Slashdot Mirror
MS Must Ship Java With Windows Within 120 Days
Suppafly writes "Cnet is reporting that a federal judge on Wednesday ordered Microsoft to begin shipping Sun Microsystems' Java with the Windows operating system within 120 days, after the companies fought over implementing a ruling he made last month."
I agree they shouldn't be able to say you must include x.
However, from what I read earlier on in ths case it is not as simple. What I read was that MS had signed a contract with Sun that they would include Java and then backed out, so I guess this comes down to being the punishment for breach of contract, not just because Sun is whining.
Don't feel bad for M$. They did violate the law.
.Net product. By excluding Java in favor of their own product, they are trying to leverage their desktop monopoly into another area.
A major point of law in the area of monopolies is that a company that has a monopoly in one area can't use that monopoly to build a second monopoly in another area.
M$ was using Java, then dropped Java entirely in order to promote their
By your example, Ford does not need to use Bosch brakes because Ford is an oligopoly, not a monopoly. If Ford, GM, VW, Toyota, etc. decided to start a joint venture to make their own brakes and exclude Bosch, the analogy would be more apt.
The Debian analogy also isn't valid. There are many viable commercial and non-commercial distros. And Debian also doesn't own a competing product.
What microsoft is doing is more akin to the phone company, a legally acknowledged monopoly, that blocks you from calling a competitor of theirs. Except in microsoft's case, they reroute the call to a mock phone company which provides different rates and services intentionally meant to dissaude people from switching to that competitor.
It's anti-competive. It's illegal. And this is a fair punishment.
Have people already forgotten that Microsoft has been convicted of the most anti-competitive and anti-free-market behavior possible? That the U.S government has been trying for a decade to rein in their behavior and bring some semblence of competition to the PC market?
This isn't as much "normalization" as it is "don't take so many drugs when you're designing tables."
It's not about preinstall. It's about the fact that M$ deliberately includes an outdated & mangled (something like 5 years now) version of Java to make it look bad.
Java and Linux are threat to microsoft, so it's good for M$ when another frustrated users curses 'that fu**ing java' again when it crashes on microsoft's ancient runtime.
Think it like this: how would you feel if all the games would preinstall some buggy old beta version of the display driver for the hardware that your company is manufacturing. If you do this, you should at least inform the users that something better is available.
Funny, if I click to open a pdf-document (without acroreader installed) my XP offers to search the right tool from the internet. I think it should behave the same way if double click on that *.jar - package.
No matter how fast light travels it finds the darkness has always got there first, and is waiting for it. (T. Pratchett)
Installing Java is not the issue. They provided tools to their customers that rely on their VM being present for their corporate web pages to function. I know this because the company I am currently doing contract work for has a web application they purchased for content management of their shared project/business documents. It is written using Microsoft tools, and won't work if you have the Sun VM activated for your browser.
Their argument is valid, that this will cause problems for their corporate clients. It will cause problems whenever it comes out, because some of their corporate clients (or their customers) will not be able to view their web pages properly.
Delaying this rollout is not really going to help much, because most web application get updated when the application changes, not when the client changes. Their corporate customers are going to be very angry with them about this kind of problem.
I don't feel sorry for Microsoft, because they got themselves into this mess by trying to spin Java out of Suns control, and make it into a Microsoft specific version. Now they have been told to live up to their contract with Sun, and must pay the price for their behavior. I do feel sorry for their corporate customers who bought into systems designed around the Microsoft VM, because they were dumb, not culpable. They will end up paying part of the price for Microsoft's past errors.
Most corporate clients will have control of their desktops, and can make their internal users use the Microsoft VM until they can fix things. They can't make joe user on the internet do that, which is where things will break down.
As part of their contract, MS was forbidden to add public names to system packages (e.g. java.lang, java.net, etc). Nevertheless, they did so. There were some stretchers on both sides.
Microsoft PR claimed that Sun was forbidding them to add Windows specific extensions. This was silly - there was no problem with any number of packages named com.ms.* or whatever (except that the ms.com domain belongs to Morgan Stanley, and thus didn't follow the 3rd party naming convention - but that wasn't in the contract). There were some very nice extensions with proper names - like JDirect which let you call Microsoft DLL's without writing JNI glue. The problem was that Microsoft wanted to name some extensions java.*. This would of course cause the unwary programmer to inadvertantly create Java programs which only run on Windows - despite not knowingly using any MS specific packages. Exactly what MS wanted.
On Sun's part, the contract included a list of packages which Microsoft could not touch the public name space of. More system packages were added to Java 1.1. Sun claimed that Microsoft couldn't touch those either - reasonable, but they weren't in the specific list in the contract.
The completeness problem was along the same lines. Microsoft provided a complete 1.0 API. However, they left out components of the 1.1 API that competed with their own offerings. For instance, they left out RMI and offered DCOM support instead. Sun said that it was understood that the same restrictions regarding system name space pollution and completeness would apply to the packages of subsequent API versions. But this was not spelled out in the contract. It would not be in the ruthless spirit of Microsoft for them to follow the spirit of a contract if they could find a loophole.
Regardless of quibbling over whether the system package list under contract should expand to match new API versions, Microsoft polluted even core packages from 1.0 with handy additions sure to entice the unwary. So they were guilty even by the letter of the law.
Java has become one of the primary tools for enterprise development, mostly on the server, but also on enterprise clients, where downloading an applet or java app is typically not time consuming for the client because they are on a LAN.
What takes so long in software development? TESTING, and in java testing different versions of the VM. Up until this point, enterprises have been able to enforce a VM version on enterprise clients, and the developers can count on that version being on the client desktops. Now what? If the enterprise wants to stick with its 1.2.2 or 1.3.1 VM, they can't install WinXP SP2? What happens with the next SP and a new java VM? All enterprise java apps will need to be thoroughly tested with each new service pack, since Sun's VMs are not all backwards compatible.
In addition, if anyone is still righting java applets for the internet, how does this help? What percentage of users are going to have XP SP2 in the next 12-24 months?
This solves none of the Java VM version issues. This was Sun saying "wah wah" in court and getting a sympathetic judge.
Sun needs to hand over Java to the JCP and stop using it as a weapon in its fight against MS.