) but this was still in their allowable 7 years based on the new agreement.

Now Sun has gone and sued MS and somehow MS has to include Sun's JVM (which was the option MS decided not to take in the 2nd argeement). This is what I don't understand.... the original point of MS 'breaking' the Java paradigm "Write Once, Run Anywhere" is irrelevant - that case had already been won by Sun.

Re:This is ridiculous...

[Anonymous Coward]

The J++ VM cannot support JNI, and you can't even depend on RMI (unless you convince your users to have their admins download and install it manually).

These incompatibility issues are how Microsoft lost the right to use the Java trademark to identify their software. You're lying to people when you call what Microsoft shipped a JVM.

It was perfectly easy to write code using J++ that would run on any JVM, you just had to avoid MS extensions.

How could you easily avoid them? Instead of being in identifiably polluted packages, some of them were smuggled into java.lang!

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Now we're really screwed

[mo wiggley]

Now, if you wipe your drive clean you will have to get service pack 1 for XP to get JVM. I ran into this a few days ago, but luckily I had gone to the admin downloads a few months ago and downloaded ALL of the pre SP1 updates EXEPT for the famous Media Player backdoor. I did this back when MS announced that soon, Windows Update would begin uniquely ID'ing your machine. So if you believe the little drama that was acted out in front of you to make divert your attention to the illusion that they are getting tough with MS you might want to read the story or Brayer Rabbit from the Disney movie Song of the South, which you can get in NTSH format from ebay pirates. God Bless Us All.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

A very fair remedy... NOT

[t0ny]

This case is very basic, and I dont see that Sun has an ice-cube's chance on the sun (haha) of winning.

1. Sun prevented MS, in court, of updating their JavaVM to higher versions.

2. MS wanted to get out of the JavaVM business, but wanted to have Sun maintain an install on demand installation. Sun refused.

3. MS then figures "hey, since it seems that Sun doesn't want us making our own JavaVM, and doesn't want to maintain a package for our customers, we may as well just ship IE and WinXP without Java."

You see, what Sun was REALLY after was attempting to get the courts to force MS to include an install of Sun's Java package into the OS, and getting MS to pay a royalty to Sun for it.

This isn't about open standards, because Java was never open. This isn't about technology, because there are alternatives to Java which work much better and do a lot more. This is about money, plain and simple- MS has some, and Sun has their eyes on a cut. Imagine how much money Sun would make if they were receiving a royalty on every Windows license sold! I'm sure this logic is nothing new to Sun.

Re:A very fair remedy... NOT

[Anonymous Coward]

A 30 minute JRE download is the biggest impediment to real-world use of client-side Java. What Sun was after was widespread deployment of a conforming JVM on Windows systems. Microsoft committed to that in a contract but then refused to do it; their "Java" VM lacked essential features, implemented others in totally incompatible ways, and tampered with core classes that are intended to be portable.